Books: Life at High Tide
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Various >> Life at High Tide
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He did, after his own fashion. "You ought to see Judith here," he
laughed to a caller, "practising her kindergarten methods on me." His
imperturbability was at once a boast and a slight.
"He doesn't mean it," she apologized, later, protecting herself by
defending him. "You know how men are; the best of them a bit stupid
about some things. They don't mean to hurt you. You know it, but you
can't help crying."
"Oh, I understand!" (That any one should sympathize with her! It was
not so much her vanity that suffered as her precious regard for him,
her pride in their marriage.) "Nobody minds little things like that
against such devotion and constancy. Why, he talks of you all the
time, Judith; of your style, your housekeeping. You are his pet boast.
He says you can do more with less than anybody he ever saw." And then
Judith laughed.
They were all articles of the creed she herself repeated--and doubted
more and more. Faithful enough. He never came or went without the
customary kiss. When he had typhoid fever, no one might be near him
but her, until her exhaustion could no longer be concealed, when he
fretted about her--until he fretted himself back into high temperature
and had a relapse.
So, run down as she was, she hid it, kept up, went on alone, adding to
the score of her inevitable day of reckoning, after the old
heroic-criminal woman-way.
She had begun with ideas of their saving together for a purpose; but,
not allowed to plan, she must use every opportunity to provide against
future stricture; besides, Sam's arbitrary and unregulated spending
made her poor little economies both futile and unfair.
"I know nothing about your business. How can I tell if I spend too
much?"
"Make your mind easy; I'll keep you posted," he laughed. _He_ was
not bothering about dangerous ground.
"Doubtless,"--dryly. "But if I spend too little?"
"Not you."
He did mean it! He didn't care! The half-truth fanned the slow fire
growing within her into sudden flame. Judith turned, stammering over
the dammed rush of replies.
"My dear, my dear!" he deprecated, amused. "How easily you lose your
temper lately, every time there is a discussion of expenses! Why
excite yourself?" Why, indeed? Anger put her at a disadvantage, and
making her half wrong, half made him right. "I don't say I
particularly blame you, but you see for yourself you don't keep your
balance, and it's mistaken kindness to tempt any woman's natural
feminine weakness for luxury and display."
The retorts were so obvious they were hopeless. She stood looking at
him.
His eyebrows lifted; he shrugged his shoulders, went out, and forgot.
Why any of it, indeed? There was no bridge of speech between alien
minds. Their life was a continual game of cross-questions and silly
answers. Their natures were antipodal; he had the faults that annoyed
her most; his virtues were those least compensating.
Was her dream of influencing the children a superstition too, then?
The children! They slipped the house whenever possible; avoided their
father with an almost physical effect of dodging an expected blow;
when with him, watched his mood to forestall with hasty attention or
divert with strained wit, with timorous hilarity when he proved
complaisant. The possibilities for harm to them were numberless. She
and Sam were losing the children, and the children were losing
everything.
For years they had been a physical and mental outlet for her nature.
That love had no question of reciprocity or merit. She had always been
willing for them. Only it seemed to her all the rest of love should
come first. It occurred to her ironically how happy her marriage would
have been without her husband.
What was his love worth? It was only taxation--taxation without
representation. Had either of them any real love left?
Suddenly she stood on the brink of black emptiness. To live without
love; her whole nature, every life-habit, changed! _Oh, no, no,
no_! So the cold water sets the suicide struggling for shore.
Dear, dear! This would not do. Her nerves were getting the best of
her; she was losing her own dignity and sweetness--was on the verge of
a breakdown.
But to say so would be to invoke doctors, pointless questions, futile
drugs, and a period of acute affection from Sam--affection that took
the form chiefly of expecting it of her.
At times Judith thought of death as an escape, but she thought of no
other as being any more in her own hands; like so many people, she
quoted the Episcopal marriage-service as equal authority with the
Bible. She was too live to droop and break as some do. She had not
made herself the one armor that would have been effective--her own
shell. Friction that does not callous, forms a sore. Her love, her
utmost self, ached like an exposed nerve. She had not dreamed one's
whole being could be so alive to suffering. She must be alone, to get
a hand on herself and things again.
At table one night she wanted them all to know she was going away, for
several months perhaps, leaving her cousin Anne in charge. It was all
arranged.
The amazing innovation surprised Sam into speechlessness.
Judith had had few vacations. There had always been the babies, of
course. And Sam's consent had always been so hard to get. His first
impulse about everything was to refuse, contradict, begrudge. Then
certainly he mustn't be too easily convinced. After that he always
moped through her preparations; counted and recounted the cost, and at
the last perhaps gave her a handsome new bag when her old one was
particularly convenient, and he had supplied only half she had asked
for clothes; would hardly tell her good-by for desolate devotion;
tracked her with letters full of loneliness, ailments, discomforts.
When she had cut short her plans and hurried back, a bit quiet and
unresponsive perhaps, "How truly gracious your unselfishness is, my
dear!" he observed. "If it comes so hard to show me a little
consideration, you would really better keep doing your own way."
"I never do my own way."
"No? Whose then? I fail to recognize the brand."
"That's the trouble. I might as well stop trying."
Now, she could not delay for, nor endure, the conventional comedy.
Since he asked her no questions, she hastened to explain: "I want to
rest absolutely. Not even to write letters. You need not bother to,
either. Anne will let me know if I am needed. And if I need anything,
you will be sure to hear."
"Oh, sure." Sam was recovering.
But he couldn't think she would really go, in that way at least. He
thought he knew one good reason why not. Yet, vaguely on guard against
her capacity for surprise, he did not risk the satire of asking her
plans. To the last Judith hoped he would shame her a little by
offering the money; and against his utter disregard her indignation
rose slowly, steadily, deepening, widening, drowning out every other
feeling for him.
When, after their final breakfast, he kissed her good-by as for the
morning only, she took her jewelry and silver, mementos of his
self-indulgence in generosity, and pawned them, mailing him the
tickets from the station where she piloted herself alone.
She spent a month (in her rest-cure!), writing and destroying letters
to him. There was no alternation of moods now. Nor was she seeking a
solution of the problem; there was only one.
At last a letter seemed to do: "It cannot hurt you to read, as much as
me to write. But it must come. I can see now it has always been
coming. Things cannot go on as they are. We are unable to improve them
together. I will cast no blame. Perhaps some other woman would have
called out a different side of you, or would have minded things less.
It is enough that we do not belong together, because we are we and
cannot change. We are not only ruining each other's happiness--that is
already irrevocable,--we are ruining each other, and the children, and
their futures. It is a question of the least wrong. And I am not
coming back.
"I want the children, all of them. But if you insist, you take Sam
junior and I the girls--and the baby, of course, at least for the
present. And you shall provide for us proportionately. There is no use
pretending independence; I have given my strength and all the
accomplishments I had to you and them. And there is no sense in the
mock-heroics that I don't want your money. It isn't your money; it's
ours, everything we have. I have borne your children, and saved and
kept house and served and nursed for you and them. If you want to
divide equally now, I will take that as my share forever. But we can't
escape the fact that we have been married and have the children."
She could get an answer in two days.
But it did not come in two days, nor two weeks, nor three; while she
burned herself out waiting.
Moreover, her funds were running low. She had waves of the nausea of
defeat, fevers of the desperation of the last stand.
Then it occurred to her. Her armor had always been defensive. She had
never stooped to neutralize his alkali with acid. But there was one
weapon of offence she occasionally used. She wrote: "I am drawing on
you to-day through your First National for a hundred and fifty. You
will honor it, I think. And if I do not hear from you in a day or two
I shall have Judge Harwood call on you as my attorney."
The answer came promptly enough:--"My dear child, I couldn't make out
what had struck you, so I hoped you would just feel better after
blowing off steam and would get over your fit of nerves. Besides, I
have nothing to say except to quote yourself: 'We can't escape the
fact that we are married and have the children.' I know you too well
to be afraid of your throwing off all obligations like that. It is
impossible to fancy you airing our privacies." Bait? or a goad? Oh
yes, he counted on her "womanly qualities"--but with no idea of
masculine emulation! "If you need advice, think what either of our
mothers would say." Her mother! Judith could hear her, "His doing
wrong cannot make it right for you to," with logic so unanswerable one
forgot to question its relevance. And his! Judith held her partly
accountable; some women absolutely fostered tyranny. Their mothers,
poor things! Occasionally their fathers were different, but so
occasionally that now the times were. "This sudden mood strikes me as
very remarkable. 'After all I have done--twelve years of grind to keep
you from the brunt of the world; and now...! My dear child, do you
realize that there are husbands with violent tempers, husbands who
drink and gamble and worse?
"I honored your draft. Do not try it again. And I advise you to use it
to come home. We will have Dr. Hunter give you a tonic, and you will
find you have fewer morbid fancies occupied with your duties. I shall
look for you the end of the week." Surely Sam was moved quite out of
himself, that he had no lashes of laughter for her. But the next was
more in character: "Bridget threatens to leave. She does not work well
under Anne. The children are not manageable under her, either. Little
Judith is sallow and fretful. I suspect Anne gives her sweets between
meals. I saw a moth flying in my closet to-day...."
Judith pushed the letter away, fidgeted, yet smiled. How well they
knew each other. And they used it only to sting and bully! Surely it
could be put to better purpose. Had she tried _everything_? Had
Sam fully understood? Sometimes she thought her early excuses had hurt
too much for her to admit their truth: much of his unkindness was not
intentional, only stupid; slow sympathy, dull sensibility; he did not
suffer, nor comprehend, like a savage or a child. If the possibility
of separation was new to her, would not he never have thought of it at
all? But now, might he not see? Was not his unwonted self-defence
itself admission of new enlightenment and approachability?
She sat long in the increasing dusk. Exhausted with struggle,
loneliness was on her, crying need of the children, return to the
consideration of many things. Admitting that at times it was right to
break everything, wrong not to, it was at least the last resort. Love,
of course, was over irrevocably; but were there not some things worth
saving? Could not she and Sam find some working basis?
What had made their being together most intolerable to her was their
persistence in the religion of a vanished god in whose empty
ceremonies alone they could now take part together. Of the sacred
image nothing was left but the feet of clay. Freed of that
desecration, she could cure or endure everything else; her
obligations, moreover, would hardly conflict at all.
Looking back at the pressures of nature, society, events, Sam's
persistence, she wondered at times if, from the beginning, she had
been any more responsible for her marriage than for the color of her
hair. There were many such explanations for Sam, too. Not that they
made her like him any better, feel him any more akin. But it was true
that between the fatalities of heredity and environment that "slight
particular difference" that makes the self had but short tether for
action and reaction. Oh, she could be generous enough to him if he did
not have to be part of herself!
She got up, lit the gas, shutting out the stars, and wrote: "I am
coming back to make one more and one last effort. _Won't you_?"
If he would only try!
Sam met her with the magnanimity of forgiveness, the consciousness of
kind forgetting. Her redeemed valuables were all in place. Everything
should be the same, in spite of--And she put the back of her hand
against his lips!
When he dressed for dinner the salvage of the three balls, the spoils
of war, were piled in his bureau drawer.
Still he hoped better for the roses by her plate. She had the maid
carry them out, explaining in her absence, "No gifts, please, Sam.
Substitutes will not do any longer."
Sam played with his fork, smiling, with lips only. How shockingly she
showed suffering. Separation had made her appearance unfamiliar; he
thought the change all recent. He took pains to compliment the
immediate improvement in the pastry, to give her the servants' money
unreminded as soon as they were alone.
How characteristic! Judith thought, wearily, letting the bills lie
where he laid them.
"That's one of the things for us to settle, Sam," she said, in her new
freedom and self-respect discarding the familiar little diplomacies by
which she was used to soothe, prepare, manage, the lord of the hearth.
"I am not going to ask for money in the future, nor depend on what you
happen to give." The manner was a simple statement of fact. "You must
make me an allowance through your bookkeeper."
Sam was lounging through his cigar. "So that's it? Still?" He smiled
confidentially at the smoke, puffing it from his lower lip. "As
accurately as I can recollect, my dear, I have told you seven thousand
and three times that I am not on a salary, and don't know from month
to month what I will make."
How unchanged everything was! Her determination stiffened. "But you
know what you have made. Base it on the year before. Or have a written
statement mailed me every month, and file my signature at the bank."
Not quite unchanged; for Sam took the cigar from his mouth and turned
slowly to look at her. If he had taken her return for capitulation and
had met it according to his code, things were not fitting in. "Really,
my dear! Really! What next? Evidently I have never done you justice;
you have positive genius in the game--of monopoly; first thing,
_I'll_ be begging from _you_."
Well, why not, as fairly? and why should he think better of her than
of himself? But it was too old to go over again. For a breath she
waited to see her further way. She had not planned this as the issue,
but the moment was obviously crucial, and offered what, in
international politics already awry, would constitute a good technical
opportunity. If her mirage of regeneration, her hope of an
understanding, perhaps even her love, had flung up any last afterglow
in this home-coming, it was over now. Indeed, now it seemed an old
grief, the present but confirmation concerning a lover ten years lost
at sea. She saw the whole man now clearly, the balance of her
accusations and excuses; he had neither the modern spirit of equality,
nor the medieval quixotism of honor and chivalry; appeal merely
stirred the elemental tyranny of strength and masculinity, held as a
"divine right"; weakness tempted an instinctive cruelty, half
unconscious, half defiant.
It was Sam who spoke first, abruptly, not laughing. Sam who was never
angry, was angry now. "I never have understood you in some ways. How a
woman like you can forever bring money between us! How you got tainted
with this modern female anarchy! You seem to forget that _I_ made
the money, it is _mine_. There is bound to be discussion; I never
knew any one so determined to have everything his own way. All the
same," the defence rested its case, "it takes two to quarrel, and I
won't."
No, his defence was only admission of conscious weakness. He was
afraid--of the solution she had discarded. She did not go back to it
now. But now she saw the way, the only way, to accomplish
reconstruction.
Judith looked at him steadily. Her voice was deadly quiet. "I am sure
I have made myself quite plain. We will never discuss this again. You
can let me know in the morning which arrangement you choose."
They faced each other with level eyes.
And Sam's shifted.
He never had real nerve, she realized; they didn't--that kind. How had
she managed to love him so long?
Late that night he knocked at her door with a formal proposition:
Would that do?--dumbly. She changed a point or two: _That_ would
do, and signified good night. Sam, looking at her face, turned away
from it, hesitated, turned back, broke. Fear increased his admiration,
and, to do him justice, the fear was not wholly for conventions and
comforts; the man had certain broad moralities and loyalties. A reflex
muscular action had set in to regain what he had lost. "Judith!
Judith!" he begged.
Her raised hand stopped him. "You are too late, Sam."
"My dear, you mustn't get the idea that I don't love you still."
"Love has nothing to do with it any more. Besides, it is never any use
to talk of love without justice."
He went out, dazed and aggrieved. He had always thought they got along
as well as most people. _He_ had not been cherishing grudges.
Womanlike, having met the emergency gallantly, after it was all over
Judith collapsed. The day of reckoning for which she had so long been
running up an account was on her. But the growing assurance rallied
her, that her going away and her coming back were equally means to her
success in failure.
The reality of their marriage could not have been saved. But they had
the children; and to the children was restored much of what their
father had largely spoiled in the first place, and she nearly
forfeited in the second. For the fact was that Sam did better; the
despot is always a moral coward, and always something of the slave to
a master. Moreover, her growing invulnerability to hurt through him
set, in large measure, the attitude of the household; everybody was
more comfortable. She discounted his opinions and complaints; but, in
considering the welfare of the greatest number, she sacrificed as
little as possible his individual comforts. His interests she studied.
And for the rest, she let him go his way and went hers.
Life is a perfect equation: if something is added or subtracted,
something is subtracted or added, so long as there _is_ life.
Judith got her poise again in time, as strong natures do after any
death; with some fibres weakened past mending, gray, but calm. If his
side of her nature was stunted, she seemed to blossom all the more
richly in other ways. She loved her children in proportion as she had
suffered and worked for them. After her domestic years, like so many
women, she took fresh start, physically and mentally. Her executive
ability found public outlet. She could admit friends again. Freedom
from the corrosion of antagonism was happiness. Without the struggle
to keep that love which must ask so much of its object, she could give
Sam more of that altruism which asks nothing.
THE GLASS DOOR
BY MARY TRACY EARLE
Charlotte and Emory Blake lived at the old Blake place, on the little
plateau at the foot of the Colton hill, in a vine-covered stone
cottage. The place had belonged to old George Blake. When it came into
Emory's hands he sold it to Uncle Billy Kerr, and used the money for a
course in a school of pharmacy. Later, Charlotte, who was then
Charlotte Hastings, bought it, and, after her marriage, finished
paying for it out of its own products, while her husband talked
politics or played chess in his drug-store. It was said that when
Blake was doing either of these things he was as likely as not to keep
a customer standing a half-hour before waiting on him,--and this not
so much out of interest in his discussion or his game as from complete
lack of interest in the business of selling drugs.
North Pass correctly interpreted this general nonchalance of Blake's
as a sign that he was an unwilling partner in the matrimonial venture
he had undertaken. Indeed, it was known that the engagement had hung
fire for years through no fault of Charlotte's, and everybody had
noticed that such mildly loverlike enthusiasm for her society as Blake
had shown before he went to the school of pharmacy had disappeared
from his manner when he returned. Charlotte had told people that they
should marry as soon as he came home, yet the wedding did not come off
for two years. During this time it was noticed that although she held
her head high and was fertile in good reasons for the delay, her
girlish look left her, her features sharpened, and her speech
developed an acid reaction; it was at this time, too, that she
bargained with Uncle Billy Kerr for the old Blake place, and also
borrowed money from the old man to put up a new house. When people saw
the house going up it was generally supposed that she was preparing
either to rent it or to live in it as an old maid; but when it was
completed, to the surprise of every one, Charlotte and Blake were
married and moved in.
The morning after the wedding Blake was in his drug-store playing
chess as languidly as ever, but Charlotte spent her whole day planting
a vegetable-garden, in a mood of unreckoning exaltation such as rarely
comes to a woman of her nature, and never comes to her but once. She
had felt no such blissful security when Blake and she were first
engaged. Blake was weak. She had felt it intensely even when her
infatuation for him was too fresh to permit her to reason, and a weak
man while unmarried is peculiarly liable to changes of affection. But,
on the other hand, a weak man once safely married is completely in the
power of his wife; during the last two years of their engagement
certain illusions regarding herself and Blake had fallen from her
eyes; she had stated both those facts plainly to herself, and they had
helped her to decide upon a course of action. There had been moments
when she had despised herself for using her stronger will to coerce
Blake into the fulfilment of his engagement, but on the morning after
the wedding these moments were forgotten, and, as she hoed and raked
and planted in the brisk air and the bright spring sunshine, her whole
existence seemed uplifted by the knowledge that she and Blake at last
belonged unquestionably to each other; that every output of her
strength was for their common comfort, and would continue to be as
long as they both should live.
As the first year of married life goes, Charlotte's first year was
fairly successful. She knew Blake's faults already, and had made up
her mind to them, and if there was a frank indifference in his quiet
languor, she had made up her mind to that, too. He was never unkind,
and there were times when some fresh evidence of her devotion to him
would touch him into an appreciation that was almost responsive. And
there were other times when she would find him looking at her with an
expression which any other observer might have classed as pity, but
which she counted as tenderness. On the whole, it seemed to her that
time was bringing them together, as she had counted that it would, and
with this hope her face lost its sharp outlines.
Her first heavy chagrin was at the time of her baby's birth. When
Blake came into the room to inquire for her, and she turned down the
bed-cover to show him the little bundle at her side, a look of pain
and aversion flashed across his face, and he moved away, begging her
not to show the baby to him until it was older. On another day she
tried to make him select a name for it, and he refused.
"Call it anything you please," he said at first, but she would not let
him go at that.
"I've been thinking," she suggested, with a hesitation that was
foreign to her,--"I've been thinking of calling her for your
mother--Dorcas."
They were alone in the room, and he was sitting by her bed, but
looking away from her into the corner of the room, while she looked
anxiously at him. At her words he started, flashing a keen glance at
her. "Why should we name her that?" he asked.
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