TWO SIDES TO THE QUESTION
Lydia's unmarried life had given her but few abstract ideas for the
regulation of conduct, and fewer still ideals of self-discipline, but
chief among the small assortment that she took away from her mother's
house had been the high morality of keeping one's husband unworried by
one's domestic difficulties. "Domestic difficulties" meant, apparently,
anything disagreeable that happened to one. Not only her mother, but all
the matrons of her acquaintance had concentrated on the extreme
desirability of this wifely virtue. "It pays! It pays!" Mrs. Emery had
often thus chanted the praises of this quality in her daughter's
presence. "I've noticed ever so many times that men who have to worry
about domestic machinery and their children don't get on so well. Their
minds are distracted. Their thoughts _can't_ be, in the nature of
things, all on their business." She was wont to go on, to whatever
mother she was addressing, "We know, my dear Mrs. Blank, don't we, how
perfectly distracting the problems are in bringing up children--to say
nothing of servants. How much energy would men have for their own
affairs if they had to struggle as we do, I'd like to know! Besides, if
one person's got to be bothered with such things, she might as well do
it all and be done with it. It's easier, besides, to have only one head.
Men that interfere about things in the house are an abomination. You
can't keep from quarreling with them--angels couldn't."
She had once voiced this universally recognized maxim before Dr. Melton,
who had cut in briskly with a warm seconding of her theory. "Yes,
indeed; in the course of my practice I have often thought, as you do,
that it would be easier all around if husbands didn't board with their
wives at all."
Mrs. Emery had stared almost as blankly as Mrs. Sandworth herself might
have done. "I never said such a crazy thing," she protested.
"Didn't you? Perhaps I don't catch your idea then. It seemed to be that
every point of contact was sure to be an occasion for friction between
husband and wife, and so, of course, the fewer they were--"
"Oh, bother take you, Marius Melton!" Mrs. Emery had quite lost patience
with him. "I was just saying something that's so old, and has been said
so often, that it's a bromide, actually. And that is that it's a poor
wife who greets her tired husband in the evening with a long string of
tales about how the children have been naughty and the cook--"
"Oh, yes, yes; now I see. Of course. The happiest ideal of American
life, a peaceful exterior presented to the husband at all costs, and the
real state of things kept from him because it might interfere with his
capacity to pull off a big deal the next day."
Mrs. Emery had boggled suspiciously at this version of her statement,
but finding, on the whole, that it represented fairly enough her idea,
had given a qualified assent in the shape of silence and a turning of
the subject.
Lydia had not happened to hear that conversation, but she heard
innumerable ones like it without Dr. Melton's footnotes. On her wedding
day, therefore, she conceived it an essential feature of her duty toward
Paul to keep entirely to herself all of the dismaying difficulties of
housekeeping and keeping up a social position in America. She knew, as a
matter of course, that they would be dismaying. The talk of all her
married friends was full of the tragedies of domestic life. It had
occurred to her once or twice that it was an odd, almost a pathetic,
convention that they tried to maintain about their social existence--a
picture of their lives as running smoothly with self-adjusting machinery
of long-established servants and old social traditions; when their every
word tragically proclaimed the exhausting and never-ending personal
effort that was required to give even the most temporary appearance of
that kind. "We all know what a fearful time everybody has trying to give
course dinners--why need we pretend we don't?" she had thought on
several painful occasions; but this, like many of her fancies, was a
fleeting one. There had been as little time since her wedding day as
before it for leisurely speculation. The business of being _the_ bride
of a season had been quite as exciting and absorbing as being _the_
debutante.
The first of February, six months after her marriage, found her as thin
and restlessly active as she had been on that date a year before. It was
at that time that she had the first intimation of a great change in her
life, and since the one or two obscure and futile revolts of her
girlhood, nothing had moved her to more rebellious unresignation than
the fact that her life left her no time to take in the significance of
what was coming to her.
"Oh, my dear! Isn't it too good!" said her mother, clasping her for a
moment as they stood, after removing their wraps, in the dressing-room
of a common acquaintance. "Aren't you the lucky, lucky thing!"
"I don't know. I don't know a thing about it," Lydia returned
unexpectedly, though her face had turned a deep rose, and she had smiled
tremulously. "Ever since Dr. Melton told me it was probably so, I've
been trying to get a moment's time to think it over, but you--"
"It's something to _feel_, not to think about!" cried her mother. "You
don't need time to feel."
"But I'd like to think about everything!" cried Lydia, as they moved
down the stairs. "I get things wrong just feeling about them. But I'm
not quick to think, and I never have any time--they're always so many
other things to do and to think about--the dinner, getting Paul off in
time in the morning, how badly the washwoman does up the table linen--"
"Oh, Lydia! Why will you be so contrary? Everybody says _laundress_
now!"
"--And however Paul and I can pay back all the social debts we've
incurred this winter. Everybody's invited us. It makes me wild to think
of how we owe everybody."
"Oh, you can give two or three big receptions this spring and clear
millions off the list. And then a dinner party or two for the more
exclusives. You won't need to be out of things till June--with the
fashion for loose-fitting evening gowns; you're so slender. And you'll
be out again long before Christmas. It's very fortunate having it come
at this time of year."
Lydia looked rather dazed at this brisk and matter-of-fact disposing of
the matter, and seemed about to make a comment, but the bell rang for
card-playing to begin and Mrs. Emery hurried to her table.
Lydia had meant to ask her mother's sympathy about another matter that
for the time was occupying her own thoughts, but there was no other
opportunity for further speech between them during the card party--Mrs.
Emery devoting herself with her usual competent energy to playing a good
game. She played much better bridge than did either of her daughters.
She liked cards, liked to excel and always found easy to accomplish what
seemed to her worth doing. Marietta also felt that to avoid being
"queer" and "different" one had to play a good hand, but, as she herself
confessed, it made her "sick" to give up to it the necessary time and
thought. As for Lydia, she got rid of her cards as fast as possible, as
if with the deluded hope that when they were all played, she might find
time for something else. On the afternoon in question her game was more
unscientific than usual. Criticism was deterred from articulate
expression by the common feeling in regard to her, assiduously fostered
by Flora Burgess' continuous references to her in _Society Notes_ as
the coming social ruler of Endbury's smart set. There was as yet, to be
sure, no visible indication whatever of such a capacity on Lydia's part,
but the printed word--particularly Miss Burgess' printed word--was not
to be doubted. Madeleine Hollister, however (now soon to be Madeleine
Lowdor), was no respecter of personages, past or future. At the
appearance of an especially unexpected and disappointing card from her
sister-in-law's hand, she pounced upon her with: "Lydia, what _are_ you
thinking about?"
"My washwoman's grandson," burst out Lydia, laying down her cards with a
careless negligence, so that everyone could see the contents of her
hand. "Oh, Madeleine! I'm so worried about her, and I wish you'd--"
She got no further. Madeleine's shriek of good-natured laughter cut her
short like a blow in the face. The other ladies were laughing, too.
"Oh, Lydia! You are the most original, unexpected piece in the world!"
cried her sister-in-law. "You'll be the death of me!" She appealed to
the other players at their table: "Did you ever hear anything come out
funnier?"
To the players at the next tables, who were looking with vague,
reflected smiles at this burst of merriment, she called: "Oh, it's too
killing! Lydia Hollister just played a trump on a trick her partner had
already taken, and when I asked what in the world she was thinking
about--meaning, of course--"
Lydia sat silent, looking at her useless cards during the rest of the
narration of her comic speech. She was reflecting rather sadly that she
had been very foolish to think, even in a thoughtless impulse, of
telling Madeleine the story she had so impetuously begun. After a time
it came to her, as a commentary of the little incident, that neither
could she get anything from Marietta in the matter. At the end of the
party, she and her mother walked together to the street-cars, but she
still said nothing of what was in her mind. She would not admit to
herself that her mother would receive it as she felt sure Marietta and
Madeleine would, but--she dared not risk putting her to the test. It was
a period in Lydia's life when she was constantly in fear of tests
applied to the people she loved and longed to admire.
During the half-hour's noisy journey out to Bellevue--the unhackneyed
name that had been selected for the new and fashionable suburb she
inhabited--she had eliminated from this crisis in her mind, one by one,
all the people in her circle. Dr. Melton was out of town. Otherwise she
would have gone to him at once. Mrs. Sandworth without her brother was a
cipher with no figure before it. Her father?--she realized suddenly that
it was the first time she had ever thought of going to her father with a
perplexity. No; she knew too little about his view of things. She had
never talked with him of anything but the happenings of the day. Flora
Burgess--devoted Flora? Lydia smiled ruefully as she thought of the
attitude Flora Burgess would be sure to take.
It finally came to the point where there was no one left but Paul; and
Paul ought not to be worried with domestic questions lest his capacity
for business be impaired. She had a deep inculcated sense of the
necessity and duty of "doing her share," as the phrase had gone in the
various exhortations addressed to her before her marriage. The next few
years would be critical ones in Paul's career, and the road must be
straight and clear before his feet--the road that led to Success. No one
had voiced a doubt that this road was not coincident with all other
desirable ones; no one had suggested that the same years would be
critical in other directions and would be certain to be terribly and
irrevocably determinative of his future relation to his wife.
Lydia, ardently and naively anxious to find something "worth doing,"
therefore had settled on this one definite duty. She had wrestled in a
determined silence with the many incompetent and degenerate negresses,
with the few impertinent Americans, with the drunken Irish and insolent
Swedes, who had filed in and out of her kitchen ever since her
marriage. Suburban life was a new thing in Endbury, and "help" could see
no advantages in it. She had strained every nerve to make them appear to
Paul, as well as to the rest of the world, the opposite of what they
were; and to do herself, furtively, when Paul was not there, those of
their tasks they refused or neglected. Every effort was concentrated, as
in her mother's and sister's households, on keeping a maid presentable
to open the door and to wait on the table, rather than to perform the
heavier parts of the daily round. Those Lydia could do herself, or she
could hire an unpresentable older scrubwoman to do them. She often
thought that if she could but employ scrubwomen all the time, the
problem would be half solved. But the achievement of each day was,
according to Endbury standards, to keep or get somebody into the kitchen
who could serve a course dinner, even if the mistress of the house was
obliged to prepare it.
She had never dreamed of feeling herself aggrieved, or even surprised,
by this curious reverse side to her outward brilliant life. All her
married friends went through the same experience. Madeleine, it is true,
announced that she was going to make Lowdor import two Japanese servants
a year, and dismiss them when they began to get American ideas; but
Madeleine was quite openly marrying Lowdor for the sake of this and
similar advantages. Lydia felt that her own problems were only the usual
lot of her kind, and though she was nearly always sick at heart over
them, she did not feel justified in complaining--least of all to Paul.
But this present trouble--this was not just a question of help. For the
last month they had been floating in the most unexpected lull of the
domestic whirlwind. The intelligence office had sent out Ellen--Ellen,
the deft-handed cook, the silent, self-effacing, competent servant of
every housekeeper's dreams. Her good luck seemed incredible. Ellen was
perfection, was middle-aged and settled, never went out in the evenings,
kept her kitchen spotlessly clean, trained the rattle-headed second
girls who came and went, to be good waitresses and made pastry that
moved Paul, usually little preoccupied about his food provided there was
plenty of meat, to lyric raptures. The difference she made in Lydia's
life was inconceivable. It was as though some burdensome law of nature
had been miraculously suspended for her benefit. She gauged her past
discomfort by her present comfort.
And yet--
From the first Lydia had had an uneasy feeling in the presence of her
new servant, a haunting impression when her back was turned to Ellen
that if she could turn quickly enough, she would see her cook with some
sinister aspect quite other than the decent, respectful mask she
presented to her mistress. The second girl of the present was a
fresh-faced, lively young country lass, whom Ellen herself had secured,
and whose rosy child's face had been at first innocence itself; but now
sometimes Lydia overheard them laughing together, a laughter which gave
her the oddest inward revulsion, and when she came into the kitchen
quickly she often found them looking at books which were quickly whisked
out of sight.
And then, a day or so before, old Mrs. O'Hern, her washwoman, had come
directly to her with that revolting revelation of Ellen's influence on
her grandson, little Patsy. At the recollection of the old woman's face
of embittered anguish, Lydia shuddered. Oh, if she could only tell Paul!
He was so loving and caressing to her--perhaps he would not mind being
bothered this once--she did not know what to think of such things--she
did not know what to do, which way to turn. She was startled beyond
measure at having real moral responsibility put on her.
Perhaps Paul could think of something to do.
He was waiting for her when she entered the house, having come in from
an out-of-town trip on an earlier train than he had expected to catch.
He dropped his newspaper and sprang up from his chair to put his arms
about her and gloat over her beauty. "You're getting prettier every day
of your life, Lydia," he told her, ruffling her soft hair, and kissing
her very energetically a great many times. "But pale! I must get some
color into your cheeks, Melton says--how's this for a way?"
He seemed to Lydia very boyish and gay and vital. She caught at him
eagerly--he had been away from home three days--and clung to him. "Oh,
Paul! How much good it does me to have you here, close! You are _so_
much nicer than a room of women playing the same game of cards they
began last September!"
Paul shouted with laughter--his pleasant, hearty mirth. "I'm appreciated
at my full worth," he cried.
"Oh, how I loathe cards!" cried Lydia, taking off her hat.
"It's better than the talk you'd get from most of the people there, I
bet," conjectured Paul, taking up his newspaper again. "Cards are a
blessing _that_ way, compared with conversation."
"Oh, dear, I suppose so!" Lydia stopped a moment in the doorway. "But
doesn't it seem a pity that you never see anybody but people who'd bore
you to death if you didn't stop their mouth with cards?"
"That's the way of the world," remarked Paul comfortably, returning to
the news of the day.
The little friendly chat gave Lydia courage for her plan of asking her
husband's advice about her perplexity, but, mindful of traditional
wisdom, she decided, as she thriftily changed her silk "party dress" for
a house-gown of soft wool, that she would wait until the mollifying
influence of dinner had time to assert itself. She wondered fearfully,
with a quick throb of her heart, how he would receive her confidence.
When she called him to the table she looked searchingly into his strong,
resolute, good-natured face, and then, dropping her eyes, with an
indrawn breath, began her usual fruitless endeavors to learn from him a
little of what had occupied his day--his long, mysterious day, spent in
a world of which he brought back but the scantiest tidings to her.
As usual, to-night he shook his shoulders impatiently at her
questioning. "Oh, Lydia darling, don't talk shop! I'm sick and tired of
it after three days of nothing else. I want to leave all that behind me
when I come home. That's what a home is for!"
Lydia did not openly dissent from this axiom, though she murmured
helplessly: "I feel so awfully shut out. It is what you think about most
of the time, and I do not know enough about it even to imagine--"
Paul leaned across the table to lay an affectionate hand on his wife's
slim fingers. "Count your mercies, my dear. It's all grab, and snap, and
cutting somebody's throat before he has a chance to cut yours. It
wouldn't please you if you did know anything about it--the business
world." He drew a long breath, and went on appreciatively with his
cutlet--Lydia had learned something about meats since the year
before--"You are a very good provider, little girl; do you know it?"
"Oh, I love to," said Lydia. She added reflectively: "Wouldn't it be
nice if things were so I could do the cooking myself and not have to
bother with these horrible creatures that are all you can get usually?"
Paul laughed at the fancy. "That's a high ambition for my wife, I must
say!"
"We'd have better things to eat even than Ellen gives us," said Lydia
pensively. "If I had a little more time to put on it, I could do
wonders, I'm sure of it."
"I don't doubt that," said her husband gallantly; "but did you ever know
anybody who _was_ her own cook?"
"Well, not except in between times, when they couldn't get anybody
else," confessed Lydia. "But lots of people I know who do go through the
motions of keeping one would be better off without one. They can't
afford it, and--Oh, I wish we were poorer!"
Paul was highly amused by this flight of fancy. "But we're as poor as
poverty already," he reminded her.
"We're poor for buying hundred-dollar broadcloth tailor-made suits for
me, and cut glass for the table, but we'd have plenty if I could wear
ready-made serge at--"
Paul laughed outright. "Haven't you ever noticed, my dear, that the
people who wear ready-made serge are the ones who could really
comfortably afford to wear calico wrappers? It goes right up and down
the scale that way. Everybody is trying to sing a note above what he
can."
"I know it does--but does it _have_ to? Wouldn't it be better if
everybody just--why doesn't somebody begin--"
"It's the law of progress, of upward growth," pronounced Paul.
Lydia was impressed by the pontifical sound of this, though she ventured
faintly: "Well, but does progress always mean broadcloth and cut glass?"
"_We_ have the wherewithal to cultivate our minds!" said Paul, laughing
again. "Weren't the complete works of the American essayists among our
wedding presents!" He referred to an old joke between them, at which
Lydia laughed loyally, and the talk went on lightly until the meal was
over.
As they walked away from the table together Lydia said to herself,
"Now--now--" but Paul began to laugh as he told an incident of
Madeleine's light-hearted, high-handed tyranny over her elderly fiance,
and it seemed impossible for Lydia to bring out her story of mean and
ugly tragedy.
As usual the evening was a lively one. Some acquaintances from the
"younger married set" of Bellevue dropped in for a game of cards,
Madeleine and "old Pete" Lowdor came out to talk over the plans for
their new handsome house at the end of the street and at Paul's
suggestion Lydia hastily got together a chafing-dish supper for the
impromptu party which prolonged itself with much laughter and many
friendly wranglings over trumps and "post-mortems" until after midnight.
Paul was in the highest of gay spirits as he stood with his pretty wife
on the porch, calling good-nights to his guests disappearing down the
starlit driveway. He inhaled the odor of success sweet and strong in his
nostrils.
As they looked back into the house, they saw the faithful Ellen clearing
away the soiled dishes, her large, white, disease-scarred face
impassive over her immaculate and correct maid's dress.
"Isn't she a treasure!" cried the master of the house. "To sit up to
this hour!" He started, "What's that?"
From the shadow of the house a slim lad's figure shambled out into the
driveway. As he passed the porch where Paul stood, one strong arm
protectingly about Lydia, he looked up and the light from the open door
struck full on a white, purposeless, vacant smile. The upward glance
lost for him the uncertain balance of his wavering feet. He reeled,
flung up his arms and pitched with drunken soddenness full length upon
the gravel, picking himself up clumsily with a sound of incoherent, weak
lament. "Why, it's a drunken man--in _our driveway_!" cried Paul, with
proprietary indignation. "Get out of here!" he yelled angrily at the
intruder's retreating back. When he turned again to Lydia he saw that
one of her lightning-swift changes of mood had swept over her. He was
startled at her pale face and burning, horrified eyes, and remembering
her condition with apprehension, picked her up bodily and carried her up
the stairs to their bedroom, soothing her with reassuring caresses.
There, sitting on the edge of their bed, her loosened hair falling about
her white face, holding fast to her husband's hands, Lydia told him at
last; hesitating and stumbling because in her blank ignorance she knew
no words even to hint at what she feared--she told him who Patsy was,
the blue-eyed, fifteen-year-old boy, just over from Ireland, ignorant of
the world as a child of five, easily led, easily shamed, by his fear of
appearing rustic, into any excess--and then she told him what the boy's
grandmother had told her about Ellen. It was a milestone in their
married life, her turning to him more intimately than she would have
done to her mother, her breaking down the walls of her lifelong
maiden's reserve and ignorance. She finished with her face hidden in his
breast. What should she do? What _could_ she do?
Paul took her into the closest embrace, kissed her shut eyes in a
passion of regret that she should have learned the evil in the world, of
relieved belittling of the story, Lydia's portentous beginning of which
had quite startled him, and of indignation at "Mrs. O'Hern's foul
mouth--for you can just be sure, darling Lydia, that it's all nothing
but rowings among the servants. Probably Ellen won't let Mrs. O'Hern
take her usual weekly perquisite of sugar and tea. Servants are always
quarreling and the only way to do is to keep out of their lies about
each other and let them fight it out themselves. You never can have any
idea of who's telling the truth if you butt in and try to straighten it,
and the Lord knows that Ellen's too good a cook and too much needed in
this family until the new member arrives safely, to hurt her feelings
with investigating any of Mrs. O'Hern's yarns. Just you refuse to listen
to servants' gossip. If you'd been a little less of a darling,
inexperienced school-girl, you'd have cut off such talk at the first
words. Just you take my word for it, you dear, you sweetheart, you best
of--" he ran on into ardent endearments, forgetting the story himself,
blinding and dazzling Lydia with the excitement which always swept her
away in those moments when Paul was her passionate, youthful lover.
She tried to revert to the question once or twice later, but now Paul
alternated between shaming her laughingly for her gullibility and making
fun of her "countrified" interest in the affairs of her servants. "But,
Paul, Mrs. O'Hern says that Patsy doesn't _want_ to drink and--and go to
those awful houses--his father died of it--only Ellen makes him, by--"
Paul tried to close the discussion with a little impatience at her
attempt to press the matter. "Every Irish boy drinks more or less, you
little goose. That's nothing! Of course it's too bad to have you _see_ a
drunken man, but it's nothing so tragic. If he didn't drink here, he
would somewhere else. The only thing we have to complain about that I
can see, is having the cook's followers drunk--but Ellen's such a
miracle of competence we must overlook that. As for the rest of Mrs.
O'Hern's dirty stories, they're spite work evidently." As Lydia looked
up at him, her face still anxious and drawn, he ended finally, "Good
gracious, Lydia, don't you suppose I know--that my experience of the
world has taught me more about human nature than you know? You act to me
as though you trusted your washwoman's view of things more than your
husband's. And now what you want to do, anyhow, is to get some rest. You
hop into bed, little rabbit, and go to sleep. Don't wait for me; I've
got a lot of figuring to do."
When he went to bed, a couple of hours later, Lydia was lying quietly
with closed eyes, and he did not disturb her; but afterward he woke out
of a sound sleep and sat up with a sense that something was wrong. He
listened. There was not a sound in the room or in the house. Apparently
Lydia was not wakened by his startled movement. She lay in a profound
immobility.
But something about her very motionlessness struck a chill to his heart.
Women in her condition sometimes had seizures in the night, he had
heard. With a shaking hand, he struck a match and leaned over her. He
gave a loud, shocked exclamation to see that her eyes were open, steady
and fixed, like wide, dark pools. He threw the match away, and took her
in his arms with a fond murmur of endearments. "Why, poor little girl!
Do you lie awake and worry about what's to come?"
Lydia drew a painful breath. "Yes," she said; "I worry a great deal
about what's to come."
He kissed her gently, ardently, gently again. "You mustn't do that,
darling! You're all right! Melton said there wasn't one chance in a
thousand of anything but just the most temporary illness, without any
complications. It won't be so bad--it'll be soon over, and think what it
means to us--dearest--dearest--dearest!"
Lydia lay quiet in his arms. She had been still so long that he thought
her asleep, when she said, in a whisper: "I hope it won't be a girl!"