“THE SHOALS OF YESTERDAY”
After I had been back in New York for a month I had about decided that
Mrs. Dove was right.
Jasper had greeted my idea about buying the house with enthusiasm, but,
when it came to details, with a stubborn refusal to face the facts and
sign a check. To my entreaties that he go down and look at it, or write
to Judge Bell about it, or arrange to move there soon, I was constantly
met with, “Wait till after the play.”
We lived in four rooms in the old arcade near Columbus Circle which we
had originally chosen because artists lived there, and at that time I
had thought of myself as an artist. I did, in truth, have some _flair_
for it, and a little education, which had been laboriously acquired at
the School of Design associated with the Carnegie Technical Schools.
Two years of marriage had seen the dwindling away of my aspirations
by attrition. The one room that we had which possessed a window facing
north, which by any stretch of good-will might have been called a
studio, had been given up for our common sleeping-room, and Jasper,
because of the constant necessity of his profession to keep late hours,
was never out of bed until long after the sun had slid around to the
court. I bore fate no grudge because of this. It was quite true, as he
often pointed out to me, that I could paint out-of-doors or in some
one else’s studio, but the day that I felt free to do this never came.
When, after two years of married life, our finances still necessitated
the curtailment of every extravagance, paints and canvas seemed one of
the most plausible things to do without. It was only when prompted by
the exhibition of some woman painter, who had evidently managed these
things better, my husband would ask me why I did not paint any more,
that I suffered momentarily. For the rest of the time his own work
seemed to me much more important.
This was the night at last that my husband’s play was to go on, the
plot of which he had developed from a mystery that I had suggested
one morning a year ago, when I used to wake up so happily, full of
ideas. I did not rise as exuberantly now. I hated to get up at all. Our
studio was crowded with things and with people that we did not want
from morning until night, and from night until morning again. It had
become my chief duty to sort out all the component parts of our ménage,
producing just the influences that would further the work of my husband
and suppressing all others. To-day I had been answering questions
constantly on the telephone, from complaints about the box-office,
with which I had nothing at all to do, to reproaches from the ingénue
because she could not find the author. It seemed to me, thinking it
over while pressing out the dress I was going to wear, that Myrtle was
spending altogether too much time looking for my husband. Just because
he wrote the play and she was acting in it was no reason that I could
see why she should lunch with him every day. I sometimes wished that
all of these young girls who thought it was part of their education to
flirt with him could have the pleasure of getting him his breakfast
every day, as I did, and of waiting up for him for a thousand and one
nights.
I did not reproach Jasper; I loved him too much for that. When one is
jealous it is the contortions of a member of his own sex, of whom he is
suspicious, not the dear one upon whom he is dependent for happiness.
A woman will drop her best friend to save her husband, without letting
him know she has done so.
I blamed the city in which we worked for most of the confusion. Had
we lived in some other place, it would have been in a saner way. And
Jasper could have lived anywhere he chose; he carried his earning
capacity in his imagination. Nowhere are conditions so mad as in New
York, so enticingly witless. In this arcade building, cut up in its old
age into so-called living apartments, with rickety bridges connecting
passages that had no architectural relation to each other, whispers
followed one in bleak corridors and intrigue loafed on the stairs.
We had outgrown unconventional (which is the same as inconvenient)
housekeeping. Jasper was getting bored and I was becoming querulous
before our married life had been given any opportunity to expand. Dogs
were not allowed in our arcade; children would have been a scandal.
Thinking of the big rooms in that cool, quiet house on the cape during
the hot month of September, I could not help longing to be there, and
I had written several times to the judge. Thus I knew that Mattie
“Charles T. Smith” had once more refused to vacate, and unless we were
coming up there immediately, the judge would not evict her before
spring.
“We ought to decide something,” I was saying to myself, when I heard
my husband coming down the hall, and my heart forgot forebodings.
I hurried to hide the ironing-board, there still being a pretense
between us that it was not necessary to do these things, and put on the
tea-kettle.
Jasper was tall and angular, with wispy light hair always in disorder
above a high forehead and gray eyes wide open in happy excitement. He
looked straight into life, eager to understand it, and never seemed to
know when it came back at him, hitting him in the face. He had that
fortunate quality of making people take him seriously, even his jokes.
In a world eager to give him what he wanted, I was proud that he still
chose me, and prayed that he might continue.
He was pathetically glad to get some hot tea, assuring me that the play
was rotten, that the manager was a pig, and that none of the actors
knew their business. He had been with them all day.
“Jasper,” I said, after I had given him all the telephone messages, to
which he paid no heed at all, “have you any idea of taking that house
on Cape Cod this fall?”
Jasper went on looking through his papers as if he had not heard me.
“Where is that correction I made last night for Myrtle?” he asked.
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
“Well, what--” he began impatiently, and then, turning on me, he read
in my face, I suppose, how much the House of the Five Pines had come to
mean to me.
“Now, see here,” he finished more kindly, “I can’t think about houses
to-day; you know I can’t. Ask me to-morrow.”
“All right, dear; I’ll ask you to-morrow. Have you got my seat for
to-night?”
“Seat?”
“Yes, a ticket to get in with. I suppose I’ll have to have a pass of
some sort, won’t I? I don’t want to stand up behind the stage.”
“Why, I’m sorry; I never thought of it. I’ll run up to the theater
before I come back and get you something.”
“You won’t have time; you’re going out for dinner, aren’t you?”
“I was.”
“Well, go ahead. I’ll see about the ticket somehow. Don’t bother.”
I smiled a little ruefully after he had gone. Why did I think I had
to have any more child than just him? I had always supposed that when
a man’s play was produced his wife had a box and all her friends
gathered around her with congratulations, and that the wives of the
actors were all arrayed, family style, to see them come on. But it did
not develop that way among the members of “the profession” as I knew
them. The wives were mostly staying at home with the children, or lived
outside the city and couldn’t afford to come in, or frankly had another
engagement. They were “not expected.”
It was raining when I crowded my way into the foyer and begged a seat
for “The Shoals of Yesterday” from the man at the window. He gave
me the best he had, without any comment, and I took off my rubbers
and laid down my umbrella in the balcony. From this point I was as
interested as if I did not know every line that was to be said--almost
every gesture. After the first act I relaxed and enjoyed it.
The play went of its own volition, developing an amazing independent
vitality which withstood the surprising shocks administered to it by
the actors. I smiled benignly when the audience sat tense, and wept
when I saw them burst into laughter.
Jasper’s hurried hand-pressure, when he found me, and his whispered “Is
everything all right out here, dear?” made me feel that I, too, had
some part in it, outside of its original conception, which of course
every one had forgotten. As a watcher of the first performance, alert
to catch any criticism that might be useful, I sat up all night with
the play that I had tended from infancy. When the curtain went up upon
“The Shoals of Yesterday,” it was a manuscript from our apartment; when
the asbestos went down, it was upon a Broadway success.
I found my way back to the dressing-rooms and met Jasper coming
along with a crowd of actors, Myrtle crowding close. She wore an
orange-feathered toque, which set off her light hair like a flame, and
a sealskin wrap, drawn tight around her slim, lightly clothed body.
She was one of those competent blond girls who know not only how to
make their own clothes but how to get some one to buy them, so that
they will not have to, and how to wear them after they get them. It
is vanity which forces them into bizarre conquests. I could not tell
whether her absorption of Jasper’s time had in it elements that would
ever come to hurt me, or whether she was simply using him to further
her own advancement. Probably she did not know herself.
“Isn’t he a bright little boy?” She petted him and hung upon his neck.
“We’re going to take him out and buy him a supper, so we are; him’s
hungry.”
I knew perfectly well that it would be Jasper who would pay for the
supper, but at that moment I could not bear any one ill-will. I even
recognized that, for Myrtle, this was generosity. It would have been
more like her to have spoken of the play in terms of herself.
“It went awfully well,” I said to him over their heads. I thought he
would be waiting for some word from me.
But he did not reply. He was laughing and talking with the whole group.
In that intimate moment he was not aware of me in the way that I was of
him. Something inside me withdrew, so that I saw myself standing there,
waiting. I became embarrassed.
“Shall I go on home?” I asked.
Jasper looked relieved.
“I’ll be right along,” he assured me.
I went out with my umbrella and tried to call a taxi. But there were
not enough; there never are when it rains, and a single woman has no
chance at all. Men were running up the street a block and jumping into
them and driving down to the awning with the door half-open looking for
their girls or their wives along the sidewalk. I wished that some one
was looking for me. A hand closed over mine where I held the handle of
the umbrella and a pleasant voice said:
“Can I take you home?”
I looked up into the eyes of a bald-headed man I had never seen before,
who was smiling at me as if he had known me something more than all my
life. I jerked away and hurried down the street. After that I somehow
did not dare even to take a car; I walked home; in fact, I ran. And all
the way I kept thinking: “Why doesn’t Jasper take any better care of
me? Why doesn’t he care what happens to me? That’s it; he doesn’t care.”
It is a dangerous thing to pity oneself when one’s husband is out with
another woman.
“All I can have to eat is what is left over in the ice-box,” I said,
raising the lid and holding the lettuce in one hand while I felt around
in the dark for the bottle of milk. But there was no milk. And I had to
laugh at myself then or cry, and so I laughed, a very little, and went
to bed.
When Jasper came in it was so late that I pretended that I did not hear
him.