His Family

by Ernest Poole

  “My idea? She’s to go straight home and make up with him!”

  She hesitated. Then she said:

  “Suppose there’s another woman.”

  “Then he’s a beast,” growled Roger.

  “And yet you want her to live with him?”

  He scowled, he felt baffled, his mind in a whirl. And a wave of exasperation suddenly swept over him.

  “Well, why shouldn’t she?” he cried. “Other wives have done it—millions! Made a devilish good success of it, too—made new men of their husbands! Let her show him she’s ready to forgive! That’s only Christian, ain’t it? Hard? Of course it’s hard on her! But can you tell me one hard thing she has ever had to do in her life? Hasn’t it been pleasure, pleasure from the word go? Can’t she stand something hard? Don’t we all of us have to? I do—God knows—with all of you!” And he puffed his cigar in a fury. His daughter smiled. She saw her chance.

  “Father,” she said, in a low clear voice, “You’ve had so many troubles. Why not leave this one to me? You can’t help—no matter how hard you try—you’ll only make it worse and worse. And you’ve been through so much this year—you’ve earned the right to be quiet. And that’s what they want, both of them—they both want it quiet, without any scandal.” Her father glared, for he knew about scandal, he handled it in his office each day. “Let me manage this—please,” she said. And her offer tempted him. He struggled for a moment.

  “No, I won’t!” he burst out in reply. “I want quiet right enough, but not at the price of her peace with her God!” This sounded foolish, he felt that it did, and he flushed and grew the angrier. “No, I won’t,” he said stubbornly. “She’ll go back to him if I take her myself. And what’s more,” he added, rising, “she’s to go straight back to-night!”

  “She is not going back to-night, my dear.” And Deborah caught her father’s arm. “Sit down, please—”

  “I’ve heard enough!”

  “I’m afraid you haven’t,” she replied.

  “Very well.” His smile was caustic. “Give me some more of it,” he said.

  “Her husband won’t have her,” said Deborah bluntly. “He told me so himself—to-night.”

  “Did, eh—then _I’ll_ talk to him!”

  “He thinks,” she went on in a desperate tone, “that Laura has been leading—’her own little life’—as he put it to me.”

  “_Eh_?”

  “He is bringing suit himself.”

  “_Oh! He is_!” cried Roger hoarsely. “Then I will talk to this young man!” But she put out a restraining hand:

  “Father! Don’t try to fight this suit!”

  “You watch me!” he snarled. Tears showed in her eyes:

  “Think! Oh, please! Think what you’re doing! Have you ever seen a divorce-court—here, in New York? Do you know what it’s like? What it can be like?”

  “Yes,” Roger panted. He did know, and the picture came vividly into his mind—a mass of eager devouring eyes fixed on a girl in a witness chair. “To-morrow I see a lawyer!” he said.

  “No—you won’t do that, my dear,” Deborah told him sadly. “Laura’s husband has got proofs.”

  Her father looked up slowly and glared into his daughter’s face.

  “I’ve seen them myself,” she added. “And Laura has admitted it, too.”

  Still for a moment he stared at her. Then slowly he settled back in his chair, his eyes dropped in their sockets, and very carefully, with a hand which was trembling visibly, he lifted his cigar to his lips. It had gone nearly out, but he drew on it hard until it began to glow again.

  “Well,” he asked simply, “what shall we do?”

  Sharply Deborah turned away. To be quiet, to be matter of fact, to act as though nothing had happened at all—she knew this was what he wanted now, what he was silently begging her to be for his sake, for the family’s sake. For he had been raised in New England. And so, when she turned back to him, her voice was flat and commonplace.

  “Keep her here,” she said. “Let him do what he likes. There’ll be nothing noisy, he promised me that. But keep her here till it’s over.”

  Roger smoked for a moment, and said,

  “There’s Edith and her children.”

  “The children needn’t know anything—and Edith only part of it.”

  “The less, the better,” he grunted.

  “Of course.” She looked at him anxiously. This tractable mood of his might not last. “Why not go up and see her now—and get it all over—so you can sleep.”

  Over Roger’s set heavy visage flitted a smile of grim relish at that. Sleep! Deborah was funny. Resolutely he rose from his chair.

  “You’ll be careful, of course,” she admonished him, and he nodded in reply. At the door he turned back:

  “Where’s the other chap?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “Surely you don’t want to see _him_—.” Her father snorted his contempt:

  “See him? No. Nor she neither. _She’s_ not to see him. Understand?”

  “I wouldn’t tell her that to-night.”

  “Look here.” Roger eyed his daughter a moment.

  “You’ve done well. I’ve no complaint. But don’t try to manage everything.”

  He went out and slowly climbed the stairs. Outside the bedroom door he paused. When had he stood like this before? In a moment he remembered. One evening some two years ago, the night before Laura’s wedding, when they had had that other talk. And so it had come to this, had it. Well, there was no use making a scene. Again, with a sigh of weariness, Laura’s father knocked at her door.

  “Come in, Deborah,” she said.

  “It isn’t Deborah, it’s I.” There was a little silence.

  “Very well, father, come in, please.” Her voice sounded tired and lifeless. He opened the door and found the room dark. “I’m over on the bed,” she said. “I’ve had a headache this evening.”

  He came over to the bedside and he could just see her there, a long shadow upon the white. She had not taken off her clothes. He stood a moment helplessly.

  “Please don’t you talk to me!” His daughter fiercely whispered. “I can’t stand any more to-night!”

  “I won’t,” he answered. “It’s too late.” Again there was a pause.

  “What time is it?” she asked him. But he did not answer.

  “Well, Laura,” he said presently, “your sister has told me everything. She has seen your husband—it’s all arranged—and you’re to stay here till it’s over … You want to stay here, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it’s settled,” he went on. “There’s only one thing—the other man. I don’t know who he is and I don’t want to know. And I don’t want you to know him again. You’re not to see him. Understand?” For a moment Laura was silent.

  “I’m going to marry him, father,” she said. And standing in the darkened room Roger stiffened sharply.

  “Well,” he answered, after a pause, “that’s your affair. You’re no longer a child. I wish you were,” he added.

  Suddenly in the darkness Laura’s hand came out clutching for his. But he had already turned to the door.

  “Good-night,” he said, and left her.

  In the hallway below he met Deborah, and to her questioning look he replied, “All right, I guess. Now I’m going to bed.” He went into his room and closed the door.

  As soon as Roger was alone, he knew this was the hardest part—to be here by himself in this intimate room, with this worn blue rug, these pictures and this old mahogany bed. For he had promised Judith his wife to keep close to the children. What would she think of him if she knew?

  Judith had been a broad-minded woman, sensible, big-hearted. But she never would have stood for this. Once, he recollected, she had helped a girl friend to divorce her husband, a drunkard who ran after chorus girls. But that had been quite different. There the wife had been innocent and had done it for her children. Laura was guilty, she hadn’t a child
, she was already planning to marry again. And then what, he asked himself. “From bad to worse, very likely. A woman can’t stop when she’s started downhill.” His eye was caught by the picture directly before him on the wall—the one his wife had given him—two herdsmen with their cattle high up on a shoulder of a sweeping mountain side, tiny blue figures against the dawn. It had been like a symbol of their lives, always beginning clean glorious days. What was Laura beginning?

  “Well,” he demanded angrily, as he began to jerk off his clothes, “what can I do about it? Try to keep her from re-marrying, eh? And suppose I succeeded, how long would it last? She wouldn’t stay here and I couldn’t keep her. She’ll be independent now—her looks will be her bank account. There’d be some other chap in no time, and he might not even marry her!” He tugged ferociously at his boots. “No, let well enough alone!”

  He finished undressing, opened the window, turned out the gas and got into bed. Wearily he closed his eyes. But after a time he opened them and stared long through the window up at the beetling cliff of a building close by, with its tier upon tier of lighted apartments, a huge garish hive of homes. Yes, the town was crowding down on him to-night, on his house and on his family. He realized it had never stopped, and that his three grown children, each one of them a part of himself, had been struggling with it all the time. Laura—wasn’t she part of himself? Hadn’t he, too, had his little fling, back in his early twenties? “You will live on in our children’s lives.” She was a part of him gone wild. She gave it free rein, took chances. God, what a chance she had taken this time! The picture of that court he had seen, with the girl in the witness chair and those many rows of eyes avidly fixed upon her, came back to his mind so vividly they seemed for a moment right here in the room, these eyes of the town boring into his house. Angrily he shut out the scene. And alone in the darkness, Roger said to his daughter all the ugly furious things he had not said to her upstairs—until at last he was weary of it.

  “Why am I working myself all up? I’ve got to take this. It’s my medicine.”

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  But as he watched Laura in the house, Roger’s first emotions were complicated more and more by a feeling of bewilderment. At dinner the next evening he noticed with astonishment that she appeared like her natural self. “She’s acting,” he decided. But this explanation he soon dismissed. No, it was something deeper. She was actually unashamed, unafraid. That first display of feelings, the night of her arrival, had been only the scare of an hour. Within a few days she was back on her feet; and her cure for her trouble, if trouble she felt, was not less but more pleasure, as always. She went out nearly every evening now; and when she had spent what money she had, she sold a part of her jewelry to the little old Galician Jew in the shop around the corner. Yes, she was her natural self. And she was as before to her father. Her attitude said plainly,

  “It isn’t fair to you, poor dear, to expect you to fully understand how right I am in this affair. And considering your point of view, you’re acting very nicely.”

  Often as she talked to him a note of good-humored forgiveness crept into his daughter’s voice. And looking at her grimly out of the corner of his eye, he saw that she looked down on him, far, far down from heights above.

  “Yes,” he thought, “this is modern.” Then he grew angry all at once. “No,” he added, “this is wrong! You can’t fool me, young woman, you know it as well as I do myself! You’re not going to carry this off with an air—not with your father! No, by George!”

  And he would grow abrupt and stern. But days would pass and in spite of himself into their talks would creep a natural friendly tone. Again he found himself friends with her—friends as though nothing whatever had happened! Could it be that a woman who had so sinned could go right on? Here was Laura, serenely unconscious of guilt, and smiling into her future, dreaming still of happiness, quite plainly sure of it, in fact! With a curious dismayed relief Roger would scowl at this daughter of his—a radiant enigma in his quiet sober house.

  But Edith was not at all perplexed. When she learned from Deborah that there was soon to be a divorce, she came at once to her father. Her face was like a thundercloud.

  “A nice example for my children!” she indignantly exclaimed.

  “I’m sorry, my dear. But what can I do?”

  “You can make her go back to her husband, can’t you?”

  “No, I can’t,” he flatly replied.

  “Then I’d better try it myself!”

  “You’ll do no such thing!” he retorted. “I’ve gone clear to the bottom of this—and I say you’re to leave her alone!”

  “Very well,” she answered. And she did leave her sister alone, so severely that Laura soon avoided being home for lunch or dinner. She had taken the room which George had occupied ever since John had been turned out, and there she breakfasted late in bed, until Edith put a stop to it. They barely spoke to each other now. Laura still smiled defiance.

  Days passed. Christmas came at last, and despite Edith’s glum resolution to make it a happy time for the children, the happiness soon petered out. After the tree in the morning, the day hung heavy on the house. Roger buried himself in his study. Laura had motored off into the country with a gay party of her friends. Or was this just a ruse, he wondered, and was she spending the day with her lover? Well, what if she was? Could he lock her in?

  About twilight he thought he heard her return, and later from his bedroom he heard her voice and Edith’s. Both voices sounded angry, but he would not interfere.

  At the Christmas dinner that evening Laura did not put in an appearance, but Edith sat stiff and silent there; and despite the obvious efforts which Deborah and Allan made to be genial with the children, the very air in the room was charged with the feeling of trouble close ahead. Again Roger retreated into his den, and presently Laura came to him.

  “Good-night—I’m going out,” she said, and she pressed her cheek lightly to his own. “What a dear you’ve been to me, dad,” she murmured. And then she was gone.

  A few minutes later Edith came in. She held a small note in her hand, which Roger saw was addressed to himself.

  “Well, father, I learned this afternoon what you’ve been keeping from me,” she said. Roger gave her a steady look.

  “You did, eh—Laura told you?”

  “Yes, she did!” his daughter exclaimed. “And I can’t help wondering, father—”

  “Why did she tell you? Have you been at her again to-day?”

  “Again? Not at all,” she answered. “I’ve done as you asked me to, let her alone. But to-day—mother’s day—I got thinking of her.”

  “Leave your mother out of it, please. What did you say to Laura?”

  “I tried to make her go back, of course—”

  “And she told you—”

  “He wouldn’t have her! And then in a perfect tantrum she went on to tell me why!” Edith’s eyes were cold with disgust. “And I’m wondering why you let her stay here—in the same house with my children!”

  Roger reached out his hand.

  “Give me that note,” he commanded. He read it quickly and handed it back. The note was from Laura, a hasty good-bye.

  “Edith will explain,” she wrote, “and you will see I cannot stay any longer. It is simply too impossible. I am going to the man I love—and in a few days we shall sail for Naples. I know you will not interfere. It will make the divorce even simpler and everything easier all round. Please don’t worry about me. We shall soon be married over there. You have been so dear and sensible and I do so love you for it.” Then came her name scrawled hastily. And at the bottom of the page: “I have paid every bill I can think of.”

  Edith read it in silence, her color slowly mounting.

  “All right,” said her father, “your children are safe.” She gave him a quick angry look, burst into tears and ran out of the room.

  Roger sat without moving, his heavy face impassive. And so he remained for a long time. Well, Laura
was gone—no mistake about that—and this time she was gone for good. She was going to live in Rome. Try to stop her? No. What good would it do? Wings of the Eagles, Rome reborn. That was it, she had hit it, struck the keynote of this new age. Rome reborn, all clean, old-fashioned Christian living swept away by millions of men at each others’ throats like so many wolves. And at last quite openly to himself Roger admitted that he felt old. Old and beaten, out of date. Moments passed, and hours—he took little note of time. Nor did he see on the mantle the dark visage of “The Thinker” there, resting on the huge clinched fist and brooding down upon him. Lower, imperceptibly, he sank into his leather chair.

  Quiet had returned to his house.

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  But the quiet was dark to Roger now. Each night he spent in his study alone, for instinctively he felt the need of being by himself for a while, of keeping away from his children—out of whose lives he divined that other events would soon come forth to use up the last of the strength that was in him.

  And Roger grew angry with the world. Why couldn’t it let a man alone, an old man in a silent house alive for him with memories? Repeatedly in such hours his mind would go groping backward into the years behind him. What a long and winding road, half buried in the jungle, dim, almost impenetrable, made up of millions of small events, small worries, plans and dazzling dreams, with which his days had all been filled. But the more he recalled the more certain he grew that he was right. Life had never been like this: the world had never come smashing into his house, his very family, with its dirty teeming tenements, its schools, its prisons, electric chairs, its feverish rush for money, its luxuries, its scandals. These things had existed in the world, but remote and never real, mere things which he had read about. War? Did he not remember wars that had come and gone in Europe? But they hadn’t come into his home like this, first making him poor when he needed money for Edith and her children, then plunging Deborah into a struggle which might very probably ruin her life, and now taking Laura and filling her mind with thoughts of pagan living. Why was every man, woman and child, these days, bound up in the whole life of the world? What would come of it all? A new day out of this deafening night? Maybe so. But for him it would come too late.