The experience of that night was one of those moments on the Olympus
of extravagant hope, before which it is merciful to draw the veil. In
one hour they seemed to have attained all that life held for the most
fortunate--freedom, work, love.
Therefore, had they stepped from the tropical belt to the Arctic
circle; had they plunged from the top of a sunlit tower to the depths
of a coal shaft, the change which came during the next month could
not have been greater. Moira had never anticipated resenting her
first baby. Preparations for the trip, expenditures for the trip, had
first been slackened up in mid-career, as they waited apprehensively
and then had been abandoned with the abruptness that only comes when
death enters a house. There lay the paraphernalia of travel, new and
useless. They had drifted into a state of divine negligence. Jobs and
all practical affairs went along any old way; they were matters soon to
be jettisoned like an old coat. Then came this reality as if the four
walls of a prison had been dropped about them in a day.
It was not so bad as that of course, when the first rude awakening had
passed. Life substitutes one enthusiasm for another. Miles recovered
admirably at once; he spent his eloquence reassuring her that this was
the best thing that could have happened to them. He had all the normal
delight in the prospect of fatherhood.
But Moira was not so easily reconciled. She would always look upon that
baby as something a little too unreasonably expensive. She was not
ready for it, and had the plan of going abroad been broached earlier
she would never have had it. She would have been more pleased had Miles
not tried so hard to make her see it in a better light. She did not
doubt his sincerity, nor that he would be one whose joy in children of
his own would be unbounded. But she hated to think of his taking one
burden after another from her shoulders until he would be carrying them
all, while she waited helplessly. She had never thought him, as yet,
strong enough without her.
So she did not relinquish her burdens until she had to. She worked on,
until the last day she could without embarrassment. After a season of
careful figuring she estimated that what they had saved, with Miles’
salary (which had been slightly increased not long before) would enable
them to maintain their present comforts until she got back to earning.
She hoped that could be managed somehow within two years.
But if the idea of having a child was an adventure, they both had to
admit that the conditions it called for were somewhat depressing. For
one thing, they had to have more space. The first work she did after
leaving Barcroft’s establishment was to move to a flat in the eighties
on the west side. In every particular this place lacked the charm of
her studio, nor could anything they did to it or put into it make it
seem the same. The little kennel-like separations called rooms were
diabolically invented for people who had to have children, and so
constructed as to make them hate the fact that they had them.
At the earliest hint of the baby’s coming she noticed changes in Miles.
He had never been very regular or responsible about office hours. Now
it worried him if he was a half minute late in getting started. He
talked less, he exaggerated less. He seemed to be unwilling to discuss
books, or any of the old subjects that had enthralled him. He spoke
much of there being a future “in the firm,” for a chap who “really
buckled down and dug up results.” She realized that he was beginning to
regard his job as a permanent support.
He came home sometimes with bundles of papers filled with figures and
sat in the little study at night, writing what he called “plans” and
“copy” and making “market analyses.” It was the same sort of jargon
that Barcroft talked incessantly--“sales and distribution,” “consumer
demand,” and “dealer helps.” It had sounded all right from Barcroft;
but from Miles.... She found among his papers rough drafts in his own
hand of advertisements extolling the value of hog foods, lice powder,
piston rings--and one long story about “How I raised my salary from
fifty to two hundred dollars a week in six months.” When she read these
she went into her room and cried. They had meant nothing to her so long
as he took them lightly; now that he applied his whole mind to them and
sat absently dreaming of them, they seemed blasphemous. But she dared
not complain; she had no remedy to offer.
In a little while--after the baby was a few months old--he began to
bring home news of certain results from all this energy and absorption.
His salary took a sudden jump. He was “meeting clients” continually,
doing executive work. Soon, he told her, he would have a small office
to himself. She simulated pleasure at these announcements, but she
felt none. Every triumph of that sort meant a surrender of himself.
She even resented the care he had begun to take in his clothes and his
hair-cuts, the change in his style of dress.
The ugliness of the little apartment in a building which held perhaps
fifty tiresome families, the dreary parade of bourgeois virtues, and
fourth or fifth rate finery, the strident female voices in the street
and halls, the newness of everything one touched and looked at, the
lack of shadows and mystery and ease, the pervasive, obvious travail
for money--all these things were to Moira an education in American
life which her youth had escaped. She disliked them, but she regarded
them, because they were strange to her, with a detached, half-amused
curiosity.
To Miles, however, they were a return to the hated past--from just such
a street in Cincinnati he had fled in horror years before. She saw
that it really involved him; that daily, as it were, he had to brush
its overwhelming effect from his clothes and from his mind. It was
she who was putting him through all this.... And it was only an added
irony that Miles, junior, turned out such a satisfactory child, normal
and vigorous and good-tempered. It did not improve matters any that he
deserved this sacrifice, for with every new fascination he exerted,
every delightful characteristic he exhibited, the subjection of all
their hopes to his demands became more complete....
* * * * *
Three years passed this way, and though the affairs of the Harlindew
family went on quite as ever in outward appearance, much had happened
underneath to both.
In the first place she had learned that a child was not a temporary
encumbrance, one that she could throw off in a year or two for outside
work. If certain of its wants diminished with its growth, others
increased, and the habit of being an attendant mother became fixed. She
had had to abandon her plan of returning to offices. Cheap servant
girls and the risk run in trusting them worried her too much as it was.
She became as helpless a house-person as the scores of other young
mothers in her teeming block.
With the relinquishment of this notion came the gradual realization
that they might never be able to take up again that shoulder to
shoulder independence which had seemed so fine while it lasted. Miles
from now on was the provider--she and her child the dependents. She
discovered that he had seen this more clearly than she from the
beginning.
He ceased to take an interest in himself at all. His mind settled into
a hopeless groove of dogged, disinterested work. To see him pick up
a book and lay it aside was a gesture that came to hold a veritable
sense of tragedy for her. To watch the effect of a fine play upon him
was pathetic. While its beauty filled him with happiness, he dared
not allow himself to be lifted too far into that rarified atmosphere.
He ventured no opinions about any of the hundreds of stimulating
personalities who were coming up on the horizon of culture everywhere.
Poetry he spoke of with whimsical condescension, even with contempt. It
seemed to him an impudent excrescence, a meaningless dream that had no
right to existence in a life of reality.
All this came more swiftly than she knew, occupied as she was with the
absorbing bit of life under her care. In three years she thought she
scarcely knew Miles. The poems he had shown her that night before the
baby’s coming were often in her hands, though she dared not mention
them to him. They were as fine as they had been then. Could this
plodding man--who loved her still with a desperate, clinging love, a
love, as it seemed, that was the breath of his life--be the same man
who had written them? And was it possible that he must stop that divine
occupation for no other reason than that three people had to live? The
future seems short when life is meaningless and tiresome, and we become
seized with a fierce impatience. Moira fought against a feeling that
they were old and life was declining to its end....
An ominous fact was apparent. In spite of Harlindew’s devotion to work
at the office he was achieving very little. He had reached a certain
point and come to a standstill. His salary, large according to the
ideas with which he had begun, was a dwindling insufficiency when it
came to paying their bills. He was beginning to be afraid that he
might never go farther. She remembered now a saying that Barcroft had
repeated to her: “Push may start behind, but it’s got brains beat all
hollow in the end.” He was referring to the kind of brains Miles had,
theoretic and literary. Miles himself tried to explain his predicament
in words of much the same import. There was a “point of saturation,”
he said, in salaries and advancement, unless you “got outside and went
after the business.” Apparently that was what he could not do.
At the same time, an incredible number of new expenses, roundly
chargeable to the item named “baby” had absorbed all their early
savings except a few hundred dollars, which she jealously kept--not so
much in fear of an emergency, as with the hope that it might be the
magic key to open the door to some way out of their life. But she went
into this treasure to buy Miles decent business suits. They were both
behind in similar comforts and vanities.
Harlindew seemed to resent any invasion of his evenings, to prefer
to sit with her and his thoughts. Yet in reality he was full of an
enormous restlessness to which he dared not surrender. The office
needed all his energy; he could not spend it. So he thought.... Moira
would take the bored man out whenever her maid would stay, trying to
revive the spirit of their old comradeship. It came to life only in
rare flashes.
Her twenty-eighth year passed. She found herself with more freedom on
her hands now, and she obtained work from Elsie Jennings which brought
in a few dollars a week. She was not sure which feeling was uppermost
in Miles, his pleasure at seeing the money or his disgust at finding
her painting silly gift cards. Her painting, the fact that she had
always kept it up to some extent, was his consolation, a vicarious
substitute for his own emptiness.... But the money made them more
comfortable.
Then she discovered that she was going to have another baby. He took
the announcement casually, even with a joke.
“By Jove, my dear,” he said, “I’m succeeding in something, anyway.”
He sat down and chuckled to himself. Three things had struck him as
very funny. One was that he had never in his life pictured himself as
a prolific father--like his own father; another was that he would be
thirty-seven that week--and the third that he had come home to tell
Moira his salary had been cut.
She dropped quickly, beseechingly beside him, disliking the sound of
his laugh.
“What’s the matter, darling, is it too much?”
He put his arms across her shoulders in an accustomed gesture.
“No, no, dear. How absurd. I’m as glad as I can be.”
He laughed again, attempting naturalness, and ruffled his hair with a
sudden motion of his hand. But she felt the husband slipping from her
grasp, turning defiantly before her eyes into the vagrant poet....