There was no doubt that at the start the break meant peace to Cecily.
That was what surprised her so much. She had tortured herself in advance
with the thought of those nervous stresses which she imagined would
follow Dick’s leaving. But they did not materialize. There were a few
very bad nights at first. Then came a sleep of exhaustion and after that
a night when to her surprise she slept naturally and although, when she
woke, the sick feeling of impending trouble and past trouble was still
upon her, she was rested. There were hours of choking hysteria when it
took more courage than she had ever guessed she had to keep from seeking
Dick out, begging him to come back--on any terms--only to relieve the
terrible loneliness without him. Days when she felt strangely light and
queer and at the end of things as if the emptiness of her soul were
swallowing her up; days when the sight of her own strange, strainedly
sad eyes and thin face horrified her. The physical pain and exhaustion
which went with the mental struggle seemed sometimes unbearable. The
children looked strange and seemed remote at times. And yet, little by
little, usage, duties, routine began to pull her back to normal. Her
emotions wore themselves out battering against her resistance and she
commenced to live again.
Half life, she told herself, without sparkle, with no joy, but none the
less ordered. She commenced to read a little and the ability to focus
her mind on an impersonal situation came back. Reading was almost her
only diversion. The few people whom she saw at her own home were her
only companions and the only two of those who gave her real
companionship were her stepfather and Agatha Ward, whose literary
modernism had a kind of solace in it because it grouped her case with so
many others. Not that she talked about her trouble to Agatha, but Agatha
talked of life and of strange, new, shifting points of view to her. If
Agatha had a point of approach to all the currents of life other than
that of analysis she never showed it. Under her touch Cecily was able
now and then to depersonalize herself, see herself as a “case”--as a
situation created by the turmoil of modern things--and it invariably
gave her some comfort. The moments of intellectual broadening did not
last, but they helped.
Matthew she had not seen. He had written her a note which was brief and
careful, asking her if there was anything that he could do for her and
she had replied briefly:
“Nothing, thank you, Matthew. There is nothing for any one to do
except be sorry for the fact that we are not always brave and wise.
Come to see me when you can. Talking to you always helps me.
Faithfully yours, Cecily Harrison.”
Matthew read that note again and again and then, not putting it into his
pocket, perhaps for fear of the mocking eye of Fliss, he tore it across
and dropped it thoughtfully into the wastebasket. He did not go to see
her at once.
So with the routine, the care of the house and the increasingly
interesting children, a month wore on. At the end of the month a letter
from Dick came, enclosing a check for her usual allowance. She sent it
back with a note which she tried to make not too curt, reiterating that
she must live on her own money and that she had plenty. Then she went
into her own room and there, with her check book and a pencil, made
various budgets to figure out just how she could manage to cut her
expenses to a fourth of their usual amount. That, it appeared, must be
done--or if not she would have to take money from Dick or her
stepfather. She wouldn’t do that, she was resolved. The decision not to
take Dick’s money helped her self-respect enormously. If he was not to
live with her she was not going to be supported by him. Dick’s incensed,
insulted arguments on that point--that he had a right to support his
children and that she had no right to prevent him--made no impression on
the fixity of her decision.
“I couldn’t do it, Dick,” she told him, as they were trying to have a
“calm” discussion a few days before he went. “Don’t you see that it
would be shameful? You’re getting nothing from me--nothing from the
children and there’s something in taking money from a man with whom you
aren’t living that puts you in a sordid class.”
“But I did get so much--I did get everything----”
“You don’t owe anything for that; please don’t drag money into it, Dick.
I couldn’t--I couldn’t ever take it. Love is a gift; children are a
gift; you can’t settle for them in----”
“I’m not trying to,” cried Dick, “but don’t you see that for you and for
them to get along without things that they have a right to have is
ridiculous!”
But she was stubborn. She sent back his first check without an instant’s
thought of changing her position, although expenses already were
beginning to trouble her. That strength which her mother had known was
in her had already begun to bolster up her actions and her resolves.
She took counsel with Ellen.
“Do you think that if I did the upstairs work and took all the care of
the children we could get along with just you and a laundress? Now that
the family is smaller and since we shall be very quiet we might be able
to manage it, don’t you think so?”
“I’d be glad,” said Ellen. “There’s not so much work as there used to be
and now that you are taking so much care of the babies those nurses have
time heavy on their hands.”
So the nurse and the housemaid problem was solved for Cecily by her
getting along without them and the extra activity which was necessary
for her helped her to fill many hours which might have been terribly
disconsolate. That saved a hundred dollars a month for her.
She scraped her budget closer and closer. Cards from exclusive shops
showing children’s clothes or gowns for herself went into the
wastebasket. She went to the public library instead of to the
booksellers for her books. Yet, in spite of all she tried to do and all
she actually did accomplish she could not cut far enough to make her
little income cover expenses. She was running behind at the end of the
first month. Recalculations made her do a little better for a week after
that. Then the baby had a week’s illness of no particular seriousness,
but Cecily found herself confronting a presumable bill from the child
specialist which would throw her budget into chaos again. She used the
thousand dollars her father had given her for Christmas to bring her
checking account up to normal and that exhausted her cash reserves.
There was a certain interest and pleasure in working it out, however.
Work was almost her only refuge and it was one which she sought with
redoubled interest and comfort constantly.
The mind which had been latent for so long began to develop as it was
trained upon real problems and as she made herself independent, her own
protector and her own refuge.
The moments when she was panic-stricken for want of a refuge--when she
needed Dick or her mother to solve things, to smooth life over--became
fewer and fewer. It amazed her to find how dependent she had been, to
see how many things Dick had taken off her hands. That he still wanted
to do them she knew, for there were rather pathetic attempts to pay
garage bills; a watchdog was presented to her by her father, but she
somehow guessed from the phrasing of the note that came with it that it
had been Dick’s thought and that her father wanted her to know it. Such
things hurt. It wasn’t that it made her feel more hopeful about herself
and Dick. But she usually wanted to feel that Dick was happy and
benefited by leaving her, and such things made her wonder. Then in the
bitter, contradictory hours when she did not want him to be happy and
when the resentment at the wreck of her own happiness scourged her, she
was angry that he should attempt even anonymous courtesies.
After a little the moods grew less bitter. But one bitterness never grew
less. The sight of such frivolities as had wrecked Dick and herself, the
mention of them, the sight of the people involved in them--could always
bring back a rush of poison through her mind. That had cut her off
completely from Della. Her mother’s house had changed. It was no longer
the spacious, comfortable, somewhat quiet house of Mrs. Warner’s
planning, at least not to Cecily, though a casual observer would have
noticed few changes. Della had pervaded the house with herself. At first
Cecily made a protest here and there, but her protests were against
trifles and it was impossible to explain to her stepfather or to Walter
why little things like irregular hours for meals, like the careless and
indiscriminate use of linens (Della could not waste her time over a lot
of sheets and pillow-cases, she said), were a violation of her mother’s
spirit. Cecily felt that the men thought her trivial and she soon came
seldom to the house now ruled by Della, except to bring the children to
see Mr. Warner. Walter and she were rather definitely estranged. She
came in one morning at eleven o’clock to find Walter eating breakfast in
a bathrobe, weary, red-eyed and unshaven. He explained crossly and with
an aggressive note of defense that they had been up until all hours.
Cecily was silent and her glance as she looked at him and the disordered
breakfast room was only discouraged, but it must have shamed Walter into
bravado.
She was standing there when Della came in. Della was wearing an
extravagant negligee and looking untidy, but delightfully pretty. At
sight of Cecily she threw up her hands.
“Good Heavens, Cecily, this is no morning for you to drop in and catch
us at our worst. We’ll shock her, Walter. Now don’t you scold him,
Cecily. He was tired and I let him sleep.”
She settled down on the arm of Walter’s chair and he pushed back from
the table, pulling her down into his arms. Disheveled and laughingly
protesting, Della let him hold her. Cecily turned away, trying to be
light.
“Too domestic a party for me. I only wanted to see if I could find the
second volume of a novel father lent me. I’ll hunt for it?”
“Go ahead. Try his room if it isn’t in the library.”
Cecily left them and with the closing of the door, Della settled herself
more comfortably.
“I think we really shocked her, dearie.”
“Nonsense,” said Walter, looking down at the bundle of lace and ribbons
which should have been so alluring. “Nonsense.” He passed a hand over
his chin and kissed her without much interest. “Get up, honey; I’ve got
to get dressed.”
* * * * *
It was such little things which isolated Cecily. She did not go to her
father’s house again for weeks. She was apologetic for being a drawback
and yet she could not enter into so many of the things the others made
their habits. The knowledge, too, that Della felt that Cecily had made a
mess of things and that all her sympathies were with Dick kept her away.
The thought of Della as her critic was intolerable to her pride.
Shut off from her own family, she was equally shut off from Dick’s
mother. Mrs. Harrison had been away at the time of the actual break and
she was humiliated by it all. Most seriously of all was she hurt by the
fact that Dick had gone to his club and not home to her. When he did
come to her he absolutely refused to discuss the situation. So Mrs.
Harrison went to Cecily and found it equally hard to get information
from her.
“You’re the talk of the town--you and Dick--and both of you mute. What
is the trouble? Has Dick been misbehaving himself?”
“No,” answered Cecily. “No, indeed, Mrs. Harrison. It is just that we
don’t seem very happy and I thought--we hoped it would be better for us
if we separated.”
“But without a reason!”
“We don’t agree about marriage. It’s so impossible to explain.”
“Is this stuff I hear about your refusing to go into society true? Or is
it true that Dick is enamored of this Mrs. Allenby?”
That struck fire. “It is quite true that Dick and I did not agree about
the kind of society we cared to enter. What there is in any feeling for
Mrs. Allenby is really for Dick to say, Mrs. Harrison.”
“It’s ridiculous. He’s not in love with that young woman.”
“He prefers her type of woman to what he calls the domestic type,”
answered Cecily coldly. There was nothing in this little woman, so
annoyed about scandal, to excite any pity or kindly feeling in her at
all.
Mrs. Harrison rose, tapping her fingers nervously on her bag.
“It’s an extremely unfortunate situation. I would be prepared to give
you every support, Cecily, if I believed that Dick had misbehaved
himself at all. But if you have thrown him over, broken up his home for
the sake of a--a theory, it is one of the most cruel and unnecessary
things I have ever heard of. Men are men. They demand a little
amusement. If you refuse to allow him that you must expect----”
“Please, Mrs. Harrison. There’s nothing to be gained by all this,
surely.”
The little woman drove off, her angry, alert little head looking
straight ahead through the window of her limousine.
“Didn’t Grandmother Harrison bring me anything?” asked Dorothea, running
in a little too late to speak to her grandmother.
“Not to-day, dear. She was in a hurry.”
“She nearly always does,” said Dorothea, with some disappointment.
Cecily regarded her daughter with some worry as she climbed up to see if
she could catch a glimpse of the departing car from the window. She
often wondered how she was going to explain all this to the children.
Would they understand or would they, like Della, blame her, or, like
Mrs. Harrison and her father, think she was foolish?
“But I didn’t do it,” she protested to herself. “It was Dick who
insisted. I couldn’t keep him from going. Unless I was willing to throw
everything in life which seems worth while to me into the discard.
Everything that is worth while to anybody. The standards of life that
must be maintained.” She thought of Della, a mass of provocative
lingerie. She did not want this sturdy little figure in blue linen to
grow up to be like that. If one had to give up everything to prevent
Dorothea’s becoming like that, it was worth it. The extravagance of her
conclusions did not strike her as false just then. She topped her
sacrifice with some self-glorification, and taking Dorothea out into the
garden, played with her until dinner time.
But in the empty evening she found the self-glory fading. She was alone.
She had failed.
It was often like that.