But all this was as nothing compared to the intensity, the ups and
down, in her relations with Joe himself. He often looked tired and
harassed. "What's the matter with me?" he seemed to ask. And she felt
his two sides combatting each other. On the one hand were the
influences of Nourse and Dwight and the men at the club, to which he
went nearly every day. He took part in discussions there, long
rambling talks and arguments. And his old ideals were rising hungrily
within him. But meanwhile the business man in Joe kept savagely putting
the dreamer down, and for days he would plunge into his work and the
fever of the money game. Joe had been so successful of late; and she
knew that in his office that odious press agent was for ever at him.
From Nourse she learned that her husband was even still considering the
scheme for a row of buildings named after the presidents. And Ethel had
a sinking of heart.
"If he does that, I'm lost," she decided. But she would shake off such
fears, as she felt again the old Joe emerge, the Joe of dreams and
startling plans. And she grew excited as she thought:
"Oh, if he'll only let himself go! I don't want him just nice and tame
and refined! I don't want only friends like that! I want--I want--"
What she wanted was still exceedingly vague, and Ethel could not put it
in words. It had something to do with the teachings of the little
history "prof" at home. She wanted the artist in him to rise, the
creative soul of him! Cautiously she probed his thoughts--now tender
and maternal toward him in his tired moods, now alive and interested as
she got him talking. Bits came out. Joe was so plainly tortured by the
struggle going on inside. She felt at once pity and admiration, and was
deeper in love with him than she had ever been before. She felt the
excitement of a fight with hope of victory close ahead. She took care
in her dress and manner to give him little surprises at night, and by
her cheery comradeship and her warm beauty of body and soul, Ethel drew
him on and on. At such times she would often lose all memory of her
scheming and would give up to her love, which had become a passion now.
But always she came back to her plan. Not openly, for she had to be
careful; she worked at him in little ways. She stirred his youth and
his cast-off dreams by her own youth and zest for it all. She got him
to tell her of Nourse and Dwight, the old friends she herself had put on
his trail, and of new friends he had met in his club--"the club I
elected you to," she exulted. But the next instant she would add, "Oh,
Ethel, you're so ignorant! If you only knew about his work!" And
knitting her brows she would listen hard while he talked of steel
construction. As with her encouragement he talked on rapidly, absorbed,
Ethel would clutch at this and that. She learned of books and magazines
on architecture here and abroad. Stealthily she noted them down, and
those she could not purchase she hunted up in libraries. Nourse was a
great help to her here. He came to see her now and then; and though he
still had his discouraging moods, at other times he was friendly and
kind. Enjoying this conspiracy with the charming young Mrs. Lanier, he
expressed his gallantry by bringing her books of appalling size. But
some had beautiful illustrations that set her to imagining. Eagerly she
groped her way deep into the history of the building of cathedrals and
palaces in times gone by. And the long majestic story of man's building
on the earth thrilled her to the very soul. Joe must make his place in
it all!
When on coming home at night he dumped a pile of work on the table, she
would unobtrusively slip some book beside it. She grew to know which
ones tempted him most. He had been surprised and amused at first at her
interest in architecture--and secretly a little disturbed, suspecting
what lay behind it. But as autumn drew on he read more and more of the
books she kept putting in his way. While he read she would sit with a
novel or sew. She would glance up with some remark, and they would talk
and then read on. Subtly she made the atmosphere. She often brought
Paris into their talks. She spoke longingly of the shops and plays, and
all she wanted to see over there. And she almost succeeded in making
him promise to take her over the following spring.
Joe was happy at such times, when she could make him leave business
alone. And although he had many relapses, when night after night he
would sit by the table planning more horrible "junk for the Bronx," with
an inner smile she saw how often her husband scowled at such labour now.
She heard of changes in the office.
"We 're still building junk," Nourse confided one day, "but it isn't
quite as bad as before. Joe wants the money just as hard, but he's
plainly jarred by some of the jobs. He even fought his press agent last
week!"
One night Joe suggested awkwardly:
"Suppose we try Bill Nourse again. Let me bring him home to dinner, I
mean. He isn't especially cheery, God knows--but he seems so damnably
lonely this fall."
"Very well, dear--if you want to," she sighed. She had told Nourse to
hint he was lonely.
When Nourse came to dinner that Saturday night, Joe was surprised and
delighted at the way his partner seemed to get on now with his wife.
The visit indeed was such a success that it was not long before Joe
proposed bringing home "an old pal of mine--fellow named Dwight." To
this, too, Ethel assented, and when Dwight arrived one night she greeted
him very graciously.
"I feel as though I knew you," she said. "I've heard Joe talk of you so
much."
To Joe's delight they got on like old friends. And when Dwight spied
the piano there and learned of her interest in music, he insisted on
trying her voice, and was loud in his praise of its promise. Before he
left, it was arranged that she should come to his studio and take
lessons twice a week. Openly his pupil now, she could speak of him to
Joe, and he came to dine with them often.
How smoothly things were working out. If there were any cloud upon the
horizon it was the occasional presence of Amy's old friend, Fanny Carr.
Fanny had been abroad through the summer, but in October she had
returned. She had come to see Ethel several times, in the same
determinedly friendly way; and Nourse reported that she was going
frequently to see Joe at his office about her eternal money affairs.
And the fact that Joe never spoke of it only made the matter worse. For
Joe still had his money side, and Fanny knew how to flatter him so. He
still had his loyalty to his first wife, and Fanny so cleverly played to
that. "And he likes her, too--clothes, voice, perfumery and all!" Ethel
would declare to herself in anger and vexation. Oh, these women who
used sex every minute! how could men be so easily fooled?
"You can't change a man in a minute," she thought. "Remember Amy had
him five years." Amy had planted so deep in him the feeling that money
is everything; she had got the fever into his blood. And Fanny was
there to keep it alive by her flattery of his money success. And for
Ethel, even still, it was decidedly unsafe to criticize Joe in some of
his moods. As autumn changed to winter, these moods grew much more
frequent. What was worrying him? She couldn't find out. She sent for
Nourse and asked him, "What's going on in the office?"
"The press agent is pushing him hard," was Nourse's gloomy answer, "for
that row of patriotic atrocities up on Riverside Drive." Ethel squirmed.
"But he won't!" she cried. "He couldn't!"
"Oh, yes he could," Joe's partner growled. "There's so much money in
it!"
"If he puts that through I'm done for!" Ethel told herself that night.
"His name will be a perfect joke--among all the people I want to know!
And they'll all keep away from us as though he were running a yellow
journal! And then her friends will crowd about--because we'll be so
rich, you see! Oh, damn money! Damn! Damn!"
She was lying sleepless on her bed, and Joe was sleeping by her side.
She sat up now and looked at his face in the dim light from the window.
"If you get very rich," she thought, "and middle-aged and very fat in
body and soul, get to care only for building 'junk' and for going about
with Amy's friends--I wonder what would I do then." Again the words of
young Mrs. Grewe came up in her mind: "You can get out whenever you
choose." She frowned. "But there are the children. And besides, I love
you, Joe--yes, more than ever, and in a queer way! I'm fighting for
what I love in you, but at the same time I love you all--every bit of
you!" Breathing quickly now, she sank back on her pillow, and there she
soon grew quiet again. "So we'll fight it out once and for all. You've
got to drop this plan of yours." One evening that same week when Nourse
had come to dinner, she led the talk by slow degrees to that other plan
of Joe's--the one with terrace gardens. Soon she had Nourse talking
about it, and seeing her husband grow morose she grew cheerily
interested.
"Oh, I'm very dull, I suppose," she said at the end with a quizzical
smile, "but I'm afraid I can't get it clear. Couldn't you draw it?"
Nourse smiled at this, for he saw what she was driving at.
"No, I'm poor at that," he said.
"Then, Joe, you sketch it out for me."
Joe put down his paper and began in surly fashion. But as he sketched
more and more rapidly, she saw the thing take hold of him. With little
exclamations and questions Ethel drove him on. She thought it a
fascinating plan but the details puzzled her still, she said, and the
rough sketch he had drawn was very unsatisfactory. She begged him to
draw it on a large scale, and he set out to do so. But his hand was
inexpert. Although once the most brilliant designer in town, for years
Joe had stuck to the business side, and his hand had grown clumsy, his
memory cold. Ethel had known of this from Nourse. And now probing by
her questions as to details here and there, with Nourse helping at her
side, she revealed Joe's weakness to himself. A scared angry look came
into his eyes. Stubbornly he worked on and on, but the thing would not
come as it used to!
And this revealing process continued until Nourse with masculine pity
dropped out of the torturing and went home. But Ethel gently encouraged
Joe, and in his dogged persistency he kept at it half the night. The
more tired he grew, the worse was his work. And again and again, as she
glanced at his face, she saw that frightened look in his eyes. It
almost brought the tears in her own, but steadily she kept thinking:
"I'm scaring him badly, and that's what he needs. For years he has been
telling himself that first he would make money and then he would work
out his ideals. But he's frightened now. He's wondering if he has put
it off too long?"
Pitilessly she goaded him on. Then at last she relented and began to
persuade him to go to bed. How white and haggard and queer he looked.
Again a lump rose in her throat. Soon she was saying quietly:
"I should think that some day, dear, you'd want to go back to Paris and
work."
He made no answer.
But in the weeks that followed, she dropped this thought again and again
into his mind. Paris, study, work, old dreams--she played these against
his business, against Amy and her friends and the flattery of Fanny
Carr, against that odious press agent and the plan for Riverside Drive.
"Has he turned it down?" she inquired of his partner.
"Not yet," was the answer. "It's still in the air.
"I wish this were over," Ethel thought. Joe's face had grown so queer
and drawn that sometimes as she looked at him a sickening dread stole
into her mind. "Is he really too old?" she asked herself.
One Saturday night when he came home, with a sudden leap of compassion
she saw what a day he had been through. "But he is through! Something
has happened!" she thought. And she treated him very tenderly--both
because of the state he was in, and more perhaps because she knew how
bad it would be for both of them if he had decided against her.
"How has the work been going?" she asked. He looked at her almost with
dislike.
"For a month," he said, "you've been trying to make me give up that
Riverside scheme." He paused, and her heart was in her mouth.
"I haven't said so, have I?"
"No--you haven't said so," he growled.
"Well?"
"It's off. I've dropped it."
She started to embrace him, but saw at once it would be a mistake.
"Thank you, Joe," she said softly, and went into the nursery. It was so
dark and quiet there. She had a cry.