CHAPTER XVII
Edith, reflecting upon her first dinner party, wished Johnny had seenher, all dressed up. Then she pondered the possibilities of herallowance: If she was "going out," oughtn't she to have a real eveningdress? But this daring thought faded very soon, for there didn't seem tobe any dinner parties ahead. Mrs. Newbolt's supper table was, as Mauricesaid, sarcastically, the extent of the "Curtises' social whirl"--a factwhich did not trouble him in the least! He had his own social whirl. Hehad made a man-circle for himself; some of the fellows in the officewere his sort, he told Edith, and it was evident that their bachelorhabits appealed to him, for he dined out frequently; and when he did, hewas careful not to tell Eleanor where he was going, because once ortwice, when he had told her, she had called up the club or house onthe telephone about midnight to inquire if "Mr. Curtis had startedhome?" ... "I was worried about you, it was so late," she defendedherself against his irritated mortification. He used to report these stagparties to Edith, telling her some of the stories he had heard; itdidn't occur to him to tell any stories to Eleanor, because, as HenryHoughton had once said, Maurice and his wife didn't "have the same tastein jokes." When Edith chuckled over this or that witticism (or frownedat any opinion contrary to Maurice's opinion!) Eleanor sat in unsmilingsilence. It was about this time Maurice fell into the way of saying "we"to Edith: "We" will have tea in the garden; "we" will put in a lot ofbulbs on each side of the brick path; "we" will go down to the squareand hear the election returns. Occasionally he remembered to say, "Whydon't you come along, Eleanor?"
"No, thank you," she said; and sometimes, to herself, she added, "Hekeeps me out." The jealous woman always says this, never realizing thedeeper truth, which is that she keeps herself out! Maurice did notnotice how, all that winter, Eleanor was keeping herself out. She wassteadily retreating into some inner solitude of her own. No one noticedit, except Mrs. O'Brien--and perhaps fat, elderly, snarling Bingo, whomust sometimes, when his small pink tongue lapped her cheek, have tastedtears. By another year, Eleanor's mind had so utterly diverged fromMaurice's that not even his remorse (which he had grown used to, as onegrows used to some encysted thing) could achieve for them any unity ofliving. She bored him, and he hurt her; she loved him and tried toplease him; he didn't love her, but tried to be polite; he was not oftenangry with her, he wasn't fond enough of her to be angry! So, forgetfulof that security of the Stars--Truth!--to which he had once aspired, hegrew dully used to the arid safety of untruth,--though sometimes heswore softly to himself at the tiresome irony of the office nicknamewhich, with an occasional gilt hatchet, still persisted. He wouldremember that evening of panic at the Mortons', and think, lazily, "Shecan't possibly get on Lily's track!" So Lily lived in anxiousthriftiness at 16 Maple Street; and Maurice, no longer acutely afraid ofher, and only seeing her two or three times a year, was more or lessable to forget her, in his growing pleasure in Edith's presence in hishouse--a pleasure quite obvious to Eleanor.
As for Edith, she used to wonder, sometimes, why Eleanor was so "upstage"? (that was her latest slang); but it did not trouble her much,for she was too generous to put two and two together. "Eleanor hasnervous prostration," she used to tell herself, with good-natured excusefor some especial coldness; and she even tried, once in a while, "tomake things pleasant for poor old Eleanor!" "I lug her in," she toldJohnny.
"She's a dose," said Johnny.
"Yes," Edith agreed; "she's stupid. But I'm going to pull off a picnic,some Sunday, to cheer her up. 'Course you needn't come, if you don'twant to."
Johnny, looking properly bored, said, briefly, "I don't mind."
This was in mid-September. "Are you game for it, Eleanor?" Edith saidone night at dinner; "we can find some pleasant place by the river--"
"I know a bully place," Maurice said, "in the Medfield meadows;remember, Eleanor? We went there on our trolley wedding trip," heinformed Edith.
Eleanor, struggling between the pleasure of Maurice's "remember," andantagonism at sharing that sacred remembering with Edith, objected; "Itmay rain."
"Oh, come on," Edith rallied her: "be a sport! It won't kill you if itdoes rain!"
But Maurice, after his impulsive recollection of the "bully place,"remembered that the trolley car which would take them out to the river,must pass Lily's door; "I hope it will rain," he thought, uneasily.
However, on that serene September Sunday a week later, it didn't rain;and Maurice fell into the spirit of Edith's plans; for, after all, evenif the car did pass Lily's ugly little house, it wouldn't mean anythingto anybody! "I'll sit with my back to that side of the street," he toldhimself. "It's safe enough! And it will give Buster a good time." Hedidn't realize that he rather hankered for a good time himself; to besure, he felt a hundred years old! But money was no longer a very keenanxiety (he had passed his twenty-fifth birthday); and the day wasglittering with sunshine, and Edith would make coffee, and Eleanor wouldsing. Yes! Edith should have a good time!
They went clanging gayly along over the bridge, down Maple Street, andthrough the suburbs of Medfield until they came to the end of the carline, where they piled out, with all their impediments, and started forthe river and the big locust.
"You'll sing, Nelly," Maurice said--Eleanor's face lighted withpleasure;--"and I'll tell Edith how a girl ought to behave on herwedding trip, and you can instruct Johnny how to elope."
Then, with little Bingo springing joyously, but rather stiffly, ahead ofthem, they tramped across the yellowing stubble of the mowed field,talking of their coffee, and whether there would be too much wind fortheir fire--and all the while Maurice was aware of Lily at No. 16; andEleanor was remembering her hope of a time when she and Maurice would becoming here, and it would not be "just us"! and Johnny was thinking thatEdith was intelligent--for a woman; and Edith was telling herself that_this_ kind of thing was some sense!
Eleanor, sitting down under the old locust, watched the three youngpeople. She wondered when Maurice would tell her to sing. "The river isa lovely accompaniment, isn't it?" she hinted. No one replied.
"I'm going in wading after dinner," Edith announced; "what do you say,boys? Let's take off our shoes and stockings, and walk down to thesecond bridge. Eleanor can sit here and guard our things."
"I'm with you!" Maurice said; and Johnny said he didn't mind; butEleanor protested.
"You'll get your skirts wringing wet, Edith. And--I thought we were tosit here and sing?"
"Oh, you can sing any old time," Edith said, lifting the lid of thecoffee pot and stirring the brown froth with a convenient stick.
"And I'm just to look on?" Eleanor said.
"Why, wade, if you want to," her husband said; "It's safe enough toleave Edith's things here."
After that he was too much absorbed in shooing ants off the marmalade togive any thought to his wife. The luncheon (except to her) was the usualdelightful discomfort of balancing coffee cups on uncertain knees, andwaving off wasps, and upsetting glasses of water. Maurice talked aboutthe ball game, and Edith gossiped darkly of her teachers, and JohnnyBennett ate enormously and looked at Edith.
Eleanor neither ate nor gossiped; but she, too, watched Edith--andlistened. Bingo, in his mistress's lap, had snarled at Johnny when hetook Eleanor's empty cup away, which led Edith to say that he wasjealous.
"I don't call it 'jealous,'" Eleanor said, "to be fond of a person."
"You can't _really_ be fond of anybody, and be jealous," Edithannounced; "or if you are, it is just Bingoism."
This brought a quick protest from Eleanor, which was followed by theinevitable discussion; Edith began it by quoting, "'Love forgets self,and jealousy remembers self.'"
Maurice grinned and said nothing--it was enough for him to see Eleanorhit, _hard_! But Johnny protested:
"If your girl monkeys round with another fellow," he said, "you have aright to be jealous."
"Of course," said Eleanor.
"No, sir!" said Edith. "You have a right to be _unhappy._ If the otherfellow's nicer than you--I mean
if he has something that attracts herthat you haven't, of course you'd be unhappy! (though you could get busyand _be_ nice yourself.) Or, if he's not as nice as you, you'd beunhappy, because you'd be so awfully disappointed in her. But there's nojealousy about _that_ kind of thing! Jealousy is hogging all the lovefor yourself. Like Bingo! And _I_ call it plain garden selfishness--andno sense, either, because you don't gain anything by it. Do you thinkyou do, Maurice? ... For Heaven's sake, hand me the sandwiches!"
Maurice didn't express his thoughts; he just roared with laughter.Eleanor reddened; Johnny, handing the sandwiches, said that, thoughEdith generally could reason pretty well--for a woman--in thisparticular matter she was 'way off.
"You are long on logic, Edith," Maurice agreed; "but short on humannature; (she hasn't an idea how the shoe fits!)."
"The reason I'm so up on jealousy," Edith explained, complacently, "isbecause yesterday, in English Lit., our professor worked off a lot ofquotations on us. Listen to this (only I can't say just exactly thewords!): '_Though jealousy be produced by love, as ashes by fire, yetjealousy_'--oh, what does come next? Oh yes; I know--'_yet jealousyextinguishes love, as ashes smother flames_.'"
"Who said that?" Maurice said.
Edith said she'd forgotten: "But I bet it's true. I'd simply hate ajealous person, no matter how much they loved me! Wouldn't you, Eleanor?Wouldn't you hate Maurice if he was jealous of you? I declare I don'tsee how you can be so fond of Bingo!"
Maurice, suddenly ashamed of himself for his pleasure in seeing Eleanorhit, was saying, inaudibly, "Good Lord! what will she say next?" To keepher quiet, he said, good-naturedly, "Don't you want to sing, Nelly?"
She said, very low, "No." Her throat ached with the pain of knowing thatthe one little contribution she could make to the occasion was notreally wanted!
Maurice did not urge her. He and the other two took off their shoes andstockings; and went with squeals across the stubble, down a steep bank,to a pebbly point of sand, round which a sunny swirl of water chatteredloudly, then went romping off into sparkling shallows. Edith's liftedskirt, as she stepped into the current, assured her against the wettingEleanor had foreseen, and also showed her pretty legs--and Eleanor, onthe bank, her tensely trembling hand cuddling Bingo against her knee,"guarded" her things! It was at this moment that her old, unrecognizedenvy of Youth turned into a perfectly recognizable fear of Age. Edithwas a woman now, not a child! "And I--dislike her!" Eleanor said toherself. She sat there alone, thinking of Edith's defects--her bigmouth, her bad manners, her loud voice; and as she thought,--watchingthe waders all the while with tear-blurred eyes until a turn in thecurrent hid them--she felt this new dislike flowing in upon her: "Hetalks to her; and forgets all about me!" ... She was deeply hurt. "Hesays she has 'brains.' ... He doesn't mind it when she says she 'doesn'tcare for music,' which is rude to me! And she talks about jealousy! Sheknows I'm jealous. Any woman who loves her husband is jealous."
Of course this pathetically false opinion made it impossible for her torealize that jealousy is just a form of self-love, nor could she enlargeupon Edith's naive generalization and say that, if a woman suffersbecause she is not the equal of the rival who gains her lover'slove--_that_ is not jealousy! It is the anguish of recognizing her owndefects, and it may be very noble. If she suffers because the rival isher inferior, _that_ is not jealousy; it is the anguish of recognizingdefects in her lover, and it, too, is noble, for she is unhappy, notbecause he has slighted her, but because he has slighted himself!Jealousy has no such noble elements; it is the unhappiness that Bingoknows--an ignoble agony! ... But Eleanor, like many pitiful wives, didnot know this. Sitting there on the bank of the river, withoutaspiration for herself or regret for Maurice, she knew only the anguishof being neglected. "He wouldn't have left me six years ago," she said;"He doesn't even ask me if I want to wade! I don't; but he didn't _ask_me. He just went off with her!"
Suddenly, her fingers trembling, she began to take off her shoes andstockings. She _would_ do what Edith did! ... It was a tremor ofaspiration!--an effort to develop in herself a quality he liked inEdith. She went, barefooted, with wincing cautiousness, and with Bingostepping gingerly along beside her, across the mowed grass; then,haltingly, down the bank to the sandy edge of the river; there, whilethe little dog looked up at her anxiously, she dipped a white, uncertainfoot into the water--and as she hesitated to essay the yielding mud, andthe slimy things under the stones, she heard the returning splash ofwading feet. A minute later the three youngsters appeared, Edith'sskirts now very well above the danger line of wetness, and the two menoffering eager guiding hands, which were entirely disdained! Then as,from under the leaning trees, they rounded the bend, there came anastonished chorus:
_"Why, look at Eleanor!"_
"Your skirt's in the water," Edith warned her; "hitch it up, and 'comeon in--the water's fine!'"
She shook her head, and turned to climb up the bank.
"'The King of France,'" Edith quoted, satirically, "'marched _down_ ahill, and then marched up again!'"
Eleanor was silent. When the three began to put on their shoes andstockings, Eleanor, putting on her own, her skirt wet and drabbled abouther ankles, heard Maurice and Johnny offering to tie Edith'sshoestrings--a task which Edith, with condescending giggles, permitted.Both of the boys--for Maurice seemed suddenly as much of a boy asJohnny!--went on their knees to tie, and re-tie, the brown ribbons,Maurice with gleeful and ridiculous deference.
"Want me to tie your shoestrings for you, Nelly?" he said over hisshoulder.
"I am capable of tying my own, thank you," she said, so icily that thethree playfellows looked at one another and Maurice, reddening sharply,said:
"Give us a song, Nelly!" But she sitting with clenched hands and tenselysilent, shook her head. She was too wounded to speak. For the rest ofthe poor little picnic, with its gathering up of fragments and burningpaper napkins--the conversation was labored and conscious.
On the trolley going home, Edith was the only one who tried to talk;Eleanor, holding Bingo in her lap, was dumb; and Johnny--hunting aboutfor an excuse to "get away from the whole blamed outfit!" only said"M-m" now and then. But Maurice said nothing at all. After all, what cana man say when his wife has made a fool of herself?
"Even Lily would have had more sense!" he thought.
The Vehement Flame Page 17
