Rosalind's life in Chicago had been like a stream that apparently turns
back toward its source. It ran forward, then stopped, turned, twisted.
At just the time when her awakening became a half realized thing she
went to work at a new place, a piano factory on the Northwest Side
facing a branch of the Chicago River. She became secretary to a man who
was treasurer of the company. He was a slender, rather small man of
thirty-eight with thin white restless hands and with gray eyes that
were clouded and troubled. For the first time she became really
interested in the work that ate up her days. Her employer was charged
with the responsibility of passing upon the credit of the firm's
customers and was unfitted for the task. He was not shrewd and within a
short time had made two costly mistakes by which the company had lost
money. "I have too much to do. My time is too much taken up with
details. I need help here," he had explained, evidently irritated, and
Rosalind had been engaged to relieve him of details.
Her new employer, named Walter Sayers, was the only son of a man who in
his time had been well known in Chicago's social and club life.
Everyone had thought him wealthy and he had tried to live up to
people's estimate of his fortune. His son Walter had wanted to be a
singer and had expected to inherit a comfortable fortune. At thirty he
had married and three years later when his father died he was already
the father of two children.
And then suddenly he had found himself quite penniless. He could sing
but his voice was not large. It wasn't an instrument with which one
could make money in any dignified way. Fortunately his wife had some
money of her own. It was her money, invested in the piano manufacturing
business, that had secured him the position as treasurer of the
company. With his wife he withdrew from social life and they went to
live in a comfortable house in a suburb.
Walter Sayers gave up music, apparently surrendered even his interest
in it. Many men and women from his suburb went to hear the orchestra on
Friday afternoons but he did not go. "What's the use of torturing
myself and thinking of a life I cannot lead?" he said to himself. To
his wife he pretended a growing interest in his work at the factory.
"It's really fascinating. It's a game, like moving men back and forth
on a chess board. I shall grow to love it," he said.
He had tried to build up interest in his work but had not been
successful. Certain things would not get into his consciousness.
Although he tried hard he could not make the fact that profit or loss
to the company depended upon his judgment seem important to himself. It
was a matter of money lost or gained and money meant nothing to him.
"It's father's fault," he thought. "While he lived money never meant
anything to me. I was brought up wrong. I am ill prepared for the
battle of life." He became too timid and lost business that should have
come to the company quite naturally. Then he became too bold in the
extension of credit and other losses followed.
His wife was quite happy and satisfied with her life. There were four
or five acres of land about the suburban house and she became absorbed
in the work of raising flowers and vegetables. For the sake of the
children she kept a cow. With a young negro gardener she puttered about
all day, digging in the earth, spreading manure about the roots of
bushes and shrubs, planting and transplanting. In the evening when he
had come home from his office in his car she took him by the arm and
led him eagerly about. The two children trotted at their heels. She
talked glowingly. They stood at a low spot at the foot of the garden
and she spoke of the necessity of putting in tile. The prospect seemed
to excite her. "It will be the best land on the place when it's
drained," she said. She stooped and with a trowel turned over the soft
black soil. An odor arose. "See! Just see how rich and black it is!"
she exclaimed eagerly. "It's a little sour now because water has stood
on it." She seemed to be apologizing as for a wayward child. "When it's
drained I shall use lime to sweeten it," she added. She was like a
mother leaning over the cradle of a sleeping babe. Her enthusiasm
irritated him.
When Rosalind came to take the position in his office the slow fires of
hatred that had been burning beneath the surface of Walter Savers' life
had already eaten away much of his vigor and energy. His body sagged in
the office chair and there were heavy sagging lines at the corners of
his mouth. Outwardly he remained always kindly and cheerful but back of
the clouded, troubled eyes the fires of hatred burned slowly,
persistently. It was as though he was trying to awaken from a troubled
dream that gripped him, a dream that frightened a little, that was
unending. He had contracted little physical habits. A sharp paper
cutter lay on his desk. As he read a letter from one of the firm's
customers he took it up and jabbed little holes in the leather cover of
his desk. When he had several letters to sign he took up his pen and
jabbed it almost viciously into the inkwell. Then before signing he
jabbed it in again. Sometimes he did the thing a dozen times in
succession.
Sometimes the things that went on beneath the surface of Walter Sayers
frightened him. In order to do what he called "putting in his Saturday
afternoons and Sundays" he had taken up photography. The camera took
him away from his own house and the sight of the garden where his wife
and the negro were busy digging, and into the fields and into stretches
of woodland at the edge of the suburban village. Also it took him away
from his wife's talk, from her eternal planning for the garden's
future. Here by the house tulip bulbs were to be put in in the fall.
Later there would be a hedge of lilac bushes shutting off the house
from the road. The men who lived in the other houses along the suburban
street spent their Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings tinkering
with motor cars. On Sunday afternoons they took their families driving,
sitting up very straight and silent at the driving wheel. They consumed
the afternoon in a swift dash over country roads. The car ate up the
hours. Monday morning and the work in the city was there, at the end of
the road. They ran madly toward it.
For a time the use of the camera made Walter Sayers almost happy. The
study of light, playing on the trunk of a tree or over the grass in a
field appealed to some instinct within. It was an uncertain delicate
business. He fixed himself a dark room upstairs in the house and spent
his evenings there. One dipped the films into the developing liquid,
held them to the light and then dipped them again. The little nerves
that controlled the eyes were aroused. One felt oneself being enriched,
a little--
One Sunday afternoon he went to walk in a strip of woodland and came
out upon the slope of a low hill. He had read somewhere that the low
hill country southwest of Chicago, in which his suburb lay, had once
been the shore of Lake Michigan. The low hills sprang out of the flat
land and were covered with forests. Beyond them the flat lands began
again. The prairies went on indefinitely, into infinity. People's lives
went on so. Life was too long. It was to be spent in the endless doing
over and over of an unsatisfactory task. He sat on the slope and looked
out across the land.
He thought of his wife. She was back there, in the suburb in the hills,
in her garden making things grow. It was a noble sort of thing to be
doing. One shouldn't be irritated.
Well he had married her expecting to have money of his own. Then he
would have worked at something else. Money would not have been involved
in the matter and success would not have been a thing one must seek. He
had expected his own life would be motivated. No matter how much or how
hard he worked he would not have been a great singer. What did that
matter? There was a way to live--a way of life in which such things did
not matter. The delicate shades of things might be sought after. Before
his eyes, there on the grass covered flat lands, the afternoon light
was playing. It was like a breath, a vapor of color blown suddenly from
between red lips out over the grey dead burned grass. Song might be
like that. The beauty might come out of himself, out of his own body.
Again he thought of his wife and the sleeping light in his eyes flared
up, it became a flame. He felt himself being mean, unfair. It didn't
matter. Where did the truth lie? Was his wife, digging in her garden,
having always a succession of small triumphs, marching forward with the
seasons--well, was she becoming a little old, lean and sharp, a little
vulgarized?
It seemed so to him. There was something smug in the way in which she
managed to fling green growing flowering things over the black land. It
was obvious the thing could be done and that there was satisfaction in
doing it. It was a little like running a business and making money by
it. There was a deep seated vulgarity involved in the whole matter. His
wife put her hands into the black ground. They felt about, caressed the
roots of the growing things. She laid hold of the slender trunk of a
young tree in a certain way--as though she possessed it.
One could not deny that the destruction of beautiful things was
involved. Weeds grew in the garden, delicate shapely things. She
plucked them out without thought. He had seen her do it.
As for himself, he also had been pulled out of something. Had he not
surrendered to the fact of a wife and growing children? Did he not
spend his days doing work he detested? The anger within him burned
bright. The fire came into his conscious self. Why should a weed that
is to be destroyed pretend to a vegetable existence? As for puttering
about with a camera--was it not a form of cheating? He did not want to
be a photographer. He had once wanted to be a singer.
He arose and walked along the hillside, still watching the shadows play
over the plains below. At night--in bed with his wife--well, was she
not sometimes with him as she was in the garden? Something was plucked
out of him and another thing grew in its place--something she wanted to
have grow. Their love making was like his puttering with a camera--to
make the weekends pass. She came at him a little too determinedly--
sure. She was plucking delicate weeds in order that things she had
determined upon--"vegetables," he exclaimed in disgust--in order that
vegetables might grow. Love was a fragrance, the shading of a tone over
the lips, out of the throat. It was like the afternoon light on the
burned grass. Keeping a garden and making flowers grow had nothing to
do with it.
Walter Sayers' fingers twitched. The camera hung by a strap over his
shoulder. He took hold of the strap and walked to a tree. He swung the
box above his head and brought it down with a thump against the tree
trunk. The sharp breaking sound--the delicate parts of the machine
being broken--was sweet to his ears. It was as though a song had come
suddenly from between his lips. Again he swung the box and again
brought it down against the tree trunk.