Ditmar stood staring after the trolley car that bore Janet away until
it became a tiny speck of light in the distance. Then he started to walk
toward Hampton; in the unwonted exercise was an outlet for the pent-up
energy her departure had thwarted; and presently his body was warm with
a physical heat that found its counterpart in a delicious, emotional
glow of anticipation, of exultant satisfaction. After all, he could not
expect to travel too fast with her. Had he not at least gained a signal
victory? When he remembered her lips--which she had indubitably given
him!--he increased his stride, and in what seemed an incredibly brief
time he had recrossed the bridge, covered the long residential blocks of
Warren Street, and gained his own door.
The house was quiet, the children having gone to bed, and he groped his
way through the dark parlour to his den, turning on the electric switch,
sinking into an armchair, and lighting a cigar. He liked this room of
his, which still retained something of that flavour of a refuge and
sanctuary it had so eminently possessed in the now forgotten days of
matrimonial conflict. One of the few elements of agreement he had
held in common with the late Mrs. Ditmar was a similarity of taste in
household decoration, and they had gone together to a great emporium in
Boston to choose the furniture and fittings. The lamp in the centre of
the table was a bronze column supporting a hemisphere of heavy red and
emerald glass, the colours woven into an intricate and bizarre design,
after the manner of the art nouveau--so the zealous salesman had
informed them. Cora Ditmar, when exhibiting this lamp to admiring
visitors, had remembered the phrase, though her pronunciation of it,
according to the standard of the Sorbonne, left something to be desired.
The table and chairs, of heavy, shiny oak marvellously and precisely
carved by machines, matched the big panels of the wainscot. The
windows were high in the wall, thus preventing any intrusion from the
clothes-yard on which they looked. The bookcases, protected by leaded
panes, held countless volumes of the fiction from which Cora Ditmar had
derived her knowledge of the great world outside of Hampton, together
with certain sets she had bought, not only as ornaments, but with a
praiseworthy view to future culture,--such as Whitmarsh's Library of the
Best Literature. These volumes, alas, were still uncut; but some of
the pages of the novels--if one cared to open them--were stained with
chocolate. The steam radiator was a decoration in itself, the fireplace
set in the red and yellow tiles that made the hearth. Above the oak
mantel, in a gold frame, was a large coloured print of a Magdalen,
doubled up in grief, with a glory of loose, Titian hair, chosen
by Ditmar himself as expressing the nearest possible artistic
representation of his ideal of the female form. Cora Ditmar's objections
on the score of voluptuousness and of insufficient clothing had been
vain. She had recognized no immorality of sentimentality in the art
itself; what she felt, and with some justice, was that this particular
Magdalen was unrepentant, and that Ditmar knew it. And the picture
remained an offence to her as long as she lived. Formerly he had enjoyed
the contemplation of this figure, reminding him, as it did, of mellowed
moments in conquests of the past; suggesting also possibilities of the
future. For he had been quick to discount the attitude of bowed despair,
the sop flung by a sensuous artist to Christian orthodoxy. He had been
sceptical about despair--feminine despair, which could always be cured
by gifts and baubles. But to-night, as he raised his eyes, he felt
a queer sensation marring the ecstatic perfection of his mood. That
quality in the picture which so long had satisfied and entranced him
had now become repellent, an ugly significant reflection of
something--something in himself he was suddenly eager to repudiate and
deny. It was with a certain amazement that he found himself on his feet
with the picture in his hand, gazing at the empty space where it had
hung. For he had had no apparent intention of obeying that impulse. What
should he do with it? Light the fire and burn it--frame and all? The
frame was an integral part of it. What would his housekeeper say? But
now that he had actually removed it from the wall he could not replace
it, so he opened the closet door and thrust it into a corner among
relics which had found refuge there. He had put his past in the closet;
yet the relief he felt was mingled with the peculiar qualm that follows
the discovery of symptoms never before remarked. Why should this woman
have this extraordinary effect of making him dissatisfied with himself?
He sat down again and tried to review the affair from that first day
when he had surprised in her eyes the flame dwelling in her. She had
completely upset his life, increasingly distracted his mind until now
he could imagine no peace unless he possessed her. Hitherto he had
recognized in his feeling for her nothing but that same desire he had
had for other women, intensified to a degree never before experienced.
But this sudden access of morality--he did not actually define it as
such--was disquieting. And in the feverish, semi-objective survey he
was now making of his emotional tract he was discovering the presence
of other disturbing symptoms such as an unwonted tenderness, a
consideration almost amounting to pity which at times he had vaguely
sensed yet never sought imaginatively to grasp. It bewildered him
by hampering a ruthlessness hitherto absolute. The fierceness of her
inflamed his passion, yet he recognized dimly behind this fierceness an
instinct of self-protection--and he thought of her in this moment as a
struggling bird that fluttered out of his hands when they were ready
to close over her. So it had been to-night. He might have kept her,
prevented her from taking the car. Yet he had let her go! There came
again, utterly to blot this out, the memory of her lips.
Even then, there had been something sorrowful in that kiss, a quality he
resented as troubling, a flavour that came to him after the wildness was
spent. What was she struggling against? What was behind her resistance?
She loved him! It had never before occurred to him to enter into the
nature of her feelings, having been so preoccupied with and tortured by
his own. This realization, that she loved him, as it persisted, began
to make him uneasy, though it should, according to all experience, have
been a reason for sheer exultation. He began to see that with her it
involved complications, responsibilities, disclosures, perhaps all of
those things he had formerly avoided and resented in woman. He
thought of certain friends of his who had become tangled up--of one in
particular whose bank account had been powerless to extricate him....
And he was ashamed of himself.
In view of the nature of his sex experience, of his habit of applying
his imagination solely to matters of business rather than to affairs of
the heart,--if his previous episodes may be so designated,--his
failure to surmise that a wish for marriage might be at the back of
her resistance is not so surprising as it may seem; he laid down, half
smoked, his third cigar. The suspicion followed swiftly on his recalling
to mind her vehement repudiation of his proffered gifts did he think she
wanted what he could buy for her! She was not purchasable--that way.
He ought to have known it, he hadn't realized what he was saying. But
marriage! Literally it had never occurred to him to image her in a
relation he himself associated with shackles. One of the unconscious
causes of his fascination was just her emancipation from and innocence
of that herd-convention to which most women--even those who lack wedding
rings--are slaves. The force of such an appeal to a man of Ditmar's type
must not be underestimated. And the idea that she, too, might prefer the
sanction of the law, the gilded cage as a popular song which once had
taken his fancy illuminatingly expressed it--seemed utterly incongruous
with the freedom and daring of her spirit, was a sobering shock. Was
he prepared to marry her, if he could obtain her in no other way? The
question demanded a survey of his actual position of which he was at the
moment incapable. There were his children! He had never sought to arrive
at even an approximate estimate of the boy and girl as factors in his
life, to consider his feelings toward them; but now, though he believed
himself a man who gave no weight to social considerations--he had
scorned this tendency in his wife--he was to realize the presence of
ambitions for them. He was young, he was astonishingly successful;
he had reason to think, with his opportunities and the investments he
already had made, that he might some day be moderately rich; and he had
at times even imagined himself in later life as the possessor of one
of those elaborate country places to be glimpsed from the high roads in
certain localities, which the sophisticated are able to recognize as the
seats of the socially ineligible, but which to Ditmar were outward and
visible emblems of success. He liked to think of George as the inheritor
of such a place, as the son of a millionaire, as a “college graduate,”
as an influential man of affairs; he liked to imagine Amy as the wife
of such another. In short, Ditmar's wife had left him, as an unconscious
legacy, her aspirations for their children's social prestige....
The polished oak grandfather's clock in the hall had struck one before
he went to bed, mentally wearied by an unwonted problem involving, in
addition to self-interest, an element of ethics, of affection not wholly
compounded of desire.
He slept soundly, however. He was one of those fortunate beings who
come into the world with digestive organs and thyroid glands in
that condition which--so physiologists tell us--makes for a sanguine
temperament. And his course of action, though not decided upon, no
longer appeared as a problem; it differed from a business matter in that
it could wait. As sufficient proof of his liver having rescued him from
doubts and qualms he was able to whistle, as he dressed, and without a
tremor of agitation, the forgotten tune suggested to his consciousness
during the unpleasant reverie of the night before,--“Only a Bird in a
Gilded Cage!” It was Saturday. He ate a hearty breakfast, joked with
George and Amy, and refreshed, glowing with an expectation mingled with
just the right amount of delightful uncertainty that made the great
affairs of life a gamble, yet with the confidence of the conqueror, he
walked in sunlight to the mill. In view of this firm and hopeful tone of
his being he found it all the more surprising, as he reached the canal,
to be seized by a trepidation strong enough to bring perspiration to his
forehead. What if she had gone! He had never thought of that, and he had
to admit it would be just like her. You never could tell what she would
do.
Nodding at Simmons, the watchman, he hurried up the iron-shod stairs,
gained the outer once, and instantly perceived that her chair beside the
window was empty! Caldwell and Mr. Price stood with their heads together
bending over a sheet on which Mr. Price was making calculations.
“Hasn't Miss Bumpus come yet?” Ditmar demanded. He tried to speak
naturally, casually, but his own voice sounded strange, seemed to strike
the exact note of sickening apprehension that suddenly possessed him.
Both men turned and looked at him in some surprise.
“Good-morning, Mr. Ditmar,” Caldwell said. “Why, yes, she's in your
room.”
“Oh!” said Ditmar.
“The Boston office has just been calling you--they want to know if you
can't take the nine twenty-two,” Caldwell went on. “It's about that
lawsuit. It comes into court Monday morning, and Mr. Sprole is there,
and they say they have to see you. Miss Bumpus has the memorandum.”
Ditmar looked at his watch.
“Damn it, why didn't they let me know yesterday?” he exclaimed. “I won't
see anybody, Caldwell--not even Orcutt--just now. You understand. I've
got to have a little time to do some letters. I won't be disturbed--by
any one--for half an hour.”
Caldwell nodded.
“All right, Mr. Ditmar.”
Ditmar went into his office, closing the door behind him. She was
occupied as usual, cutting open the letters and laying them in a pile
with the deftness and rapidity that characterized all she did.
“Janet!” he exclaimed.
“There's a message for you from Boston. I've made a note of it,” she
replied.
“I know--Caldwell told me. But I wanted to see you before I went--I had
to see you. I sat up half the night thinking of you, I woke up thinking
of you. Aren't you glad to see me?”
She dropped the letter opener and stood silent, motionless, awaiting his
approach--a pose so eloquent of the sense of fatality strong in her as
to strike him with apprehension, unused though he was to the appraisal
of inner values. He read, darkly, something of this mystery in her eyes
as they were slowly raised to his, he felt afraid; he was swept again by
those unwonted emotions of pity and tenderness--but when she turned
away her head and he saw the bright spot of colour growing in her cheek,
spreading to her temple, suffusing her throat, when he touched the
soft contour of her arm, his passion conquered.... Still he was acutely
conscious of a resistance within her--not as before, physically directed
against him, but repudiating her own desire. She became limp in his
arms, though making no attempt to escape, and he knew that the essential
self of her he craved still evaded and defied him. And he clung to her
the more desperately--as though by crushing her peradventure he might
capture it.
“You're hurting me,” she said at last, and he let her go, standing
by helplessly while she went through the movements of readjustment
instinctive to women. Even in these he read the existence of the
reservation he was loth to acknowledge.
“Don't you love me?” he said.
“I don't know.”
“You do!” he said. “You--you proved it--I know it.”
She went a little away from him, picking up the paper cutter, but it lay
idle in her hand.
“For God's sake, tell me what's the matter!” he exclaimed. “I can't
stand this. Janet, aren't you happy?”
She shook her head.
“Why not? I love you. I--I've never been so happy in my life as I was
this morning. Why aren't you happy--when we love each other?”
“Because I'm not.”
“Why not? There's nothing I wouldn't do to make you happy--you know
that. Tell me!”
“You wouldn't understand. I couldn't make you understand.”
“Is it something I've done?”
“You don't love me,” she said. “You only want me. I'm not made that way,
I'm not generous enough, I guess. I've got to have work to do.”
“Work to do! But you'll share my work--it's nothing without you.”
She shook her head. “I knew you couldn't understand. You don't realize
how impossible it is. I don't blame you--I suppose a man can't.”
She was not upbraiding him, she spoke quietly, in a tone almost
lifeless, yet the emotional effect of it was tremendous.
“But,” he began, and stopped, and was swept on again by an impulse
that drowned all caution, all reason. “But you can help me--when we are
married.”
“Married!” she repeated. “You want to marry me?”
“Yes, yes--I need you.” He took her hands, he felt them tremble in his,
her breath came quickly, but her gaze was so intent as seemingly to
penetrate to the depths of him. And despite his man's amazement at her
hesitation now that he had offered her his all, he was moved, disturbed,
ashamed as he had never been in his life. At length, when he could stand
no longer the suspense of this inquisition, he stammered out: “I want
you to be my wife.”
“You've wanted to marry me all along?” she asked.
“I didn't think, Janet. I was mad about you. I didn't know you.”
“Do you know me now?”
“That's just it,” he cried, with a flash of clairvoyance, “I never will
know you--it's what makes you different from any woman I've ever seen.
You'll marry me?”
“I'm afraid,” she said. “Oh, I've thought over it, and you haven't. A
woman has to think, a man doesn't, so much. And now you're willing to
marry me, if you can't get me any other way.” Her hand touched his coat,
checking his protest. “It isn't that I want marriage--what you can give
me--I'm not like that, I've told you so before. But I couldn't live as
your--mistress.”
The word on her lips shocked him a little--but her courage and candour
thrilled him.
“If I stayed here, it would be found out. I wouldn't let you keep me.
I'd have to have work, you see, or I'd lose my self-respect--it's all
I've got--I'd kill myself.” She spoke as calmly as though she were
reviewing the situation objectively. “And then, I've thought that
you might come to believe you really wanted to marry me--you wouldn't
realize what you were doing, or what might happen if we were married.
I've tried to tell you that, too, only you didn't seem to understand
what I was saying. My father's only a gatekeeper, we're poor--poorer
than some of the operatives in the mill, and the people you know here in
Hampton wouldn't understand. Perhaps you think you wouldn't care, but--”
she spoke with more effort, “there are your children. When I've thought
of them, it all seems impossible. I'd make you unhappy--I couldn't bear
it, I wouldn't stay with you. You see, I ought to have gone away long
ago.”
Believing, as he did, that marriage was the goal of all women, even of
the best, the immediate capitulation he had expected would have made
matters far less difficult. But these scruples of hers, so startlingly
his own, her disquieting insight into his entire mental process had a
momentary checking effect, summoned up the vague presage of a future
that might become extremely troublesome and complicated. His very
reluctance to discuss with her the problem she had raised warned him
that he had been swept into deep waters. On the other hand, her splendid
resistance appealed to him, enhanced her value. And accustomed as he had
been to a lifelong self-gratification, the thought of being balked in
this supreme desire was not to be borne. Such were the shades of his
feeling as he listened to her.
“That's nonsense!” he exclaimed, when she had finished. “You're a
lady--I know all about your family, I remember hearing about it when
your father came here--it's as good as any in New England. What do you
suppose I care, Janet? We love each other--I've got to have you. We'll
be married in the spring, when the rush is over.”
He drew her to him once more, and suddenly, in the ardour of that
embrace, he felt her tenseness suddenly relax--as though, against her
will--and her passion, as she gave her lips, vied with his own. Her
lithe body trembled convulsively, her cheeks were wet as she clung to
him and hid her face in his shoulder. His sensations in the presence of
this thing he had summoned up in her were incomprehensible, surpassing
any he had ever known. It was no longer a woman he held in his arms,
the woman he craved, but something greater, more fearful, the mystery of
sorrow and suffering, of creation and life--of the universe itself.
“Janet--aren't you happy?” he said again.
She released herself and smiled at him wistfully through her tears.
“I don't know. What I feel doesn't seem like happiness. I can't believe
in it, somehow.”
“You must believe in it,” he said.
“I can't,--perhaps I may, later. You'd better go now,” she begged.
“You'll miss your train.”
He glanced at the office clock. “Confound it, I have to. Listen! I'll be
back this evening, and I'll get that little car of mine--”
“No, not to-night--I don't want to go--to-night.”
“Why not?”
“Not to-night,” she repeated.
“Well then, to-morrow. To-morrow's Sunday. Do you know where the Boat
Club is on the River Boulevard? I'll be there, to-morrow morning at ten.
I'd come for you, to your house,” he added quickly, “but we don't want
any one to know, yet--do we?”
She shook her head.
“We must keep it secret for a while,” he said. “Wear your new dress--the
blue one. Good-bye--sweetheart.”
He kissed her again and hurried out of the office.... Boarding the train
just as it was about to start, he settled himself in the back seat of
the smoker, lit a cigar, inhaling deep breaths of the smoke and scarcely
noticing an acquaintance who greeted him from the aisle. Well, he had
done it! He was amazed. He had not intended to propose marriage, and
when he tried to review the circumstances that had led to this he became
confused. But when he asked himself whether indeed he were willing to
pay such a price, to face the revolution marriage--and this marriage in
particular--would mean in his life, the tumult in his blood beat down
his incipient anxieties. Besides, he possessed the kind of mind able to
throw off the consideration of possible consequences, and by the time
the train had slowed down in the darkness of the North Station in Boston
all traces of worry had disappeared. The future would take care of
itself.
For the Bumpus family, supper that evening was an unusually harmonious
meal. Hannah's satisfaction over the new stove had by no means subsided,
and Edward ventured, without reproof, to praise the restored quality
of the pie crust. And in contrast to her usual moroseness and
self-absorption, even Lise was gay--largely because her pet aversion,
the dignified and allegedly amorous Mr. Waiters, floor-walker at the
Bagatelle, had fallen down the length of the narrow stairway leading
from the cashier's cage. She became almost hysterical with glee as she
pictured him lying prone beneath the counter dedicated to lingerie,
draped with various garments from the pile that toppled over on him.
“Ruby Nash picked a brassiere off his whiskers!” Lise shrieked. “She
gave the pile a shove when he landed. He's got her number all right. But
say, it was worth the price of admission to see that old mutt when he
got up, he looked like Santa Claus. All the girls in the floor were
there we nearly split trying to keep from giving him the ha-ha. And Ruby
says, sympathetic, as she brushed him off, 'I hope you ain't hurt, Mr.
Waiters.' He was sore! He went around all afternoon with a bunch on his
coco as big as a potato.” So vivid was Lise's account of this affair
which apparently she regarded as compensation for many days of
drudgery-that even Hannah laughed, though deploring a choice of language
symbolic of a world she feared and detested.
“If I talked like you,” said Lise, “they wouldn't understand me.”
Janet, too, was momentarily amused, drawn out of that reverie in which
she had dwelt all day, ever since Ditmar had left for Boston. Now she
began to wonder what would happen if she were suddenly to announce “I'm
going to marry Mr. Ditmar.” After the first shock of amazement, she
could imagine her father's complete and complacent acceptance of the
news as a vindication of an inherent quality in the Bumpus blood. He
would begin to talk about the family. For, despite what might have been
deemed a somewhat disillusionizing experience, in the depths of his
being he still believed in the Providence who had presided over the
perilous voyage of the Mayflower and the birth of Peregrine White,
whose omniscient mind was peculiarly concerned with the family trees of
Puritans. And what could be a more striking proof of the existence of
this Providence, or a more fitting acknowledgment on his part of the
Bumpus virtues, than that Janet should become the wife of the agent of
the Chippering Mills? Janet smiled. She was amused, too, by the thought
that Lise's envy would be modified by the prospect of a heightened
social status; since Lise, it will be remembered, had her Providence
likewise. Hannah's god was not a Providence, but one deeply skilled in
persecution, in ingenious methods of torture; one who would not hesitate
to dangle baubles before the eyes of his children--only to snatch them
away again. Hannah's pessimism would persist as far as the altar, and
beyond!
On the whole, such was Janet's notion of the Deity, though deep within
her there may have existed a hope that he might be outwitted; that, by
dint of energy and brains, the fair things of life might be obtained
despite a malicious opposition. And she loved Ditmar. This must be love
she felt, this impatience to see him again, this desire to be with him,
this agitation possessing her so utterly that all day long she had dwelt
in an unwonted state like a somnambulism: it must be love, though not
resembling in the least the generally accepted, virginal ideal. She
saw him as he was, crude, powerful, relentless in his desire; his very
faults appealed. His passion had overcome his prudence, he had not
intended to propose, but any shame she felt on this score was put to
flight by a fierce exultation over the fact that she had brought him to
her feet, that he wanted her enough to marry her. It was wonderful to
be wanted like that! But she could not achieve the mental picture of
herself as Ditmar's wife--especially when, later in the evening, she
walked up Warren Street and stood gazing at his house from the opposite
pavement. She simply could not imagine herself living in that house
as its mistress. Notwithstanding the testimony of the movies, such a
Cinderella-like transition was not within the realm of probable facts;
things just didn't happen that way.
She recalled the awed exclamation of Eda when they had walked together
along Warren Street on that evening in summer: “How would you like to
live there!”--and hot with sudden embarrassment and resentment she had
dragged her friend onward, to the corner. In spite of its size, of the
spaciousness of existence it suggested, the house had not appealed
to her then. Janet did not herself realize or estimate the innate if
undeveloped sense of form she possessed, the artist-instinct that made
her breathless on first beholding Silliston Common. And then the vision
of Silliston had still been bright; but now the light of a slender moon
was as a gossamer silver veil through which she beheld the house, as in
a stage setting, softening and obscuring its lines, lending it qualities
of dignity and glamour that made it seem remote, unreal, unattainable.
And she felt a sudden, overwhelming longing, as though her breast would
burst....
Through the drawn blinds the lights in the second storey gleamed yellow.
A dim lamp burned in the deep vestibule, as in a sanctuary. And then, as
though some supernaturally penetrating ray had pierced a square hole in
the lower walls, a glimpse of the interior was revealed to her, of
the living room at the north end of the house. Two figures chased one
another around the centre table--Ditmar's children! Was Ditmar there?
Impelled irresistibly by a curiosity overcoming repugnance and fear,
she went forward slowly across the street, gained the farther pavement,
stepped over the concrete coping, and stood, shivering violently, on
the lawn, feeling like an interloper and a thief, yet held by morbid
fascination. The children continued to romp. The boy was strong and
swift, the girl stout and ungainly in her movements, not mistress of her
body; he caught her and twisted her arm, roughly--Janet could hear her
cries through the window-=when an elderly woman entered, seized him,
struggling with him. He put out his tongue at her, but presently
released his sister, who stood rubbing her arm, her lips moving in
evident recrimination and complaint. The faces of the two were plain
now; the boy resembled Ditmar, but the features of the girl, heavy and
stamped with self-indulgence, were evidently reminiscent of the woman
who had been his wife. Then the shade was pulled down, abruptly; and
Janet, overcome by a sense of horror at her position, took to flight....
When, after covering the space of a block she slowed down and tried to
imagine herself as established in that house, the stepmother of those
children, she found it impossible. Despite the fact that her attention
had been focussed so strongly on them, the fringe of her vision had
included their surroundings, the costly furniture, the piano against the
farther wall, the music rack. Evidently the girl was learning to play.
She felt a renewed, intenser bitterness against her own lot: she was
aware of something within her better and finer than the girl, than the
woman who had been her mother had possessed--that in her, Janet,
had lacked the advantages of development. Could it--could it ever be
developed now? Had this love which had come to her brought her any
nearer to the unknown realm of light she craved?...