“And that's the end of the chapter.” Mrs. Severance's voice trailed off
into silence. She closed the book with a soft sound. The man whom it
might be rather more convenient than otherwise to call Mr. Severance
opened his eyes. He had not been asleep, but he had found by a good deal
of experience that he paid more attention to Dickens if he closed his
eyes while she read.
“Thank you dear.”
“Thank you. You know I love it. Especially Pip.”
He considered.
“There was a word one of my young men used the other day about Dickens.
Gusto, I think--yes, that was it. Well, I find that, as I grow older,
that seems to be the thing I value rather more than most men of my age.
Gusto.” He smiled “Though I take it more quietly, perhaps,--than I did
when I was young,” he added.
“You _are_ young” said Mrs. Severance carefully.
“Not really, dear. I can give half-a-dozen youngsters I know four
strokes in nine holes and beat them. I can handle the bank in half
the time and with half the worry that some of my people take to one
department. And for a little while more, Rose, I may be able to satisfy
you. But” and he passed a hand lightly over his hair. “It's grey, you
know,” he ended.
“As if it mattered,” said Mrs. Severance, a little pettishly.
“It does matter, Rose.” His eyes darkened with memory--with the sort of
memory that hurts more to forget than even to remember. “Do you realize
that I am sixteen years older than you are?” he said a little hurriedly
as if he were trying to scribble the memory over with any kind of words.
“But my dear” and she smiled, “you were sixteen years older six years
ago--remember? There's less real difference between us now than there
was then.”
“Yes, I certainly wasn't as young in some ways--six years ago.” He
seemed to speak almost as if unconsciously, almost as if the words were
being squeezed out of him in sleep by a thing that had pressed for a
long time with a steady weight on his mind till the mind must release
itself or be broken. “But then nobody could be with you, for a month
even, and not feel himself turn younger whether he wanted to or not.”
“So that's settled.” She was trying to carry it lightly, to take the
darkness out of his eyes. “And once you've bought our steamer tickets we
can leave it all behind at the wharf and by the time we land we'll be
so disgracefully young that no one will recognize us--just think--we can
keep going back and back till I'm putting my hair up for the first time
and you're in little short trousers--and then babies, I suppose and
the other side of getting born--” but her voice, for once, turned
ineffectually against his centeredness of gaze, that seemed now as if it
had turned back on itself for a struggling moment and regarded neither
what was nor what might be, but only what was past.
“Six years ago” he said with the same drowsy thoughtfulness. “Well,
Rose, I shall always be--most grateful--for those six years.”
She started to speak but he checked her.
“I think I would be willing to make a substantial endowment to any
Protestant Church that still really believed in hell,” he said, “because
that was very like hell--six years ago.”
Intensity began to come into his voice like a color of darkness, though
he still spoke slowly.
“You can stand nearly everything in life but being tired of yourself.
And six years ago I was tired--tired to death.”
Her hand reached over and touched him medicinally.
“I suppose I had no right” he began again and then stopped. “No, I think
the strong man tires less easily but more wholly than the weak one when
he does tire. And I was strong enough.
“I'd played a big game, you know. When my father died we hadn't much
left but position--and that was going. I don't blame my father--he
wasn't a business man--he should have been a literary critic--that
little book of essays of his still sells, you know; not much but there's
a demand for a dozen copies every year and that's a good deal for an
American who's been dead for thirty. Well, that's where the children get
their liking for things like that--I've got it too, a little--I could
have done something there if I'd had time. But I never had time.
“I could have done it when I got out of Harvard--drifted along like half
a dozen people I know, played at law, played at writing, played always
and forever at being a gentleman--ended up as an officer of the Century
Club with what little money I had in an annuity. But I couldn't stand
the idea of just scraping along. And for nearly ten years I put those
things aside.
“You know about my going West and the way I lived there. It wasn't
easy when I'd been at Harvard and gone everywhere in New York and
Boston--starting in so far below the bottom that you couldn't even see
the bottom unless you squinted your eyes. But I never took a job with
more money if I thought I could learn anything in a job with less--and
every place I went I stayed until I could handle the job of the man two
places ahead of me--and if I didn't get his job when I asked for it I
went somewhere else. I don't think I read a book except a technical one
for the first five years. And after that, when the chain-stores started
going they asked me back to New York--a big offer too--but it wasn't the
kind I wanted and I threw it down. I knew just how I wanted to come back
to New York and that's the way I came.
“I don't suppose my morals were too edifying those years. But they were
as good as the men I went with and I kept myself in hand. I saw men go
to pieces with drink--and I didn't drink. I saw men go to pieces over
women--and I kept away from that kind of woman. A man has to have women
in his life no matter how much you talk about it--but I took the kind
with the price-tag because when you paid them you were through. I could
have married a dozen times if I'd wanted but I didn't want--that old
hocus-pocus of tradition was still with me, stronger than death--I
thought I knew the kind of wife I wanted and she was in the East.
“Then the partnership with Jessup came and I took it. And after a year
I was made. I wasn't the last of one of the penniless old families
that give each other dinners once a month and pretend they're the
real society because they haven't money enough to trail in the present
society game--even by then I was--what did that last newspaper story
say? 'a figure of nation-wide importance.' Then it must be just about
time, I thought, that this figure of nation-wide importance began to
look around a little and married the wife he'd been waiting for and
started to pick up all the things he hadn't had for twelve years.
“Well--Mary. And I was so careful about Mary,” his lips twisted, half
whimsically, half painfully. “I was so damn sure. I was so damn sure I
knew everything about women.
“She had the qualities I'd said to myself I wanted--beauty, position,
breeding, a good enough mind, some common sense. She hadn't money, but
there I thought I could help her--the way she ran things for her father
on what they had showed what she could do with more. We weren't in
love with each other--oh dear no--but that I considered on the whole an
advantage--she attracted me and it's fair enough to say that beside most
of the men she'd been seeing my combination of having been Old New York
and being one of the young big coming men from the West dazzled her
rather. And anyhow I didn't want--passion--exactly. I thought it would
take too much time when I was only in the middle of my game and getting
as much real solid fun out of it as a kid gets out of cooking his own
dinner in camp. I wanted a partner and a home and children and somebody
to sit at the head of my table when I wanted to be--public--and yet
somebody you could be at home with when you wanted to be at home. And
I thought I had them all in Mary--I thought I was being about the most
sensible man in the world.
“Well, up till after both children were born I think I tried pretty
hard. I gave her all I could think of--materially at least. And then I
found out in spite of myself that you can't be married to a woman--even
bearably--and neither be lovers nor friends with her. And Mary and I
never got beyond the social acquaintance stage.
“It wasn't all Mary's fault either--I can see that now. A good deal was
in the way she'd been brought up--they weren't modern about the blisses
of ignorance in the nineties. But the rest of it was Mary and she
couldn't have changed it any more than she could have been rude to
a servant or raised her voice more than usual when she really wanted
something done.
“She'd been brought up never to be demonstrative--that was one thing.
But that wasn't the main trouble--the main trouble was her most curious,
most frigid self-sufficiency. Until her children came she was the most
wholly self-sufficient person I've ever known. She was really only happy
when she was entirely alone, always. It wasn't egotism exactly--she's
always had a very-well-mannered conviction of her own relative
unimportance--it was just that in spite of the fact that she seemed
so perfectly healthy and calm and composed whenever she was with other
people they'd be sure to hurt her a little somehow or other without
meaning to--the only person she could genuinely depend on never to hurt
her was herself.
“As for men, she'd formed one crystallized opinion of men in the first
weeks of our marriage and she's kept it ever since. She looks at them
as if they were a kind of tame wolf about the house--something you must
never show you're afraid of, something you must feed and look after and
be publicly amiable to because you must be just--but something you
never never would bring in the house of your own accord or touch without
feeling that you, that you had to preserve so jealously against all
the things that could possibly hurt it, start to shrink and be pained
inside.
“Then the children came--she did and does love them. She lives for them.
But they're part of herself too, you see, an essential part, and as she
can't give herself to anybody but herself, she can't give them to me
even in the easiest kind of partnership, really. You don't leave small
children alone with even the tamest kind of wolf--and she's the kind of
woman whose children are always six to her. And she's their mother--and
so she has her way.
“That's the way it got worse. Right up to six years ago.
“I'd done my job--I was President of the Commercial. And I'd made my
money, and the money still kept coming in as if it didn't make any
difference what I did with it. I'd won my game. And what was there in it
for me?
“I didn't have a home--I had a place where I ate and slept. I didn't
have a wife--I had an acquaintance who kept house for me. I had
children--at school and college. I didn't have real hobbies--I hadn't
had time for them. And I was forty-nine. All I could do was go on making
money till I died.
“Well, you changed that,” his voice shook a little.
“You came and I saw and knew and took you. And I'm not sorry. Because
you've made me alive again. And I'm going to be alive now till I die.
“Funny--I was never so anxious about anything happening as I have been
about--our approaching mutual disappearance. Especially the last six
months when I've been planning. But now that's settled.
“Mary will have more than enough and the children are grown. They won't
know--I still have brains enough to settle that and money will do nearly
everything. It'll be a nine days' wonder. 'Sudden Disappearance of
Prominent Financier--Foul Play Suspected' and that'll be all.
“As for the Commercial--I haven't come to my age without finding
out that nobody in the world is indispensable. If a taxi ran over me
tomorrow they'd have to do without me--and Harris and the young men can
handle things.
“But you know where there'll be an elderly gentleman retired from
business with a country house and a garden he can putter around in
all his worst clothes. And a wife that reads Dickens to him in the
evening--oh yes, Rose, we'll take Dickens along. And he'll be pretty
contented as things go--that retired old gentleman.”
The darkness had passed from his eyes--he was smiling now.
“Be nice--eh Rose?”
He took her hand--the warm touch was still strong, still reassuring.
Only the eyes that he was not looking at now seemed singularly unsure,
as if they had seen something they had pondered over lightly, as a mere
possibility, years ago, take on sudden impatient body and demand to be
heard.
She let her hand lie lightly in his for a moment. Then she rose.
“Half past twelve” she said a little stiffly. “Time for two such genuine
antiques as we are to think of being put away in our cases for the
night.”