“You seem to forget that I am not divorced, Walter.”
“Oh, hell, it’s lousy either way, isn’t it? If we’re married then we’re bigamists and if not we’re adulterers.” Then brightening: “But we’re going to have the baby in any case. There’s no law against that.”
“But what about my mother?”
“Tell her about it, of course.”
Ruth looked at Walter in astonishment. “Tell her about it? What are you talking about, dear? It’s simply out of the question.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s a devout Catholic.”
“But does that mean if her daughter has a child that she’s not to know of it?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
“But why?”
“It would kill her.”
“Kill her? How?”
“Oh, Walter, you just don’t understand. You can tell your parents that we are married, but—.”
“Why can’t you? I mean, is there any essential difference?”
“No, but I am married and I have a husband—.”
“You haven’t seen him in years. He means nothing to you. Apart from the stupid law he’s nothing but a stranger to you.”
“But mother doesn’t recognize that.”
“But if you tell her that you are now married she’ll have to recognize it.”
“She won’t, she’ll simply feel disgraced. It’ll kill her. You don’t understand.”
“I do understand.”
“You don’t understand that all this business of sin and hell are terrible realities to her. She would feel that I am worse than a prostitute.”
“I understand thoroughly, I tell you. She’s a religious bigot and we’re not. We ask nothing of her, not even her approval. But she’s got to know. It’ll be painful, I know, but it’ll save you a lot of evasion and unhappiness afterwards. We’ve simply got to tell her, it’s the only honest thing to do.”
“Yes, with anyone but my mother. She’s old and this would be the end. I don’t want to be cruel.”
“Well, then get a divorce.”
“That would be just as bad, maybe worse. I don’t want to hurt anyone just because I want to be happy according to my own lights. Just let’s go on as we are.”
“But you are pregnant—and I want a child. Don’t you?”
“Yes, but I can’t. I can’t.”
There was something dogged in her voice. She sat at the window and looked down into the street below and kept repeating the phrase.
“But sooner or later she’ll know, one way or another. If you have the baby, don’t you want Guy to know that he has a brother or a sister?”
“I can’t, Walter, really, I can’t.” (He felt a slight impatience at her constant repetition.)
“I have written mother and dad saying that we were married. You don’t mind that,” he added with some coldness.
“No, that’s all right. I’m glad about that.”
“I don’t see why you should be so concerned about her feelings. I mean that business about your uncle and her attitude—.”
“Please don’t say that, Walter. She’s my mother. She and Guy are all I have left of my family. I don’t want to cause anyone any pain.”
“All right, dear, let’s not talk about it. It seems so utterly silly—but have it your way. I won’t say another word about your mother. But you will have the baby, won’t you?” She nodded.
In the morning they crossed the Victoria Bridge and headed south towards New York.
LXVIII
The thing of which Ruth had dreamed all her life had come to pass. She had found the love of one man, she lived unmolested, and her new-born child gave her great joy. (Bruce was born the June following their return from Canada.) There had been no difficulty at the hospital: father—Walter Sprague; mother—Ruth Courtney Sprague. And that was all there was to it.
That Spring Walter’s parents came east on their way to Germany; Mrs. Sprague needed the waters of a European spa and her husband, brow-beaten but grumbling, came along. There were jokes about being granddad and grandma so soon, there were congratulations. Mrs. Sprague took Ruth aside, told her of her rheumatism and poured a flood of maternal, unscientific advice into her ears. Walter considered that they were man and wife and nothing was said on the subject other than the introduction: “This is my wife, Ruth.” The Spragues were happy that Walter had settled down. Sprague senior secured a position for his son in his New York branch, increased his income, settled some property and bonds on him, and two weeks later, accompanied by his wife, left for Europe.
“You see,” Walter said, “it’s as simple as that.”
But he did not mention the question of telling Ruth’s mother of their union. The subject was a painful one and there seemed nothing further to say. Walter wanted to engage a nurse for the baby but Ruth wanted to experience the joy of doing things for the infant. The child was the living result of her new love and the performance of the most menial tasks for him gave her an abiding pleasure. Later she refused to have a governess for the boy as he grew up. She planned to teach him his alphabet, tell him stories and play with him. The warmth of a hovering mother had been denied to her when she was a child; her earliest memories were of strange women, nurses, no doubt, and later the convent … It would be different with Bruce.
There were uneventful days on which she thought she had never felt a greater and more enduring felicity. Hers was the satisfaction which veterans of many wars find in the prosaic tending of an obscure rose garden. There were quiet evenings, an occasional concert, the theater. Since Bruce’s coming Walter found many of his pleasures at home. The boy filled him with almost incoherent delight; he gloried in every meaningless gurgle and wrote long letters to his father telling of the infant’s indescribable wisdom. He made far-fetched plans for the youngster’s future: the lad would need money and an extensive education. Something might happen to his granddad’s money and he would have to have an independent fortune. He threw himself into business and spent long hours at the office. The thought of the child threw him into ecstasies of work and he telephoned from the office several times a day.
In the afternoon, following tea, little Bruce sometimes sat propped up in an armchair and listened to Ruth at the piano. The child listened with wide-open eyes, mystified at the thunders of sound which issued from the instrument. Sometimes when the music descended into the minor and its keening filled the room, his little lower lip would protrude and his blue eyes filled with tears; then as the music became animated again, his face brightened in sympathy.
Ruth’s correspondence with her mother caused her uneasiness of spirit. All reference to Walter and Bruce had to be carefully omitted and sometimes she felt that she was tearing something vital out of herself as she wrote of her life as though these, her most precious treasures, had died or had never come to life. At such times she wondered whether her acceptance of Walter’s neoteric concept of morality were wholly honest.
—Perhaps, after all, I have changed very little since the day when I left the convent. Perhaps people do not change much in any direction. If I am so modern why am I so afraid of telling mother of my greatest happiness? If I were as strong as I think I am I would tell her—let the world know.
But there was the question of Guy; it was different where he was concerned. There was his career. He would in all likelihood come back to Canada. People thought differently there. As she thought, she heard the whispers of the Pine Avenue circles: “Do you know, they say his mother ran off, lived with a young man in New York. Of course all her talk about poor Edgar was nonsense … ” In fancy she saw the amused smiles, heard the tones of cutting irony.
Such thoughts, fortunately, were rare enough. She wrote to her mother once a month and in time her letters became noncommittal and vague. She spoke of her music, how she was becoming accustomed to New York, a veritable New Yorker. The mother r
eplied faithfully, telling of her life in England, recounting Guy’s progress (“do you realize, Ruth dear, that he is now a tall boy, he reaches above my shoulders”) and praying that her daughter was living a good Christian life. The letters JMJ headed each sheet of paper and the flap of each envelope was sealed with the mystic initials SAG.
—Guy is nearly thirteen years old. Let me see, that means I am nearly thirty-four and Walter is twenty-eight.
The thought depressed her but the mirror still gave back her image tall and slender, white and resilient. Her hair, too, held its auburn glint.
—There is nothing to fear.
Thus, the thin stream of days trickled through her fingers, each day placidly joyous, filled with the delight in simple things which give profound elemental pleasure to those who ask but little: a child, music, the love of one man and the droning sound of life as the days sometimes hurried, sometimes languidly passed by.
LXIX
For years Walter had been engrossed in his work. It was now five years since he and Ruth had gone to live with each other. She was a good wife, had given him a lusty youngster and now for the first time he had a definite motive in life. He recalled the groping, uncertain days before he had met her—the wild nights, the awakening in strange beds, the horrible, shame-faced feeling in the morning.
All that was gone now. He was now in complete charge of his father’s business in New York; he was respected by his associates. For a man not quite thirty he had done exceedingly well. He had been a good father, providing insurance policies and securities for the lad when he would no longer be here. He had not been wholly faithful to Ruth—but no more unfaithful than most men. He detested the word anyhow. Faithfulness! The word was forever on the lips of women, he thought. One could be loyal, jealous of the honor of one’s wife and family, provide for them, love them and then one peccadillo—and the man was a faithless wretch.
Not that he was any worse than most men, a good deal better in fact, but whichever way one turned one seemed to run into women; at parties, in the office, at the club sometimes—and things just happened, not very often, but they happened. He suspected that Ruth was aware of these little excursions into sex—there was something in the way she looked at him when he came home from a trip to Philadelphia. Her questions were sometimes too insistent. At such times he felt somewhat helpless, she seemed to know more about the masculine heart than he did, she asked questions in such a way as to put him out of sorts for the entire day. There was a reproachful look in her eyes as he answered—and still nothing very definite. Then, too, the physical expression of her love for him had grown fiercer during the past five years. It seemed as if she felt that he were trying to escape from her.
His operations on the stock market were extremely successful. He had nearly trebled his capital during the last two years; he was a member of many boards of directors. It was the Summer of 1929, and he rode with the tide. It seemed as if she were jealous of his success, fearful that when he became an important figure in Wall Street he would no longer find her necessary. Once in a very long while she would give expression to this fear, half-jokingly:
“When you become a great, important man, Walter, will you still love me?”
The question annoyed him. The fact that he considered their relationship permanent was evident in all his actions: in his will, in the provisions that he was making for her and for Bruce. He answered with a touch of impatience:
“What a question, Ruth!”
“You are not answering.”
“Of course, I’ll love you.”
“And you’ll never leave me?”
“Never.” And he returned to the financial page of his paper.
LXX
The winter of 1929 came and passed. The huge edifice which men had constructed in America began to crumble. Everywhere men and women were stunned and bewildered. Suddenly, it seemed, the factories had ceased roaring and humming and the streets became filled with lonely and homeless people. A feeling of dissolution pervaded everything; it was felt in lonely farmhouses, in small villages and towns and in steel-ribbed cities, now ominous with the silence of listless men. All the firmness and hope seemed to have gone out of life in America. In the streets one saw harassed, frightened faces, gaunt and pale. In desperation some threw their bodies from the windows of tall buildings, spattering the sidewalks with futile blood.
Walter came home late from the office; each day was a day of madness as his associates scrambled and clawed for what little security remained. He found no solace at home; schemes and plans for preserving his business raced through his mind at dinner, at the theater, in bed. His hands absently fondled Ruth’s body—but his thoughts were of other things. Stocks in which he had placed all his hopes were now worthless. Ruth, too, had been affected by the collapse in values. Some of her securities were now depleted of value. Another pulp and paper company had gone bankrupt and Sir Robert wrote advising her to put her remaining money into three per cent British consols.
“The return might be small,” he wrote, “but at least they are absolutely safe, which is a considerable thing in these days.”
Walter’s face became lined and his nervousness increased from day to day. Reading bored him and during a piano recital he fidgeted and refused to return to his seat after the intermission.
But to Ruth, the wiping out of many of her holdings did not matter. She pitied Walter and understood how he felt about his losses.
“You mustn’t take it so seriously,” she consoled him, “after all, most of my money is still here. We have enough to live on comfortably and besides no matter what happens we have each other and Bruce.”
“It isn’t the loss of the money,” he replied, “it’s the feeling that the bottom has fallen out of everything. There was a time once when it was possible to face the next day with some sort of security but all that seems to have gone forever.”
No matter what happened, she kept saying to herself, they had their love for one another. And she marveled at those who took their lives because ease and luxury had suddenly been snatched from them. What empty lives they must have lived, she thought.
—It will not be so with me. I have Walter and the boy and now at last I am happy. A few crumbs more or less do not matter.
In this thought she found peace and wondered at her stoical fortitude.
LXXI
It was late November. The wind, laden with piercing, slanting rain, whined and whistled through the darkened streets. An air of utter restfulness pervaded the apartment, now dimly lit with shaded lamps. Walter sat reading in the living room, Bruce was asleep in his room upstairs and Ruth was seated near the radio. Soon the sad, moaning strains of Bach’s Arioso filled the room. And as she listened, imperceptibly, long lines of men, wraith-like, came to life in her mind; they were the hungry unemployed she had seen downtown the day before. She saw the vacant crowds gathered before the offices advertising work; she felt the painful hopelessness which brooded over the city like a premonition of death. As the wind assaulted the windows with thin pellets of rain and as the gentle rising and falling of the violins continued, she felt a ruthfulness, a glowing human feeling for the homeless, the hungry, the desperate. The violins wailed, giving voice to the mystic sorrow which lies unspoken in the hearts of inarticulate men.
November, slanting, driving rains, homeless men and women crawling into doorways, into holes in the ground, forgotten by their fellows and by God—slowly ascending, slowly descending, beautiful, mournful music. To think that men could create in their wisdom such exquisite music and at the same time and out of the same cosmic substance fashion life so that multitudes wanted for the most simple necessities: warmth, shelter, food, love. For a moment the solo violin contained in its rich tonal ascension all the hopes and aspirations of a weary and struggling mankind. And at this moment Ruth felt a powerful necessity for a credo that would strengthen her in the face of this grinding poverty, these pursued men and wo
men, this overwhelming barrenness of body and soul which confronted one on all sides. To have some consuming devotion to an idea or belief that would finally triumph over the powers of darkness and destruction! To have a faith that would arise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of chaos and despair! But this, she realized, was beyond her. She knew that she lacked the courage to fight and struggle against forces which would crush her as though she were a crawling insect. It was this feeling of impotence in the face of an all-destroying enemy that impelled her to take refuge in a narrower hope.
Very well, then, it was something in the nature of a victory to live to see the next day, to rear a child, to love one’s husband, to do some little insignificant personal good to one more unfortunate than one’s self. And if (now the violins were falling), she could only keep the boy and Walter, she would be content, if not fully appeased, for the rest of her days. The music approached its closing measures and at length came to its haunting, last end.
Walter looked up from his book. “That was so beautiful, Ruth, what is it called?”
For a moment Ruth did not reply, then: “It’s miserable outside,” she said absently, “listen to the angry rain on the windows.”
Outdoors the late Autumn rain dashed itself against the pavements of the street, the roofs of houses and windows of the brightly lighted rooms making the sound of cruel, hideous laughter.
LXXII
As the months wore on, Walter became increasingly nervous and irritable. One night at dinner his hands shook and he sat pale and taut until the spell passed. Ruth was frightened.
“Don’t you think,” she said, “that you ought to go away somewhere and rest?”
“I can’t go away. Things are in a critical way at the office. I simply can’t.”
There Are Victories Page 19