WHAT GOES ON INSIDE
_Half an Hour in the Life of a Modern Woman_
May 8.
Marise looked at the clock. They all three looked at the clock. On
school mornings the clock dominated their every instant. Marise often
thought that the swinging of its great pendulum was as threatening as
the Pendulum that swung in the Pit. Back and forth, back and forth,
bringing nearer and nearer the knife-edge of its dire threat that nine
o'clock would come and the children not be in school. Somehow they must
all manage to break the bonds that held them there and escape from the
death-trap before the fatal swinging menace reached them. The stroke of
nine, booming out in that house, would be like the Crack o' Doom to the
children.
Marise told Paul not to eat so fast, and said to Elly, who was finishing
her lessons and her breakfast together, "I let you do this, this one
time, Elly, but I don't want you to let it happen again. You had plenty
of time yesterday to get that done."
She stirred her coffee and thought wistfully, "What a policeman I must
seem to the children. I wish I could manage it some other way."
Elly, her eyes on the book, murmured in a low chanting rhythm, her mouth
full of oatmeal, "Delaware River, Newcastle, Brandywine, East Branch,
West Branch, Crum Creek, Schuylkill."
Paul looked round at the clock again. His mother noted the gesture, the
tension of his attitude, his preoccupied expression, and had a quick
inner vision of a dirty, ragged, ignorant, gloriously free little boy on
a raft on the Mississippi river, for whom life was not measured out by
the clock, in thimbleful doses, but who floated in a golden liberty on
the very ocean of eternity. "Why can't we bring them up like Huckleberry
Finns!" she thought, protestingly, pressing her lips together.
Then she laughed inwardly at the thought of certain sophisticated
friends and their opinion of her life. "I daresay we do seem to be
bringing them up like Huckleberry Finns, in the minds of any of the New
York friends, Eugenia Mills for instance!" She remembered with a passing
gust of amusement the expression of slightly scared distaste which
Eugenia had for the children. "Too crudely quivering lumps of
life-matter for Eugenia's taste," she thought, and then, "I wonder what
Marsh's feeling towards children really is, children in general. He
seems to have the greatest capacity to ignore their existence at all. Or
does he only seem to do that, because I have grown so morbidly conscious
of their existence as the only thing vital in life? That's what he
thinks, evidently. Well, I'd like to have him live a mother's life and
see how he'd escape it!"
"Mother," said Paul seriously, "Mother, Mark isn't even awake yet, and
he'll never be ready for school."
"Oh, his teacher had to go to a wedding today. Don't you remember? He
doesn't have any school till the afternoon session."
She thought to herself, "What a sense of responsibility Paul has! He is
going to be one of the pillars of the earth, one of those miraculous
human beings who are mixed in just the right proportions, so that they
aren't pulled two ways at once. _Two_ ways! Most of us are pulled a
thousand ways! It is one of the injustices of the earth that such people
aren't loved as much as impulsive, selfish, brilliant natures like dear
little Mark's. Paul has had such a restful personality! Even when he
was a baby, he was so straight-backed and robust. There's no yellow
streak in Paul, such as too much imagination lets in. I know all about
that yellow streak, alas!"
The little boy reached down lovingly, and patted the dog, sitting in a
rigid attitude of expectancy by his side. As the child turned the light
of his countenance on those adoring dog eyes, the animal broke from his
tenseness into a wriggling fever of joy.
"'Oh, my God, my dear little God!'" quoted Marise to herself, watching
uneasily the animal's ecstasy of worship. "I wish dogs wouldn't take us
so seriously. We don't know so much more than they, about anything." She
thought, further, noticing the sweetness of the protecting look which
Paul gave to Médor, "All animals love Paul, anyhow. Animals know more
than humans about lots of things. They haven't that horrid perverse
streak in them that makes humans dislike people who are too often in the
right. Paul is like my poor father. Only I'm here to see that Paul is
loved as Father wasn't. Médor is not the only one to love Paul. _I_ love
Paul. I love him all the more because he doesn't get his fair share of
love. And old Mr. Welles loves him, too, bless him!"
"Roanoke River, Staunton River, Dan River," murmured Elly, swallowing
down her chocolate. She stroked a kitten curled up on her lap.
"What shall I have for lunch today?" thought Marise. "There are enough
potatoes left to have them creamed."
Like a stab came the thought, "Creamed potatoes to please our palates
and thousands of babies in Vienna without milk enough to _live_!" She
shook the thought off, saying to herself, "Well, would it make any
difference to those Viennese babies if I deprived my children of
palatable food?" and was aware of a deep murmur within her, saying only
half-articulately, "No, it wouldn't make any literal difference to those
babies, but it might make a difference to you. You are taking another
step along the road of hardening of heart."
All this had been the merest muted arpeggio accompaniment to the steady
practical advance of her housekeeper's mind. "And beefsteak . . . Mark
likes that. At fifty cents a pound! What awful prices. Well, Neale
writes that the Canadian lumber is coming through. That'll mean a fair
profit. What better use can we put profit to, than in buying the best
food for our children's growth. Beefsteak is not a sinful luxury!"
The arpeggio accompaniment began murmuring, "But the Powers children.
Nelly and 'Gene can't afford fifty cents a pound for beefsteak. Perhaps
part of their little Ralph's queerness and abnormality comes from lack
of proper food. And those white-cheeked little Putnam children in the
valley. They probably don't taste meat, except pork, more than once a
week." She protested sharply, "But if their father won't work steadily,
when there is always work to be had?" And heard the murmuring answer,
"Why should the children suffer because of something they can't change?"
She drew a long breath, brushed all this away with an effort, asking
herself defiantly, "Oh, what has all this to do with _us_?" And was
aware of the answer, "It has everything to do with us, only I can't
figure it out."
Impatiently she proposed to herself, "But while I'm trying to figure it
out, wouldn't I better just go ahead and have beefsteak today?" and
wearily, "Yes, of course, we'll have beefsteak as usual. That's the way
I always decide things."
She buttered a piece of toast and began to eat it, thinking, "I'm a
lovely specimen, anyhow, of a clear-headed, thoughtful modern woman,
muddling along as I do."
The clock struck the half-hour. Paul rose as though the sound had lifted
him bodily from his seat. Elly did not hear, her eyes fixed dreamily on
her kitten, stroking its rounded head, lost in the sensation of the
softness of the fur.
Her mother put out a reluctant hand and touched her quietly. "Come, dear
Elly, about time to start to school."
As she leaned across the table, stretching her neck towards the child,
she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror on the other side of the
room, and thought, "Oh, how awful! I begin to look as Cousin Hetty does,
with that scrawny neck. . . ."
She repulsed the thought vigorously. "Well, what does it matter if I do?
There's nothing in my life, any more, that depends on my looking young."
At this thought, something perfectly inchoate, which she did not
recognize, began clawing at her. She pushed it off, scornfully, and
turned to Elly, who got up from the table and began collecting her books
into her school-bag. Her face was rosy and calm with the sweet ineffable
confidence of a good child who has only good intentions. As she packed
her books together, she said, "Well, I'm ready. I've done my grammar,
indefinite pronouns, and I can say all those river-tributaries
backwards. So now I can start. Good-bye, Mother dear." Marise bent to
kiss the shining little face. "Good-bye, Elly."
To herself she thought, as her face was close to the child's, "I wonder
if I look to my little girl as Cousin Hetty used to look to me?" and
startled and shocked that the idea kept recurring to her, assuming an
importance she was not willing to give it, she cried out to herself,
"Oh, stop being so paltry about that!"
Aloud she said, "Don't forget to put your rubbers on. Have you a clean
handkerchief? Oh, _Elly_, look at your nails! Here, hand me the
nail-file over there, Paul. I'll clean them more quickly than you,
dear."
As she cleaned the nails, one eye on the grimly relentless clock, the
ideas flicked through her mind like quick, darting flames. "What
mediaeval nonsense we do stuff into the school-children's head. What an
infamous advantage we take of the darlings' trust in us and their
docility to our purposes! My dear little daughter with her bright face
of desire-to-do-her-best! What wretched chaff she is getting for that
quick, imaginative brain of hers! It's not so bad for Paul, but . . . oh,
even for him what nonsense! Rules of grammar, names of figures of
speech . . . stuff left over from scholastic hair-splitting! And the
tributaries of rivers . . . !" She glanced up for an instant and was struck
into remorse by the tranquil expression of peace in the little girl's
clear eyes, bent affectionately on her mother. "Oh, my poor, darling
little daughter," she thought, "how _can_ you trust anything in this
weak and wicked world as you trust your broken reed of a mother? I don't
know, dear child, any more than you do, where we are going, nor how we
are going to get there. We are just stumbling along, your father and I,
as best we can, dragging you and your brothers along with us. And all we
can do for you, or for each other, is to love you and . . ."
Elly withdrew her hand. "There, Mother, I know they're clean enough now.
I'm afraid I'll be late if I don't go. And you know she scolds like
everything if anybody's late." She repeated in a rapid murmur, "The
tributaries of the Delaware on the left bank are . . ."
Her mother's mind went back with a jerk to the question of
river-tributaries. "And what's the use of cramming her memory with facts
she could find in three minutes in any Atlas if by any strange chance
she should ever ever need to know about the tributaries of the Delaware.
As well set her to learning the first page of the Telephone Directory!
Why don't I do the honest thing by her and say to her that all that is
poppy-cock?"
* * * * *
An inner dialogue flashed out, lunge, parry, riposte, like rapier blades
at play. "Because if I told her it is nonsense, that would undermine her
faith in her teacher and her respect for her."
"But why _should_ she respect her teacher if her teacher does not
deserve that sort of respect? Ought even a little child to respect
anything or anybody merely because of a position of authority and not
because of intrinsic worth? No, of course not."
"Oh, you know that's only wild talk. Of course you couldn't send the
child to school, and keep her under her teacher, unless you preserve the
form of upholding the teacher's authority."
"Yes, but in Heaven's name, why _do_ we send her to school? She could
learn twenty times more, anywhere else."
"Because sending her to school keeps her in touch with other children,
with her fellow-beings, keeps her from being 'queer' or different. She
might suffer from it as she grew up, might desire more than anything in
the world to be like others."
* * * * *
Elly had been staring at her mother's face for a moment, and now said,
"Mother, what _makes_ you look so awfully serious?"
Marise said ruefully, "It's pretty hard to explain to a little girl. I
was wondering whether I was as good a mother to you as I ought to be."
Elly was astonished to the limit of astonishment at this idea. "Why,
Mother, how _could_ you be any better than you are?" She threw herself
on her mother's neck, crying, "Mother, I wish you never looked serious.
I wish you were always laughing and cutting up, the way you used to.
Seems to me since the war is over, you're more soberer than you were
before, even, when you were so worried about Father in France. I'd
rather you'd scold me than look serious."
Paul came around the table, and shouldered his way against Elly up to a
place where he touched his mother. "Is that masculine jealousy, or real
affection?" she asked herself, and then, "Oh, what a _beast_! To be
analyzing my own children!" And then, "But how am I ever going to know
what they're like if I don't analyze them?"
The dog, seeing the children standing up, half ready to go out, began
barking and frisking, and wriggling his way to where they stood all
intertwined, stood up with his fore-paws against Paul. The kitten had
been startled by his approach and ran rapidly up Marise as though she
had been a tree, pausing on her shoulder to paw at a loosened hair-pin.
Marise let herself go on this wave of eager young life, and thrust down
into the dark all the razor-edged questions. "Oh, children! children!
take the kitten off my back!" she said, laughing and squirming. "She's
tickling me with her whiskers. Oh, _ow_!" She was reduced to helpless
mirth, stooping her head, reaching up futilely for the kitten, who had
retreated to the nape of her neck and was pricking sharp little
pin-pointed claws through to the skin. The children danced about chiming
out peals of laughter. The dog barked excitedly, standing on his
hind-legs, and pawing first at one and then at another. Then Paul looked
at the clock, and they all looked at the clock. The children, flushed
with fun, crammed on their caps, thrust their arms into coats, bestowed
indiscriminate kisses on their mother and the kitten, and vanished for
the morning, followed by the dog, pleading with little whines to be
taken along too. The kitten got down and began soberly to wash her face.
* * * * *
There was an instant of appalling silence in the house, the silence that
is like no other, the silence that comes when the children have just
gone. Through it, heavy-footed and ruthless, Marise felt something
advancing on her, something which she dreaded and would not look at.
From above came a sweet, high, little call, "Mo-o-o-ther!" Oh, a
respite--Mark was awake!
His mother sprang upstairs to snatch at him as he lay, rosy and smiling
and sleepy. She bent over him intoxicated by his beauty, by the
flower-perfection of his skin, by the softness of his sleep-washed eyes.
She heard almost as distinctly as though the voice were in her ear, "Oh,
you mothers use your children as other people use drugs. The
child-habit, the drug-habit, the baby-habit, the morphine habit . . . two
different ways of getting away from reality." That was what Marsh had
said one day. What terribly tarnishing things he did say. How they did
make you question everything. She wondered what Neale would say to them.
She hoped to have a letter from Neale today. She hoped so, suddenly,
again, with such intensity, such longing, such passion that she said to
herself, "What nonsense that was, that came into my head, out on the
road in the dark, the other night, that Neale and I had let the
flood-tide of emotion ebb out of our hearts! What could have put such a
notion into my head?" What crazy, fanciful creatures women are! Always
reaching out for the moon. Yes, that must have been the matter with her
lately, that Neale was away. She missed him so, his strength and courage
and affection.
"I'm awfully hungry," remarked Mark in her ear. "I feel the hole right
_here_." He laid a small shapely hand on the center of his pajama-clad
body, but he kept the other hand and arm around his mother's neck, and
held her close where he had pulled her to him in his little bed. As he
spoke he rubbed his peach-like cheek softly against hers.
A warm odor of sleep and youth and clean, soaped skin came up from him.
His mother buried her face in it as in a flower.
"Ooh!" he cried, laughing richly, "you're tickling me."
"I _mean_ to tickle you!" she told him savagely, worrying him as a
mother-cat does her kitten. He laughed delightedly, and wriggled to
escape her, kicking his legs, pushing at her softly with his hands,
reaching for the spot back of her ear. "I'll tickle _you_," he crowed,
tussling with her, disarranging her hair, thudding his little body
against her breast, as he thrashed about. The silent house rang with
their laughter and cries.
They were both flushed, with lustrous eyes, when the little boy finally
squirmed himself with a bump off the bed and slid to the floor.
At this point the kitten came walking in, innocent-eyed and grave. Mark
scrambled towards her on his hands and knees. She retreated with a comic
series of stiff-legged, sideways jumps, that made him roll on the floor,
chuckling and giggling, and grabbing futilely for the kitten's paws.
Marise had stood up and was putting the loosened strands of her hair
back in place. The spell was broken. Looking down on the laughing child,
she said dutifully, "Mark, the floor's cold. You mustn't lie down on it.
And, anyhow, you're ever so late this morning. Hop up, dear, and get
into your clothes."
"Oh, Mother, _you_ dress me!" he begged, rolling over to look up at her
pleadingly.
She shook her head. "Now, Mark, that's silly. A great big boy like you,
who goes to school. Get up quick and start right in before you take
cold."
He scrambled to his feet and padded to her side on rosy bare feet.
"Mother, you'll have to 'tay here, anyhow. You know I can't do those
back buttons. And I always get my drawer-legs twisted up with my both
legs inside my one leg."
Marise compromised. "Well, yes, if you'll hurry. But not if you dawdle.
Mother has a lot to do this morning. Remember, I won't help you with a
single thing you can do yourself."
The child obediently unbuttoned his pajamas and stepping out of them
reached for his undershirt. His mother, looking at him, fell mentally on
her knees before the beautiful, living body. "Oh, my son, the straight,
strong darling! My precious little son!" She shook with that foolish
aching anguish of mothers, intolerable. . . . "Why must he stop being so
pure, so _safe_? How can I live when I am no longer strong enough to
protect him?"
Mark remarked plaintively, shrugging himself into the sleeves of his
shirt, "I've roden on a horse, and I've roden on a dog, and I've even
roden on a cow, but I've never roden on a camel, and I _want_ to."
The characteristic Mark-like unexpectedness of this made her smile.
"You probably will, some day," she said, sitting down.
"But I've never even _sawn_ a camel," complained Mark. "And Elly and
Paul have, and a elephant too."
"Well, you're big enough to be taken to the circus this year," his
mother promised him. "This very summer we'll take you."
"But I want to go _now_!" clamored Mark, with his usual disregard of
possibilities, done in the grand style.
"Don't dawdle," said his mother, looking around for something to read,
so that she would seem less accessible to conversation. She found the
newspaper under her hand, on the table, and picked it up. She had only
glanced at the head-lines yesterday. It took a lot of moral courage to
read the newspapers in these days. As she read, her face changed,
darkened, set.
The little boy, struggling with his underwear, looked at her and decided
not to ask for help.
She was thinking as she read, "The Treaty muddle worse than ever. Great
Britain sending around to all her colonies asking for the biggest navy
in the world. Our own navy constantly enlarged at enormous cost.
Constantinople to be left Turkish because nobody wants anybody else to
have it. Armenian babies dying like flies and evening cloaks advertised
to sell for six hundred dollars. Italy land-grabbing. France frankly for
anything except the plain acceptance of the principles we thought the
war was to foster. The same reaction from those principles starting on a
grand scale in America. Men in prison for having an opinion . . . what a
hideous bad joke on all the world that fought for the Allies and for the
holy principles they claimed! To think how we were straining every nerve
in a sacred cause two years ago. Neale's enlistment. Those endless
months of loneliness. That constant terror about him. And homes like
that all over the world . . . with _this_ as the result. Could it have
been worse if we had all just grabbed what we could get for ourselves,
and had what satisfaction we could out of the baser pleasures?"
She felt a mounting wave of horror and nausea, and knowing well from
experience what was on its way, fought desperately to ward it off,
reading hurriedly a real-estate item in the newspaper, an account of a
flood in the West, trying in vain to fix her mind on what she read. But
she could not stop the advance of what was coming. She let the newspaper
fall with a shudder as the thought arrived, hissing, gliding with
venomous swiftness along the familiar path it had so often taken to her
heart . . . "suppose this reactionary outburst of hate and greed and
intolerance and imperialistic ambitions all around, means that the
'peace' is an armed truce only, and that in fifteen years the whole
nightmare will start over."
She looked down at the little boy, applying himself seriously to his
buttons. "In fifteen years' time my baby will be a man of twenty-one."
Wild cries broke out in her heart. "No, oh no! I couldn't live through
another. To see them all go, husband and sons! Not another war! Let me
live quickly, anyhow, somehow, to get it over with . . . and die before it
comes."
The little boy had been twisting himself despairingly, and now said in a
small voice, "Mother, I've tried and I've tried and I can't do that back
button."
His mother heard his voice and looked down at him uncomprehendingly for
a moment. He said, less resigned, impatience pricking through his tone,
"Mother, I _told_ you I never could reach that button behind."
She bent from her chair, mechanically secured the little garment, and
then, leaning back, looked down moodily at her feet. The little boy
began silently to put on and lace up his shoes.
Marise was aware of a dimming of the light in the inner room of her
consciousness, as though one window after another were being darkened. A
hushed, mournful twilight fell in her heart. Melancholy came and sat
down with her, black-robed. What could one feel except Melancholy at the
sight of the world of humanity, poor world, war-ridden, broken in
health, ruined in hope, the very nerves of action cut by the betrayal of
its desperate efforts to be something more than base.
* * * * *
Was that really Melancholy? Something else slid into her mind, something
watchful. She sat perfectly still so that no chance movement should
disturb that mood till it could be examined and challenged. There was
certainly something else in her heart beside sorrow over the miseries of
the after-war world.
She persisted in her probing search, felt a cold ray of daylight strike
into that gloom and recognized with amazement and chagrin what else it
was! Disgusting! There in the very bottom of her mind, lay still that
discomfort at beginning to look like Cousin Hetty! And so that wound to
her vanity had slowly risen again into her consciousness and clothed
itself in the ampler, nobler garments of impersonal Melancholy. . . .
"_Oh_," she cried aloud, impatiently, contemptuous of herself, "what
picayune creatures human beings are! I'm ashamed to be one!"
She started up and went to the window, looking out blankly at the
mountain wall, as she had at the newspaper, not seeing what was there,
her eyes turned inward. "Wait now, wait. Don't go off, half-cocked. Go
clear through with this thing," she exhorted herself. "There _must_ be
more in it than mere childish, silly vanity." She probed deep and
brought up, "Yes, there is more to it. In the first place I was priggish
and hypocritical when I tried to pretend that it was nothing to me when
I looked in the glass and saw for the first time that my youth has begun
to leave me. That was Anglo-Saxon pretense, trying to seem to myself
made of finer stuff than I really am. It's really not cheerful for any
woman, no matter on what plane, to know that the days of her physical
flowering are numbered. I'd have done better to look straight at that,
and have it out with myself."
She moved her head very slightly, from side to side. "But there was more
than that. There was more than that. What was it?" She leaned her ear as
if to listen, her eyes very large and fixed. "Yes, there _was_ the war,
and the awfulness of our disappointment in it, too, after all. There was
the counsel of despair about everything, the pressure on us all to think
that all efforts to be more than base are delusions. We were so terribly
fooled with our idealistic hopes about the war . . . who knows but that we
are being fooled again when we try for the higher planes of life?
Perhaps those people are right who say that to grab for the pleasures of
the senses is the best . . . those are _real_ pleasures, at least. Who
knows if there is anything else?"
Something like a little, far-away tolling said to her, "There was
something else. There was something else."
This time she knew what it was. "Yes, there was that other aspect of the
loss of physical youth, when you think that the pleasures of the senses
are perhaps all there are. There was the inevitable despairing wonder if
I had begun to have out of my youth all it could have given, whether
. . ."
There tolled in her ear, "Something else, something else there." But now
she would not look, put her hands over her eyes, and stood in the dark,
fighting hard lest a ray of light should show her what might be there.
A voice sounded beside her. Touclé was saying, "Have you got one of your
headaches? The mail carrier just went by. Here are the letters."
She took down her hands, and opened her eyes. She felt that something
important hung on there being a letter from Neale. She snatched at the
handful of envelopes and sorted them over, her fingers trembling. Yes,
there it was, the plain stamped envelope with Neale's firm regular
handwriting.
She felt as though she were a diver whose lungs had almost collapsed,
who was being drawn with heavenly swiftness up to the surface of the
water. She tore open the envelope and read, "Dearest Marise." It was as
though she had heard his voice.
She drew in a great audible breath and began to read. What a relief it
was to feel herself all one person, not two or three, probing hatefully
into each other!
* * * * *
But there was something she had not done, some teasing, unimportant
thing, she ought to finish before going on with the letter. She looked
up vacantly, half-absently, wondering what it was. Her eyes fell on
Touclé. Touclé was looking at her, Touclé who so seldom looked at
anything. She felt a momentary confusion as though surprised by another
person in a room she had thought empty. And after that, uneasiness. She
did not want Touclé to go on looking at her.
"Mark hasn't had his breakfast yet," she said to the old Indian woman.
"Won't you take him downstairs, please, and give him a dish of porridge
for me?"