Читать книгу Man of Strife - Grove Wilson - Страница 7

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WHEN he entered the house, he found his wife reading in the living-room. They had been married five years, long enough to banish illusions. He knew now that the angel he had married was ignorant, inept, slothful. Recently, the initial charm had been quickened by her impending motherhood. Birth would be an experience—the flaunting of a daring mystery. Might it not pluck scales from her eyes? It at least lent her, for him, a touch of unreality, a distinguishing characteristic.

At his entrance she raised her dark eyes—she had her coloring from her French mother—and murmured:

“Cold, isn’t it? D’you walk home? Dinner’s waiting.”

He caught the reproof, peevish, ill-timed. The glamour fled. She was no longer mother incarnate, but an ordinary pretty, spoiled girl, to whom there were no doors, closed or open. How could there be doors, or mysteries, in a world that was flat? Yes, that was it. Along with other millions, she lived in two dimensions and was helpless before the ordeals that rushed upon her from below or above her plane.

At dinner she told him, “Clarence was here. G’ing send your mother down East. I’m glad of it. Everything that can be done, should be done. Don’t you think?”

Bruce twisted uneasily on his chair. He didn’t want to flame out at her. It would be no use. “Sure,” he muttered.

“Clarence seemed to think you opposed the plan. I told him not to be ridiculous.”

“I did, I do. But it doesn’t matter. She’s going.”

“I never in my life heard anything so funny. Don’t you want her to have a chance, don’t you want her to get well?”

“Good God!” Bruce cried getting to his feet. At the door, he checked himself. “Sorry, Cora. But I’m raw tonight, actually raw. Don’t mind. I’ll go over and see mother. Be all right when I get back.”

“But you haven’t finished your dinner—you haven’t eaten a thing. I don’t mind your ‘rawness’ but you must eat. Sit down.”

In that moment he envied Gurth his brass color. He must eat or endure a scene. He sat down.

“I don’t mind your ‘rawness,’ ” she repeated, “but I think you might be more considerate—in my condition.”

He thought: “That’s part of the feminine instinct for babies—the power it gives them to tyrannize.”

“I know, Cora. You mightn’t think it but I try, I do try. When people decide to have a baby they should give their whole time to that one thing—go into a retreat so nothing could disturb or upset them.”

“Yes? That wouldn’t be very nice for the mother. I don’t know how you feel, but I like to see people.... Tommy was here. She’s a dear. It does me so much good to see her. She’s making the cutest—you aren’t hearing a word I’m saying.”

“Every syllable. Tommy’s all right. I’m glad she’s friendly. Blanche is coming soon.”

“Oh,” very dryly. “Blanche. That’ll be nice.”

“What have you against Blanche? I thought——”

“Nothing. She’s nice enough. She isn’t Tommy, no matter what you think.”

The jealous note was unmistakable. “I? I don’t think anything about it. As a matter of fact, I like Tommy better. She’s much more vivacious—a better mind.”

“Only she hasn’t big gray eyes.”

“Are you trying to quarrel, Cora?”

“Me? Who brought Blanche’s name into the conversation?”

“Oh, well, I’ll drop it out then.”

“But not out of your mind.”

For the second time he rose from the table, but this time not abruptly. He stood at her side, his tolerance restored. Why is a man always flattered when his wife is jealous without cause?

“Stop fretting, little woman. I don’t care a snap of my finger for Blanche, and you know it.”

“Nor for me, either. You don’t care for anyone.”

The hand that was resting on her shoulder froze away from it. “I’m going over to see mother, but I shan’t be long. You won’t mind?”

“Oh, no, of course not. It’s so pleasant being here alone.”

“I can’t help it, Cora. I have to go.”

“When is she going to the sanitarium?”

“I don’t know. Soon, I suppose.”

“All right. Go ’long. But don’t stay. I’ll sit up for you.”

Bruce reflected as he walked across town that Cora’s question had been illuminating. That was why she had fallen in with Clarence’s plan: it would rid her of a rival. She had no faculty for thinking farther than that. What the absent mother would be to the hopeless, suffering son, she could not comprehend. He thought of himself five years earlier and the flash of keen light that a gesture had thrown upon his life—upon all life....

His mother opposed his marriage—this particular marriage. “Cora is not the girl for you, Bruce,” she wrote. “Won’t you believe that I know my son better than he knows himself? Or perhaps you think I am letting something stand in the way of my desire for your happiness? Don’t think that, Bruce. I cannot think it myself—can find no reason to think it. Don’t you see, Bruce, that you are only a child, a little boy who has never had any time to play? One can’t go through life without a play-time. Well, a man can’t. A woman’s ordeals start so early and last so long, she has hardly ever any time to think of play. You’ll want to play, Bruce, and the prayer of my heart is that you get a chance to play freely and innocently. When that need comes, my dear son, you won’t be able to play if you are married to Cora.”

He didn’t understand what she meant by a need to play. Life was a serious business, a task requiring all one’s attention, all of one’s most earnest and deliberate attention. He was still too young to relax, too young to sense the power of tranquillity. It did not occur to him that the sun, standing dominantly motionless, forever quickened the universe.

With serious zest, he married and brought his bride home. Through a misunderstanding as to the time of the train’s arrival there was no one at the station to meet them. Their spirits were not daunted and through the bright June sunshine, they walked home, carelessly happy. Just opposite a stone church, with its entrance bowered in roses, they saw his mother and sister coming to meet them. As his mother saw and recognized them, she half turned her back, as though this physical evidence of her loss were unbearable. Bruce stopped short, agonizingly blinded by the glare of that movement. In that instant he saw into his mother’s heart, depth within depth, brilliantly illuminated. He saw, transfigured there, renunciation, struggling faith, dying hope, brooding despair, pain and regret and sacrifice. Over all, intertwined and veiling all, was love, a calm, sure passion, quieting the tumult in a distracted soul. These things were presented to him, not as in a vision, but palpable, real, vital—figures of life standing at his mother’s side. Within him there was a fierce strife of emotions that, quieting, left him looking with new eyes upon a new world. It was as though he had experienced some permanent devastating change. So fleeting was the cause of the catastrophe, that Cora noticed nothing. Obviously, she was not traveling the road to Damascus.

Not once during the five years that had passed since that home-coming had his mother, by word or look, reproached him. Not once had she voiced a criticism of Cora. Not for an instant had the affection she gave each of them wavered. She had buried her cross and she was not of the stuff that sets about profitless deep digging.