There have been pretenses since that time, on my side. They have been few, and I think they were justified. I hope so. That baby business, for instance.
I am perfectly certain that there is no man of twenty-five or so in the world who is really sure one way or the other as to whether he wants to be the father of a family, if he is not already. I know that when I married I had no ideas on the subject, except that a baby meant expense and trouble.
Two years of life with Constance altered that a little. I saw Constance with other people’s children. There was one occasion when I entered the room a little unexpectedly, and found Constance with a visitor’s baby in her arms. He was cuddled up close to her, with his head resting in the little hollow between her breast and her shoulder, and she was bowed over him, swaying just a little and crooning—some senseless little song or other.
Even while I realized the absurdity of it, I was conscious of a ridiculous pang—that little hollow was mine, and Constance had held my head there with the same gentle warmth, and yet she made this small trespasser free of my privileges without a thought. That was the kind of thing that flashed through my mind for a second or two as I stood by the door. But then Constance looked up, and I saw the expression on her face. “Dear,” she said to me, “come and look.”
Of course I looked, but looking did nothing to help me appreciate the reason for the wistful happiness on Constance’s face. No three-months-old baby is a pretty sight—naturally only disinterested people can judge this—and when I saw that child’s button nose and senseless expression and lack of forehead and chin I could only marvel silently to myself. That Constance, with her keen, aching appreciation of the beautiful, should lose her head over an object as unbeautiful as this was little short of bewildering. But for all that it broke upon me, in a flash of inspiration, that to Constance our present Eden was objectless and rather silly unless it should be turned upside down and inside out by the introduction of a third and very junior partner. But by the time that revelation had come to me Constance had forgotten me entirely, and was once more bent over that ugly morsel who had not the slightest idea of his good fortune.
We talked it over later. It was not for the first time, of course, but previously we had not gone into the subject very deeply because, blind blunderer that I was, I was not very interested, and it had seemed to me that the question was ruled out and unworthy of debate because of the expense and inconvenience; that was as far as I had considered it. This time was rather different.
The matter was soon settled. I think that was the last time that I thought of Constance as a child. Almost always before she had seemed so to me, and that evening, as she sat on my lap, and buried her face in my shoulder as I broached the subject, she seemed more a child than ever. I caught myself marveling to myself, as I had often marveled before, how it came about that this small infant—I could hardly think of her as more than twelve—could run a man’s household, and control Mrs. Rundle, and could actually be contemplating maternity. The fact that all my happiness lay in her hands I had always accepted as unaccountable, though pleasant.
As the conversation progressed Constance began to peep out from my shoulder. Her expression was beyond even my anxious analysis. The childlike look faded perceptibly before my very eyes. There was a hint of mischief, and of amusement, but these were counterbalanced by that look of wistful, happy yearning which had made me catch my breath earlier in the day. By the time the conversation had grown really animated the child had disappeared altogether, and in her place there was a new Constance, excitedly sitting upright on my lap entering into details with a fluency and a bald simplicity far beyond any mere childless man’s capacity. Constance made me feel positively shy—until she noticed it. And then her expression changed again, to one I had seen before, and as she leaned toward me I gathered her into my arms with all my love for her flooding through my veins and pulsing in my fingertips.
I was not told about it at all in the manner of the books. Constance did not volunteer the information. It did not come to me as unexpected news, altering my whole outlook. I rather think that one morning I said to Constance:
“Well?” And she said:
“Yes, I think so, dear.”
Constance kissed me very tenderly and maternally, and we were more than usually silent over breakfast. Then I hurried off to the office.
The news had a very unexpected and depressing effect on me. I had hoped that when it was certain and inevitable I would experience a miraculous change of heart, and would look forward to the event as eagerly as Constance did. But it was not so at all.
During the journey to town I grew more and more lugubrious, and the first hour in the office sufficed to reduce me to a condition of complete, dull consternation. The office grew unbearably oppressive, and in the end when I slipped out for my morning coffee only a walk in St. James’s Park could put matters right. So into the park I went—to find matters made worse. It was a Council School holiday, and the park was full of ragged parties of children from the mewses, and from the slums on the other side of the river. Children everywhere, flaunting their dirty noses and their dingy rags, spoiling for every one else the bright sunshine and the glitter of the lake. And here and there were leisured people walking lazily along the paths—neat pink-faced men silk hatted and gloved and spatted, and splendid women, wonderfully dressed, strolling placidly along with the insolent carelessness of their kind. The world was decidedly out of joint.
I sat down in the corner freest from children that I could find, and proceeded to brood over the business until I was genuinely and thoroughly miserable. It seemed as if all my little ambitions were certain of disappointment. I had been looking forward to the time when the growing success of my books would set me free from the shackles of the office, when Constance and I would have the world before us and twenty-four hours every day to see it in; when we would be able to drift round Italy, and make that motor-boat tour of the French rivers and canals to which we had been looking forward ever since I had made the suggestion before we were married. This change in affairs would alter all that. I could see in my mind’s eye the inroads into my jealously-guarded deposit account that doctor’s fees and nurses’ fees and nursing home charges would make. That deposit account was to me much more than money (money means very little to me); it signified besides the slow approach of freedom and independence. And there would be no drifting round Italy with a baby to look after—and certainly there would be no motor-boat life. We would be tied down to a domestic existence. A sudden torrent of the stale old jokes about the distracted father walking the bedroom at midnight with a wailing child in his arms surged up in my mind and intensified the generally jaundiced appearance of the landscapes.
I wanted to be rich and free. I do not think that I particularly envied the morning-coated individuals walking past me, but I know that I was jealous for Constance’s sake of the opulent women at their sides. I wanted her to be able to stroll through the park in the same fashion, wearing, as she would do so well, the equivalent of all my present deposit account. I wanted—I wanted everything which seemed so impossible to obtain that morning.
There were other things besides. I knew for the first time what it meant to be jealous. I was jealous of this child who was to absorb so much of Constance’s attention and love. From being the first person in her regard I would drop into second place—and from what I know of Constance, second place is nowhere as regards her affections. There was even a hateful, distressing feeling that perhaps Constance had never loved me as much as I had believed and hoped. Perhaps she had only looked upon me from the first as a convenient baby-provider. I even went so far as to let my thoughts stray back to Dewey, about whom I had not thought for years. The hateful suspicion that it was Dewey who held Constance’s love, and that I was only a substitute, an inadequate one, suddenly matured in my mind without any foundation at all. I could have kicked myself for thinking such a thing, and yet I went on thinking it. Baby John, still eight months from
being born, was responsible already for a great deal.
The scene changed quite suddenly. Perhaps it was the sunshine and the brightness of the grass and the lake, but I do not think so. My theory is that it was brought about by my one real gift—the ability to visualize things and to make them real to my mind’s eye. It is a habit of mine to which much is due, my books, my fits of depression, and my occasional fits of exhilaration.
A small child came and asked me the time—the right time, as all urchins do. She stood a little distance away from me and grinned at me engagingly, so engagingly that I forgot the grubbiness of her nose and the hideous gray underclothes dangling below her frock. That started me off.
As she stood there smiling at me with her eyes wrinkled in the sunlight, a picture flashed before me of the same child naked, standing unashamed and still smiling, with the green grass round her and the trees in the background, and the sun flashing from the tiny waves in the kale. Almost mechanically I glanced at my watch and told her what she wanted to know, and she scampered away, while my eyes followed her across the park I pictured small pink limbs twinkling over the lawn, the slight, graceful lines of hip and shoulder and the airy freedom of all her movements.
The vision extended itself with mesmeric rapidity. Now all the park was alive with little naked children. The piercing pipe of their voices, which had maddened me five minutes before, now made fairy music, faint and far away. The endless running to and fro, whose aimlessness had called forth from me a growl of disgust, was now the weavings of a dainty little ballet, wherein the artless gestures and grace of attitude set off the innocent nakedness of the dancers. Squalor had vanished with the rags that suggested it. And the sun shone more brightly than ever, lighting up the lake until it glittered like a sea of diamonds, and the trees swayed ever so little in the wind, their murmur making a drowsy accompaniment to the piping treble of the children’s cries. It was all sheer piercing beauty.
Along the paths came others—envied adults. My enchanted eyes stripped them, too, of the clothes that shielded them from a censorious world. This smug, self-satisfied individual, strutting perkily along, with swaying, swag belly, breathing stertorously on his way to an over-ample lunch—what the devil was there about him to be envied? And the woman with the yapping Pomeranian. She too, seemed to find difficulty in breathing—which was hardly surprising to me now, for I could see that the tortured over-abundant flesh was bound and corseted almost from neck to knee. I suppose the corsets satisfied her; they were obviously designed for the purpose, seeing that they and their attendant brassiere pushed the fat away from the front, where she could see it (and where, at any rate, there was some excuse for its existence) to the back where she could not. She puffed by me, and I could see the garters sunk in the flabby thighs, and the crippled toes hobbling painfully on the high-heeled shoes, and a trickle of sweat between the shoulder-blades beneath the silk vest.
The lean woman who followed immediately after her would be too painful to describe even to this limited extent. Then I thought of Constance and laughed joyously—and aloud. The lean woman turned involuntarily and looked at me, and then hurried on with averted glance from this imbecile bad character who sat laughing at respectable women in the park; and I laughed again.
The rest of that day passed in laughter, happy, joyful laughter, which carried me through the drudgery of the office and through the crowds on the way back, and along the streets and up the stairs home. In my eagerness I could hardly put the key into the keyhole, and as Constance met me in the hall I caught her to me in flooding happiness. Everything was right with the world.
Chapter IV
The last word I wrote yesterday was “happiness.” I suppose it is inevitable that during this period of doubt and unhappiness I should turn back to the days when there was no doubt and also no unhappiness.
Yet it is not Constance that I doubt. I am certain of that, far more certain than I am of anything else in this world. This is just a little spurt of contrariness which I suppose is inevitable. Now that it has come, I am surprised that it has not come sooner. Looking at myself dispassionately, I can not help coming to the conclusion that I must be a most exasperating man to live with in close contact for any long period.
And we are good friends again, too. By “good friends” I mean good friends, neither more nor less. It has been forced home on me lately how great is the debt that this year owes ten years ago for the invention of the expression “old thing.” It is familiar and friendly and non-committal. A woman can call her husband “old thing” and show him that she is still fond of him and yet she would rather—well, that she would rather he spent his nights in his study. And the husband can call his wife “old thing” and by those two words can imply—“Right-ho, dear. I’ve got a fairly good idea of what you are feeling like, and I think I understand. Don’t let it worry you—but—but—I am just a little bit anxious.”
Constance and I call each other “old thing” nowadays. “Dear” finds no place in our conversation, except very occasionally when one slips in by accident. When that happens there is a queer little guilty pause in the conversation. It was one of those which checked us this evening just when we were drawing near a sane and calm discussion of our trouble. We never had another opportunity of reopening the matter, which is rather a pity. I can stand this waiting myself, but I am terrified in case Constance should find it a strain. But now that Constance has gone to bed there is nothing I can do in the matter today. I can only sit here in my study and dream. Dreaming and thinking and scribbling—and remembering
I have never been able to understand why Constance would persist in calling him—or her—“Baby John.” John as a Christian name for babies has reached the over-ripeness of its popularity. It was vieux feu. About it there clung (to me, at least) a flavor of the distinctly ordinary, even of vulgarity. I may have been prejudiced by the fact that one of the wretched weekly papers for women was running a series of articles on much the same subject, and made a point of calling the expected child under discussion either “Baby John” or “the little stranger.” That Constance was not deterred by such an example showed either incredible bad taste (and Constance has very good taste as a rule) or else a strength of mind which positively alarmed me. To this day I do not know which it was, and in time it happened that I grew reconciled to the name. I came to associate it with a softness in Constance’s eyes and a little distant half-smile round her lips, and with long pleasant evenings by the fire while Constance stitched and knitted, and I sat and dreamed—or read those “Baby John” articles in a desperate endeavor to remedy my ignorance of matters maternal. Yet I think I would have liked him to have the same name as myself.
Constance was proud, and I believe she was happy. Just once or twice I found myself troubled by doubts as to whether I was really doing the world a service by summoning into it a being who was bound to inherit some of my characteristics, and once or twice I wondered whether, after all, Baby John would have much reason to be grateful for my casual condemnation of him to a lifetime in this vale of tears, but Constance knew no such scruples. The only time I had ventured to hint at them to her she looked at me wide-eyed and wondering.
“Do you think he won’t be grateful, then, dear?” she asked.
“I didn’t say that. I only said that perhaps he might not be.”
“But why shouldn’t he be?”
“Well, some folk aren’t. You often hear of people wishing they had never been born.”
“But they don’t mean it,” said Constance. “And John won’t ever think he means it, either.”
In the face of a statement made with such calm certitude I could argue no longer. I could only sit marveling at Constance’s immovable self-confidence. The matter seemed to be put beyond the pale of discussion—and there was a danger hint in Constance’s eyes which warned me that there was peril of hurting her. The debate seemed closed.
At least a quarter of an hour later Constance suddenly put aside her sewing.
Naturally I did so. With the heralding of Baby John’s approach Constance had adopted a new manner toward me. She treated me as if I were a boy of fourteen. Quite a nice boy of fourteen, but only fourteen when all was said and done. The reason of this insufferable superiority was obvious. I had not been distinguished by the Powers that Be with the immeasurable privilege of maternity.
Then all of a sudden Constance’s expression changed again. I had once more offered to me the sight of the small child I had married, instead of the wise and vastly experienced woman into whom that child had developed.
“You’ve been thinking,” said Constance.
Naturally I had, but this was no time to make comments on the obviousness of the remark.
“What’s the matter, dear?” went on Constance. “You’re worrying me. Are—are you beginning to wish you had never been born?”
That brought me to attention on the spot; I think Constance’s lips were trembling, just a little.
“Of course I’m not,” I said.
“But, dear,” said Constance, “I wish—I wish you’d tell me what it is you really think about—baby.”
I was simply struck dumb by this sudden offensive.
“You don’t ever say,” said Constance, reaching blindly forward to me with the little white hands which I worship. “I know—I know you didn’t want him when I told you first that he was coming. You kissed me, and you said that you were glad, but you weren’t really. You know you weren’t.”
I was still dumb with surprise. I had been confident that Constance had never guessed that.
Love Lies Dreaming Page 3