“Oh, when I was in love with you
Then I was clean and brave,
And miles around the wonder grew
How well did I behave....”
“It’s old Housman all over again,” cried Harlindew, in high glee.
“Since I married you, I’ve become a respected citizen. People stop me
on the street and want to talk who haven’t deigned to give me a wink in
years.”
“Don’t forget there is a second verse,” said Moira.
“But now the fancy passes by
And nothing will remain
And miles around they’ll say that I
Am quite myself again.”
“Yes, but he had to add that to make it a well-rounded thought. The
first is the only one that counts. Well-rounded thoughts are an
abomination. Or else he had to live up to the well known Housman
cynicism. But isn’t this enough for one sitting? I’m hungry.”
“Just five minutes more. There’s something I don’t want to miss about
that light. I can’t ever get you into the same position twice. You’re
changeable enough--physically!” she concluded.
He strolled over to the portrait when she had released him and
criticized it outrageously. The face was all wrong, the colour of the
hair absurd, the brow too handsome. It was a good picture perhaps,
but a poor portrait. Her sketches of him were better. She had a nice
loose line in sketching and didn’t flatter so much. Women ought never
to paint men, at least never their sweethearts. They weren’t honest
enough. They were too romantic. But this was all delivered in the
utmost good nature and she did not resent it. She thought he was quite
a good critic of painting. He liked things of very crude strength,
directness. Her work, she herself was inclined to admit, indulged in
glamour--it was the hardest thing to avoid. But she hoped that in ten
or twenty years she would do something good; that was time enough.
As a matter of fact, Miles Harlindew thought his wife’s work remarkably
fine and had often said so. Then, discovering she was so modest
about it that praise was downright displeasing to her, he adopted
the bantering tone. He catered to her modesty by giving her all the
severe criticism he dared to. And on the whole it resulted in a better
understanding.
Standing in the doorway, he watched her with some impatience, while
she put on a hat, powdered her nose, dabbed at her nails and stood in
front of the mirror gazing at herself in satisfied animation. She
liked to make him wait. Then they slipped down the narrow carpeted
stairs and into the brilliant afternoon, breathless and laughing. It
was not surprising that people looked twice at the pair. She wondered
if there were any two lovers who enjoyed their holidays together as
much as they. There were so many things to do and it needed so little
to make them memorable. A walk through Italian streets, flooded with
little bodies and loud with cries, to some unknown restaurant; or up
the Avenue in the dusk to the Park; or a long ride in front of the
bus--whatever met their eyes on these jaunts was fresh and new though
they had seen it a hundred times before. There was no place for a
honeymoon like New York: it meant that the honeymoon never ended.
Marriage had hardly changed an outward detail of their lives. She had
refused to give up her job, which he somehow expected she could do.
Perhaps she could paint and try to sell her work. It appeared to him so
much more fitting. But Moira did not wish to sell her paintings, even
if she had thought them worth any money. All that could wait. Wasn’t
his work waiting too? Poor boy! How could any one expect him to write
with his time all taken up?
“But,” he objected, “I may have to take care of more than you one of
these days. Hadn’t I better get used to it?”
“Nonsense,” she replied. “That’s all the more reason why I should be
earning now.”
Miles had retained his room downstairs, much as it was, except that
she saw it was kept in some sort of order for him. Her own tiny living
quarters were not enough comfortably for two, and she had foreseen that
he would have many a spell when he wanted to be quite alone. To her
mind he was very chivalrous in hiding his low-spirited moments from
her. When he left her early after dinner to spend the evening and the
night in his room, she knew that it was a signal for one of these.
He was working off some disappointment, some mood of defeat. These
troubles had generally fled by morning. He would be in her bedroom,
before she woke up, noisy and hungry, and full of jokes.
“You’re making me too happy to write,” he told her on one such
occasion, as he sat on her bedside and put her hand to his lips. “You
remember Rossetti says:
“By thine own tears thy song must tears beget
O Singer! Magic mirror thou hast none
Except thy manifest heart and save thine own
Anguish or ardour, else no amulet.”
He had the old-fashioned way of reading poetry, intoning it without
much shading or expression--and he threw himself into it. She thought
nobody was just like him when he did that entirely for his own
pleasure.
“But he speaks of ardour as well as anguish,” she objected.
“Yes, I suppose poetry itself does not have to be sad. But it comes
out of something like sadness. Rossetti was right. It is as foolish to
write poetry in the midst of happiness as to try to find words for what
you look like now--when I can be looking at you instead. How beautiful
you are when you wake.”
It occurred to Moira that she might be a little distressed over all
this. She wanted him to be happy, but she also wanted him to write--and
become famous or at least deserve it in her eyes. But her good sense
brushed his idle words aside. Why encourage harbouring such notions?
She had never known any one who spoke his mind aloud so continuously
as he did, and she knew that many of the things he said simply passed
through it aimlessly. They were without significance except the
significance of always tossing up other thoughts, and still others,
until the right one came. This thinking aloud had a ruthless quality
that would have hurt a more sensitive wife. It did not trouble her.
She decided there was no hurry about his getting to work. She did not
want him to do it until he could do his best. Nothing less than that
she wished to foster. They were living their lives to the full, now,
through each other. In good time they would branch out and live in
wider circles. Miles was storing up treasures that would find utterance
one of these days. Indeed he was writing--slight, experimental things
which she did not like, it was true, but which would help to open
up the dried springs of his invention. This period of his life was
certainly not less promising than the five years before she had met
him, arid years of picking up a mere living by critical trifles.
An event that she did not foresee, however, happened shortly afterward.
A week came when Harlindew spent almost no time with her. He
disappeared into his room early; at breakfast he seemed to have slept
little, and he was distracted and irritable. When the time came to go
downtown, she felt that he resented it. He would dawdle and temporize
and start off anywhere from a quarter to a half hour late. The secrecy
of his movements were a trial to her, and she could not get anything
out of him by casual questioning. His answers were indirect, hinting at
work. Then her questioning stopped. She realized that she was growing
angry; malicious impulses came to her, a desire for petty revenge, and
all this warned her that she was vainer than she had believed. She
depended upon his attentions, his love-making, his continual amusing
flattery. That was the unfairness of marriage, she argued. It taught
you to expect certain things you had got on very well without before.
But if your single mate withheld them, you could not go elsewhere to
supply them.... After six days of this, Moira began to believe herself
a philosopher, and something of a cynic as well. She had kept her
temper, but she had also been experimenting with the green serpent of
disillusionment.
The thing ended with a visit to her bedroom at two in the morning.
He was a little excited by liquor, a most unusual thing since their
marriage, yet she was sure he had not been away. Most of this
excitement came from another cause. He held in his hand a half a dozen
sheets of paper and began without preliminaries to read them to her.
They were new poems, of course--how stupid she had been not to suspect
it! When he had finished reading them she snatched them from him with
cries of delight and read them herself.
“I have to see the words--the blessed words!” she declared.
He walked out of the room, leaving the crinkly papers with her, walked
on air yet timorously, jumping half out of his boots at every slight
noise she made with the sheets. When he came back he found tear-drops
clinging to her lashes. She was still reading the poems as though to
fix them then and there in her mind. She laid back on the pillows and
asked him to read them all over himself aloud, and “very slowly.” It
was a long moment after he had ended that she spoke.
“They’re better than anything you’ve done,” she said, with a
contentment that filled him with torturing pangs of delight. “As good
and better than the best in your book. It’s come back to you, Miles, I
always knew it would. Oh, isn’t it wonderful!”
He sat down, suddenly downcast and sheepish in the midst of his elation.
“But if this is going to happen to me often, what am I going to do?”
he said. “I’ve lived those things. It’s been hell and heaven, Moira.
I took two afternoons off from the office. I had to. It was all but
impossible to go.”
She sat up in bed and gazed at him in profound reflection. She felt she
knew what he meant. It was not childish, not perverse. How could such
things be mixed up in the same day, this fine fervour of creation, and
that mechanical, wretched work? What she most desired him to be he was
now, and that he must continue to be at the cost of everything else.
She suddenly saw life rosy and fresh ahead of them, untrammelled by
anything base, full of brave expression.
“Never mind, never mind!” she cried excitedly. “Listen, you can hold
on two months longer somehow. In two months my lease will be up. We’ve
got eighteen hundred dollars between us now, and by that time we ought
to have two thousand. We’ll just quit cold, Miles, drop everything.
Somewhere in Europe we can live for nothing, live forever on that. Who
knows what can happen before it is gone? We might never have to come
back--never until we wanted to. You can go on writing and writing these
gorgeous things!”
“My God,” he murmured, “it would be marvellous. It could be done.... O
Magician!”