Genuinely bewildered, she lifted them from the letter she had been reading. “The other man?” They filled with tears. “Oh, such a darling man! My little boy. This is from his Nanny—”
“Your little boy?” He seemed really not to know of whom she was speaking.
“My son Christopher. You haven’t forgotten, I suppose, that I have a child at home, and must sometimes think of him?”
His own eyes darkened with momentary pity. “Oh, you poor lost mother-bird! But we’ll have another child,” he declared with sudden conviction, as if he were saying: “Poor child yourself—you’ve broken your toy, but I’ll buy you another. …”
And then there had been the other day, less painful but more humiliating, when he had to tell her that the London dealer had returned the picture sent on approval, and that there wasn’t money enough left to pay the hotel bill in that horrid place where the woman had been so insolent that they had already decided to leave—the day when they had had to bear her rudeness, and invent things to pacify her, and Jeff had offered to paint a head of her little girl in payment, and the monster had looked at one of his canvases, and said: “Est-ce que Monsieur se moque de moi?” Ah, how Christine hated the memory of it, she who had always held her head so high, and marked her passage by such liberalities! Devons, who wasn’t always generous, gave big tips in travelling, perhaps because it was an easy way of adding to his own consequence, and because he liked to be blessed by beggars, and have servants rush to open doors for him. “It takes so little to make them happy,” he always said, referring to the poor and the dependent; and Christine sometimes wondered how he knew.
She wasn’t sure any longer that it took so little to make anybody happy. In her case it seemed to have taken the best of four or five people’s lives, and left her so little happy that, with her steamer-trunk half unpacked, and the luncheon gong booming, she could only throw herself down on her berth and weep.
II.
“A wireless, ma’am,” the steward said, coming up to her on the last day out.
Christine took the message tremblingly; she had to wait a minute before breaking the band. Supposing it should be from Jeff, re-opening the whole question, arguing, pleading, reproaching her again? Or from Devons, to say that after all he had presumed too much on his moral courage in saying she might come back to him, with all Stokesburg maliciously agog for her return? Or the boy?—Ah, if it should be to say that Christopher was ill, was dead—her child whom she had abandoned so light-heartedly, and then, after a few weeks, begun to fret and yearn for with an incessant torment of self-reproach? How could she bear that, how could she bear it? The great tragic folds of her destiny were more than she could ever fill, were cut on a scale too vast for her. “Any answer, ma’am?” asked the hovering steward; and she stiffened herself and opened the telegram.
“In two days more there will be joy in the house. Devons and Christopher,” she read, and the happy tears rushed to her eyes.
“Yes—there’s an answer.” She found her pen, the steward produced a form, and she scribbled: “And in my heart, you darlings.” Yes; it was swelling, ripening in her heart, the joy of her return to these two people who were hers, who were waiting for her, to whom, in spite of everything, she was still, sacredly and inalienably, “my wife,” “my mother.” The steward hurried away, and she leaned back with closed eyes and a meditative heart.
What a relief to be drawn back into her own peaceful circle—to stop thinking about Jeff and the last tormented months, and glide, through the door of that tender welcome, into the safe haven of home! She kept her eyes shut, and tried to feel that home again, to see and hear it….
A house in Crest Avenue—how proud she had been of it when Devons had first brought her there! Proud of the smooth circle of turf before the door, the two cut-leaved maples, the carefully clipped privet hedge, the honeysuckle over the porch. It was in the very best neighborhood, high up, dry, airy, healthy—and with the richest people living close by. Old Mrs. Briscott, and the Barkly Troys, and the young Palmers building their great new house on the ridge just above; Devons had the right to be proud of taking his young wife to such a home. But what she thought of now was not the Briscotts and the Troys and the Palmers—no, not even Mabel Breck and her “last boat,” or the other social and topographical amenides of Crest Avenue, but just the space enclosed in her own privet hedge: the garden she and Devons had fussed over, ordered seeds and tools for, the house with its wide friendly gables and the inevitable Colonial porch, the shining order within doors, the sunny neatness of the nursery, the spring bulbs in Chinese bowls on the south window-seat in the drawing-room, her books in their low mahogany bookshelves, Devons’s own study, that was as tidy and glossy as a model dairy, and Martha’s broad smile and fluted cap on the threshold. Even to see Martha’s smile again would be a separate and individual joy! And at last her clothes would be properly mended and pressed, and she would be able to splash about at leisure in the warm bathroom….
She was not in the least ashamed of lingering over these small sensual joys. She had not made enough of them when they were hers, and dwelling on them now helped to shut out something dark and looming on the threshold of her thoughts—the confused sense that life is not a matter of water-tight compartments, that no effort of the will can keep experiences from interpenetrating and colouring each other, and that for all her memories and yearnings she was really a new strange Christine entering upon a new strange life….
As the train reached Stokesburg, she leaned out, hungry for the sight of Christopher. She saw a round pink face, an arm agitating a new straw hat, a large pink hand gesticulating.
“No; the boy’s waiting for you at home with his grandmother. I wanted to be alone to greet my wife. Let me take your bag, my darling. So; be careful how you jump.” He enveloped her with almost paternal vigilance, receiving her on his broad chest as she stepped down on the platform. He smelt of eau de Cologne and bath salts; something sanitary, crisp and blameless exhaled itself from his whole person. If anything could ever corrupt him, it would not be moth and rust….
She wanted to speak, to answer what he was saying; but her lips were dry. “And Christopher?” Her throat contracted as she tried to ask.
“Bless the boy! He’s growing out of all his clothes. Mother says—”
Oh, the relief in her heart! “I suppose Susan’s had Mrs. Shetter in to help her with the sewing?” How sweet it was to be saying the old usual things in the old usual way!
“Well, Susan—the fact is, Susan’s not here any more. She—”
Susan not here! Susan no longer with Christopher? Christine’s heart contracted again, she felt herself suddenly plunged fall into the unknown, the disquieting. What had happened, why had her boy been separated from his nurse? But she hardly heard her husband’s answer—she was thinking in a tumult: “After all, he was separated from his mother …”
“The fact is, Susan was too hide-bound, too old-fashioned. She was afraid of fresh air. She inflicted silly punishments. Mother and I felt that a change was necessary. You’ll see what Miss Bilk has done already—”
“Miss Bilk!” Ah, how she was prepared to hate Miss Bilk! And her mother-in-law also, for interfering and introducing new ideas and people behind her back. Christine had always felt, under Mrs. Robbit’s blandness and acquiescence, a secret itch to meddle and advise. And of course Devons had been wax in her hands….
And here they were at the white gate, and across the newly clipped privet the house smiled at them from all its glittering windows. On the shiny door-step stood Mrs. Robbit, large and soft and beautifully dressed; and from her arms shot forth a flying figure, shouting: “Daddy—Daddy!” as the car drew up.
Daddy—only Daddy! Christine hung back, her dry eyes devouring the child, her lips twitching. “My son, here’s your mother; here’s darling mummy, back from her long journey. You know I always said she’d come,” Devons admonished him.
Christopher stopped sho
rt, glanced at her, and twisted his hand nervously in his father’s. She fell on her knees before him. “Chris—my Chris! You haven’t forgotten me?”
“I thought you were dead,” he said.
“Christopher, I told you every day that your mother had only gone away on a journey,” his father rebuked him.
“Yes; but that’s what they always say when they’re dead,” the child rejoined, kicking the gravel, and looking away from his mother. “You won’t lock up my wireless, will you?” he asked suddenly. “Not because I thought you were dead?”
The tension was relieved by tears and laughter, and with the boy on his father’s shoulder, husband and wife walked up the carefully raked gravel to where Mrs. Robbit smiled and rustled between newly painted tubs of blue hydrangeas. “I wanted you to have your first moments alone with Chris and Devons—my daughter!” Mrs. Robbit murmured, enfolding Christine in an embrace that breathed of hygiene and Christian charity.
Miss Bilk, discretion itself, hung in the background, hiding behind her spectacles. When Christine saw how neutral-tinted she was, and how large the spectacles were, her secret apprehension was relieved. Had she actually felt jealous of Miss Bilk? Was it possible that Jeff had so altered her whole angle of vision, taught her to regard all men and women as carnivora perpetually devouring each other in hate or love? She put an appeased hand in the nursery-governess’s, and walked across the threshold with a quiet heart.
“Oh—how lovely!” she exclaimed in the doorway. On the varnished white stair-rail, facing her from a half-way landing, hung a panel on which skilful hands had woven in tight violets and roses:
JOY IN THE HOUSE
She gazed at it with tear-filled eyes. “How lovely of you all,” she murmured.
“It was his idea,” said Mrs. Robbit, with a fluffy gesture at her son.
“Ah, but mother did all the other flowers herself,” the son interposed dutifully; and between the two, the reassured Christopher capering ahead, Christine re-entered her own drawing-room, saw the sunshine on the south window-seat, the hyacinths in the Chinese bowls, and flowers, flowers everywhere, disposed to welcome her.
“Joy in the house,” her husband repeated, laying his lips on hers in an almost ritual gesture, while Mrs. Robbit delicately averted her swimming eyes.
“Yes—joy in the house, my daughter!”
“The parenthesis closed—everything between wiped out, obliterated, forgotten,” Devons continued with rising eloquence.
Christine looked about her, trying to recognise them all again, and herself among them. “Home—” she murmured, straining every nerve to make it feel so.
“Home, sweet Home!” echoed her mother-in-law archly.
III.
In the nursery, she had to admit, Miss Bilk had introduced the reign of reason. The windows were wide open day and night, Chris had his daily sun-bath, his baby gymnastics, his assorted vitamins. And he seemed not to dislike the calm spectacled guardian who had replaced his old impulsive Nanny. After dinner, and a goodnight kiss to her sleeping son, Christine said to her husband: “Yes, the boy looks splendidly. I’m sure Miss Bilk’s all right. But it must have nearly killed Susan.”
Devons’s rosy beatitude was momentarily clouded. “That’s just it. She made a dreadful scene—though she knew that scenes were the one thing strictly forbidden. She excited the child so that I had to send her off the same night.”
“Oh, poor Susan! What she must have suffered—”
“My dear, she made the child suffer. I overheard her telling him that you’d gone away because you didn’t love him. And I will not permit suffering in my house.”
Christine startled herself by a sudden laugh. “I wonder how you’re going to keep it out?”
“How?” He shone on her admonishingly over his gold-rimmed eyeglasses. “By ignoring it, denying it, saying: ‘It won’t happen—it can’t happen! Not to simple kindly people like us.’” He paused and gave a shy cough. “I said that to myself, nearly six months ago, the day you told me you … you wished to travel…. Now you see …”
Compunction flushed her, and she stood up and went to him. “Oh, you’ve been splendid—don’t think I don’t feel it….” She drew a deep breath. “It’s lovely to be here—at peace again. …”
“Where you belong,” he murmured, lifting her hand to his lips.
“Where I belong,” she echoed. She was so grateful to him for attempting nothing more than that reverential salute that she had nearly bent to touch his forehead. But something in her resisted, and she went back to her armchair. The gas-fire sparkled between them. He said ceremoniously: “You permit?” as he lit his pipe, and sank back in his armchair with the sigh of happy digestion. You had only to forbid sorrow to look in at the door, or drive it out when it forced its way in disguised as Susan. In both cases the end had justified the means, and he sat placidly among the rebuilt ruins. No wonder he stirred his pipe with a tranquil hand. He smiled at her across the fire.
“You’re tired, my dear, after your night in the train?”
“I suppose so … yes … and coming back. …”
He shook a pink finger admonishingly. “Too much emotion. I want you to have only calm happy thoughts. Go up to bed now and have a long quiet sleep.”
Ah, how tactful, how thoughtful he was! He was not going to drag her back too soon into the old intimacy…. He knew, he must know, how she was entangled in those other memories. They kissed goodnight, stiffly, half fraternally, and he called after her, as she mounted the stairs under the triumphal flower-piece that was already fading: “In the morning Chris and I’ll come in to see how you’ve slept.”
What a good thing, she thought the next morning, that in the Stokesburg world every man had an office, and had to go to it. Life was incredibly simplified by not having one’s husband about the house all day. With Jeff there was always the anxious problem of the days when he didn’t want to paint, and just messed about and disturbed the settled order of things, irritating himself and her. Now she heard the front door open and close at the usual hour, and said to herself that Devons was already on his way down town. She leaned back luxuriously against her pillows, smiling at the bright spring sunlight on her coverlet, the pretty breakfast set which Martha had brought to the bedside (a “surprise” from Mrs. Robbit, the maid told her), and Chris’s jolly shouts overhead. Yes, home was sweet on those terms … “I’ve waked from a bad dream,” she thought.
When she came down a little later she was surprised to hear her husband’s voice in the hall. It had not been to let him out that the front door had opened and closed. She paused on the landing, and saw him standing in the hall, his hat on, his hand on the door-handle, apparently addressing himself to some one who was already on the threshold.
“No, no—no publicity, please! On no account whatever! The matter is closed, you can say. Nothing changed: not a cloud on the horizon. My wife’s a great traveller—that’s all there is to it. Just a private episode with a happy ending—a Happy Ending!” he added, joyously stressing the capitals. The door shut on the invisible visitor and she saw Devons walk humming toward the umbrella-stand, select another stick, tap the barometer on the wall, and go out in his turn. “A reporter,” Christine thought, wincing under the consciousness that it was to spy out her arrival that the man had come, and thankful that he had not waylaid her in the hall. “Devons always knew how to deal with them,” she concluded, with a wife’s comfortable dismissal of difficulties she need not cope with.
The house was exquisitely calm and orderly. She liked the idea of resuming her household duties, talking over the marketing with the cook, discussing a new furniture polish with Martha. It was soothing to move from one tidy room to the other, noting that ash-trays and paper-baskets had been emptied, cushions shaken up, scattered newspapers banished. Did the rooms look a trifle too tidy, had their personality been tidied away with the rest? She recalled with a shudder that chaotic room at the Havre hotel, and her struggle to
sort out her things from Jeff’s, in the sordid overnight confusion, while he sat at the table with his face buried.
For a moment, the evening before, she had wanted to talk to Devons of what was in her mind, to establish some sort of understanding with him; but how could she, when he declared that nothing was changed, spoke of her six months’ absence as caused by a commendable desire for sight-seeing, tidied away all her emotion, and all reality, as the maid swept away pipe-ashes and stale newspapers? And now she saw that it was better so; that any return to the past would only stir up evil sediments, that the “nothing has happened” attitude was the safest, the wisest—and the easiest. She must just put away her anxious introspections, and fall in with her husband’s plan. After all, she owed him that. “But I wish I could forget about Susan. He wasn’t kind to Susan,” she thought as she sat down at her writing-table.
She caught the ring of the front door bell, and Martha crossing the hall. Her mother-in-law, she supposed. She heard a woman’s voice, and rose to welcome Mrs. Robbit. But the maid met her on the threshold, signing to her mysteriously. “There’s a lady; she won’t come in.”
“Won’t come in?”
“No. She says she wants to speak to you outside.”
Christine walked buoyantly across the room. Its brightness and order struck her again; the flowers filled the air with summer. She crossed the hall, and in the open doorway saw a small slight woman standing. Christine’s heart stood still. “Mrs. Lithgow!” she faltered.
Mrs. Lithgow turned on her a sharp birdlike face, drawn and dusky under graying hair. She was said to be older than her husband, and she looked so now.
“I wouldn’t send in my name, because I knew if I did you’d tell the maid to say you were out.” She spoke quickly, in a staccato voice which had something of Jeff’s stridency.
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