"Certainly."
"I wish you had let me see the letter. I'll bet you made it all frost.
You don't know how cold you are, Courtney. Sometimes you chill even me,
well as I know you.... I guess I'll write Basil a note, too--and let him
see that we did appreciate his thoughtfulness."
"As you please."
*XIV*
Five days since the letter to Basil, a fortnight since he went, and the
first move toward freedom not yet made. Each day added its strength of
loneliness and longing to the resolve that became the guiding purpose of
her life when she sent him away. But she must restrain her eagerness,
must compel herself to wait upon opportunity--upon the favorable gust of
event or emotion. To be tactless and abrupt would mean defeat; for,
hard though it was to realize, she must keep ever in mind that Richard
had legal right over Winchie. Moral right she denied not only because
he was as much a stranger to Winchie as to herself, but chiefly because
a child belonged to its mother. Indeed, if she had not been brought up
in a legal family it would not have occurred to her that in any
circumstances she need disturb herself about having Winchie. There was
nothing of pose or effusiveness about her love for him; it was that deep
and utter love which is not conscious of itself, but simply is. She and
the boy were as much part of each other as when his being was still
hidden within hers. She knew that she and Winchie were one; but she
also knew the man-made law. So in seeking her freedom she must move
carefully. Sometimes she felt she must be dreaming; it simply could not
be possible that in arranging her life she must take into account a
person so utterly alien and apart as this nominal husband of hers.
She had rarely seen him since Basil left. He was exercising--walking or
rowing on the lake--very early in the mornings. But he spent the whole
day at his work. When he occasionally came to dinner or supper, he was
deep in his problems, was as unconscious of his wife and child as his
child was of him. Courtney was no longer unconscious of him. As
before, she did not see him when she looked at him, did not listen when
he talked, answered, if answer was necessary, by a sort of reflex mental
action that never involved her real mind. But she had the sense of his
presence--as keen when he was out of sight as when he sat working or in
a deep abstraction before her eyes. And she was constantly revolving
how to begin the revolt--for she saw more and more clearly that it would
be regarded by him as a revolt against womanliness, against duty,
against honor, against decency, would burst upon him like thunder from
clear sky, no matter how adroitly she might begin. Until then his ideas
of woman had impressed her only in a vague, general way. She had
avoided thinking them out or hearing them from his own lips because she
knew definite knowledge would only make the struggle to be a wife to him
as far as she might the more painful, the more humiliating. But now,
piece by piece, his conception of womanhood and woman's place fitted
itself together in her mind from stray sentences dropped by him from
time to time in their five years. Every day she recalled some forgotten
or ignored remark that added to the completeness of the record--and to
its discouragement. As to the position of woman in the scheme of
things, he was untouched of any modern idea. He was just where his
grandfather had been; and Colonel Achilles Vaughan had been where the
whole world had been since the Oriental contempt for women reconquered
Europe under the banner of the Cross.
In one of the last warm days she half sat, half lay in the hammock on
the lake-front veranda, apparently idle, really with a brain as
industrious as a beehive. Gradually, however, the beauty of the
scene--summer dying like a lovely woman whose mortal disease only
enhances loveliness--stole in upon her and won her for the moment. She
looked at the wonderful colors far and near, she drank in the last
potent draughts of summer's perfume. And suddenly she thought, "I would
be divorcing all this, too!" These gardens that she had created; the
house that she had made over. Why, these things were part of her very
soul. The same life throbbed in them that throbbed in her boy and in
herself--her own life blood! The place was in Richard Vaughan's name
just as she herself was, just as Winchie was. But it was not his;
it--all that made it individual--was hers!
Most of us pass through the world, leaving little more trace of our
individuality than a traveler leaves in a hotel room. But Courtney had
the creative instinct powerfully developed. She even never dressed in
exactly the same way, no matter how simple her costume or how often she
wore it; and her clothes were so individual that Richard the absent
spoke of hats and dresses she had worn several years back. And this
place--it was like the picture the artist keeps by him and touches and
retouches. Also, she now realized for the first time how profoundly
domestic she was by nature. Not by chance had she avoided the life of
the gadabout and meddler which is chosen by so many women when they find
themselves mismated, and so, without hope of the normal life. She had
always classed herself with the flyabout sort of women rather than with
the domestic sort; she had fallen into the common error of taking as
representative of the domestic type those dreary rotters who sit at home
inert and slovenly simply because it requires less effort to stay at
home than to dress and issue forth. Now she saw that she was domestic,
was a home-maker and a home-lover; and she understood a deeper depth of
her unhappiness--the unhappiness that comes from being cheated out of
one's dearest desires; for how incomplete must be any home without love
of husband and wife. And she understood why, as she made her
surroundings more and more like her dreams, her longing for love had
grown apace; she was like the bird that builds its nest, and has nothing
to put in it.
She had built this nest; now she must abandon it. Heavier and heavier
grew her heart, as she thought of the years of thought and toil she had
invested, as she looked about at the results. She rebuked herself
almost fiercely--in terror of the weakness to which these lamentings
might tempt her; in shame at the disloyalty to Basil. "I'm utterly
selfish," she said to herself. "I'm shrinking from making any sacrifice
at all." There she stopped short in a kind of terror.
"Sacrifice"--what a strange word to use--what an ominous word--and how
clearly it warned her that delay was eating out courage, was
strengthening her natural woman's inertia. Sacrifice! She began to
picture what the new life would be--perfect sympathy, companionship ever
closer and closer, how she would grow and expand, how Winchie would
thrive in an atmosphere of ideal love--and Basil and she would together
create a place, a home which would be incomparably lovelier than
this.... "Yes, I must establish my life on its permanent basis." Her
life must be straightened out, must be settled right. Until it was
based right, nothing could be right; mind and heart would always be
uneasy, and from time to time in a turmoil. "Nothing is settled," her
father often used to quote, "until it's settled right." He was thinking
of large affairs, but the thing was just as true of the affairs of
private life. Her and Richard's relations, her and Basil's relations,
and therefore her and Winchie's relations, were awry, all awry. There
had been successive adjustments; they had one after the other fallen to
pieces--because "nothing is settled until it's settled right."
That very evening, it so happened, for the first time Richard made a
remark that gave her an opening. "Why don't you stay down in the
evenings?" said he. "It doesn't disturb me for you to play and sing in
the sitting room when I'm in the library."
"The last few times I did it," replied she, "you slipped away to the
shop."
He reddened, laughed guiltily. "Did I? Well--perhaps in certain
moods----"
"Oh, I'm not complaining," she assured him. "I've got used to our
leading separate lives--long ago.... I like it as much as you do."
"Separate lives," said he reflectively. "It's true, we don't see much
of each other. Husbands and wives rarely do, when the man amounts to
anything, or is trying to amount to anything."
"Unless they work together."
"And that's impossible where people are of our station."
Our station! Her lip curled and her heart protested. How could a human
being with a human heart talk of a station too high for love--love that
was the soul of life.
"Also," continued he, reflective and absent, "it's out of the question
where the husband is pursuing an intellectual occupation." Even had he
not been merely thinking aloud, it would not have occurred to him that
there was any slur in a statement of an elementary axiom as to the
different spheres of the two sexes. "And," he went on, "it's
unnecessary to married happiness, as we've proved. You had an idea
once--do you remember?--"
"Yes--I remember."
"If I'd let you have your foolish, impulsive, romantic way, and you'd
been at my elbow down at the shop, where I get irritable and
cranky--we'd not have made our present record--would we?"
She shivered. "No," she said faintly.
"Five years with hardly a misunderstanding, and not one quarrel."
His words, his manner--complacent, content--calmly possessive--dried up
her courage and her hope. But she held to her purpose. She said,
"We're not interested enough in each other to quarrel."