HARLAN was astonished, but he took his little defeat well; and Martha in
turn encountered a surprise, for he showed a discomfited kind of
pleasure. “So Ornaby Addition’s going to get its rapid transit at last,”
he said. “That’s not so bad, you know. Why, Dan might come out pretty
well on the thing after all!”
“But doesn’t that annoy you, Harlan?” she asked.
“You mean that I _want_ to see my brother beaten? That I really haven’t
good will toward him?”
“No, indeed I don’t. I mean: Wouldn’t it annoy you to find you’d always
been mistaken about him?”
“But I’m not. I grew up in the same house with him, and I ought to know
him. If he does happen to do anything with his wild old idea after all,
it’ll be by the grace of a series of miracles no one could possibly have
foreseen.”
“That is to say,” Martha observed, “you’d call him ‘a fool for luck.’”
“Let’s put it, I _hope_ he is.”
“And you were just telling me _I_ didn’t change!” she cried.
“Yes,” he returned placidly;—“it seems we’re neither of us wiser than
we used to be. We sit here talking of Dan and his Addition just as we’d
have been talking about them if you’d never been away. You really ought
to be speaking with a slight foreign accent and unable to put your mind
on anything later than the seventeenth century.”
She nodded, agreeing. “Yes, it’s queer; and it makes me _feel_ a little
queer. You go away and stay for ever and ever; then you come back home
and by the time your trunk’s unpacked you’re ready to wonder if you’ve
been away at all;—maybe you’ve just had a long dream. Of course, too, I
knew what was going on at home—not through papa!—but some of the girls
of our old set here have been faithful about writing, in spite of their
every single one of ’em getting married. That makes me feel I belong to
the seventeenth century—almost ‘_cinquecento_!’”
“I’d prefer the ‘_cinquecento_,’” Harlan said, and immediately added:
“Not that I care for it myself.”
“What!” she cried, her eyes widening. “You’d even criticize the
Renaissance?”
It appeared that he would, and willingly. Offhand he called the
Renaissance “a naïve movement amusingly overrated and with the single
merit that it was better than what had gone before.” Martha was
indignant, and they had an argument in which she proved to be no match
for him. He had not been abroad since his junior vacation as an
undergraduate, but he knew a great deal more about Italy than she did,
though she had just come from long residence there. She continued to
disagree with him, and presently was surprised by the suspicion that she
enjoyed hearing him talk, and in a way, found him congenial in spite of
their differences.
“You’re the only person I ever heard of that criticized the
Renaissance,” she said, when he got up to go. “You’re all wrong, of
course, even if I can’t prove it. You’re too much for me, but that’s
only because you’re such an admirable bookworm.”
Then, as he went down the long path to the gate, she observed that his
shoulders had acquired a little more habitual stoop in them than she
remembered. Otherwise the tall figure might have been that of a thin
athlete; and Harlan had a well-shaped head;—she was readily able to
comprehend what one of her friends had written her of him: “And Harlan
Oliphant seems to be just as sarcastic as he used to be, but he _is_
awfully distinguished-looking as he grows older.” Nevertheless, even in
this view of his back, Martha found something irritating, something
consciously aristocratic, over-fastidious, skeptical, and precise.
“That’s just what you are!” she said half-aloud, before she turned to go
into the house. “You can be rather fascinating, but you’re really only
an admirable bookworm in a nice, clean white collar!”
The admirable bookworm, unconscious that the definition of him had been
enlarged, walked down National Avenue, keeping within the continuous
shade of the big maple trees and perplexing himself with introspections
as he went. He was dry and cold, as he knew, yet far from incapable of
ardour, and he had never entirely lost the ardour he felt for Martha;
but what surprised him was the renewed liveliness of that ancient pain
she evoked within him. He had thought it dead, but evidently it had only
fallen into a doze in her absence.
Of course he asked himself why he should ache because she had at once
resumed with him her old critical attitude, and why, moreover, he should
care about her at all. She had almost no coquetry and little more of the
quality called “sheer feminine charm”; she was too downright and
plain-minded to possess much of either. She was not masculine yet, as
her father said with the plaintive irascibility of a man who knows
because he has suffered, she was imperious. “A man might as well be dead
as bossed to death,” he often complained. And although she was a
handsome creature and graceful, Harlan saw a dozen prettier girls at the
new Country Club every day that he played golf there. Notwithstanding
all this, she had only to let him see her again after years of absence,
and at once his heart leaped, then ached, and he could think of nothing
but this Martha who thought so little of himself.
He was not the only member of his family who found Martha’s return
disturbing; his sister-in-law also had long thoughts connected with the
arrival from Italy. That evening before dinner, Dan was whistling in his
bathroom, shampooing himself lavishly, when Lena came into his bedroom
and addressed him through the open door.
“I suppose you’ve seen her,” she said, and gave utterance to an
emotional little titter that quickly stopped his whistling.
He had heard such semblances of amusement from her often enough to
understand their prophetic meaning. “In for it again!” was instantly his
thought. “Seen her?” he said. “Who do you mean?”
“Your fair mountain range,” Lena replied, affecting a light mockery. “Of
course you didn’t know she’s home again! Innocent old Dannie!”
“I heard she was to get here to-day, so I suppose she’s here; but I
haven’t seen her. What about it?”
“Oh, nothing!” Lena returned, continuing her archness. “Do you suppose
she can stand it?”
“Stand what?”
“Why, the sight of us—of her old sweetheart married to me,” Lena
explained. “She’s stayed away till she thought she could bear it, but do
you suppose she _will_ be able to?”
“Yes, I think she’ll bear it,” he said gruffly and went on with his
lathering.
“How about you? Do you think _you’ll_ be able to contain yourself when
you——”
“I expect so.”
“Why don’t you ask me how she looks?” Lena inquired, still affecting to
rally him gaily. “I know you’re dying to. I’ve seen her; I was looking
from my window and saw her go out and walk up the street this afternoon.
I laughed so!”
“What about?”
“She was such a perfect picture of a big Western woman! Absolutely
typical!”
“You mean like mother, for instance?”
“No; your mother’s a dear thing who’d be lovely anywhere; I never think
of her as Western at all,” Lena said. “She isn’t.”
“She is as much as Martha is—or anybody else. She was born here
and——”
“Not at all!” Lena interrupted airily. “The real Western woman is like
your mountain girl. They _love_ to be huge; that’s why they live in the
prairie country—so they’ll look even bigger. One reason I laughed was
because your friend was just exactly as much the typical Western woman
after all this time abroad as she was before she went. She was wearing
all kinds of expensive clothes, and I haven’t a doubt she’d got them in
Paris, but on her they looked perfectly as Western as if she’d just
bought ’em and put ’em on downtown at Kohn & Sons! Do you suppose you’ll
be able to control your raptures at all when you meet her again, old
innocent Dannie?”
“See here,” he said, “I wish you’d let me get fixed for dinner. I had a
pretty hot day’s work and I’d like to——”
“Of course you would!” Lena said. “You’d like to make yourself beautiful
because you’re going to hurry over there to her just as soon as you’ve
finished your dinner, aren’t you? That’s what you have been planning,
isn’t it?”
“Why, yes; certainly,” he answered. “I’d like to have you go with me.
She’s an old friend of mine and all our family; she’s been away a long
time, and it wouldn’t look very cordial not to——”
“Why, no; so it wouldn’t!” Lena mocked, but now her mockery was openly
acrid. “It wouldn’t look _cordial_ and naturally you’d hate to have her
think you lacked cordiality—a woman you were so cordial with you wanted
your child to grow up to be like her instead of like its mother!—a
woman you were so cordial with you had to hold her hand the very day you
brought your bride home! It would be _terrible_ to have her think——”
But here Dan closed the door, though not so sharply as Lena closed the
outer door of his bedroom when she went out of it an instant later.
The subject of Martha’s return was not again mentioned directly during
the evening; and after dinner, when Lena with arch significance inquired
of her silent husband why he had settled down at the library table to
write business letters when there was “so much to do in the
neighbourhood,” Dan replied, without looking up, that his letters were
important—he’d have to beg to be excused from talking. Lena picked up a
book, and retired to the easy-chair and the lamp in the bay window,
which had once been Harlan’s favourite reading place; but she did not
read. She sat looking steadily at her husband—as he thoroughly and
uncomfortably understood, though he kept doggedly at his writing.
After a time his mother and father were heard in the hall, going out;
and he knew that they were “going over next door” to bid Martha welcome
home. They had not mentioned where they were going, and he understood
the significance of their not mentioning it—and so did Lena, as she sat
watching him. He wondered why he did not rise and say to her: “There’s
an old friend of mine next door; I haven’t seen her for years; I ought
to go over and tell her I’m glad she’s home, and I want to! There’s no
reason I shouldn’t, and you can make the most of it—I’m going!”
Lena had her own wonderings. She wondered why she was keeping her
husband from going. Her thought was that she ought to say: “I don’t
think I care for you enough any more to have a right to be jealous. Go
to your old friend and tell her you’re glad she’s home again, since you
wish to. I’m not so small about it as I’m making you think, and I really
don’t care.”
Lena wondered why she did not say this to her husband;—in a manner she
wanted to say it, and at the same time she knew that she would say
nothing of the kind, but on the contrary, intended to keep him in fear
of what she might do if he made any effort to appear “cordial,” as he
had said, to Martha. Thus the husband and wife sat—the husband bent
over his writing and the wife looking at him, her book in her lap. When
she looked away from him it was not to the book that her gaze went, but
to the wall across the room, where she saw nothing to please her; and
when she had looked at the wall for a time she always looked again at
Dan. His own eyes were kept to the writing upon the table, yet he must
have been conscious of hers when they were upon him, for a deeper frown
came upon his forehead whenever she looked away from the wall and again
at him.
After a while Mr. and Mrs. Oliphant were heard returning, and in the
library it somehow seemed strange, and like an event out of nature’s
order, to hear such brisk and cheerful sounds, when the front door
opened, letting in the two voices and their owners simultaneously.
“Indeed she _is_!” Mrs. Oliphant was heard to say, while her husband
continued a narrative evidently begun outside.
“And I told her so. I said, ‘By George, if an old maid’s a person who
just gets lovelier and lovelier, Martha, why, then, maybe you’re——’”
But here his voice so abruptly dropped to a mumble no one could have
doubted that the suppression was in obedience to a tactful gesture of
his wife’s; nor was it difficult to picture this gesture as a movement
of Mrs. Oliphant’s hand toward the open door of the library. Immediately
afterward the two were heard ascending the stairs; the house again
became as quiet as before; Dan went on with his writing, and Lena with
her looking and wondering.
Often such a vigil between husband and wife does not end by leaving
things as they were before it began. Between the two silent people
appear to have taken place communications so imperceptible that neither
is definitely aware of them, yet each may be affected by them as if by
words spoken. It would seem that there is a danger here; for with
couples not well wedded the unspoken words may be too true, or may carry
altogether too much revelation. Lena stopped wondering; and then rather
slowly it became clear to her that she and her husband no longer cared
for each other at all. Long, long she had clung to her belief that she
was still in love with him; and now all she had left to her of this was
that she could still be jealous of him. “A fine reason for not leaving a
man!” she said to herself;—especially a man who really cared about
nothing but his business and his boy!
Suddenly she rose from her chair, the book in her lap falling to the
floor, where she let it remain; and then she stood still, while Dan
glanced up inquiringly from his work and met the strange, examining,
hostile look she gave him.
There was a final moment of silence between them before Lena hurried
across the room and left him. A minute later Dan rubbed his forehead,
wondering again. Upstairs, Lena had not slammed her door.
He had an absent-minded impression that something had happened, but as
its nature seemed indefinite, and he had now become more interested in
his letters than in Martha’s return or Lena’s temper, he bent again to
his work and kept at it with zest until after midnight.