Virginia

At the hotel she found that Oliver had not come in, and after a belated luncheon of tea and toast in the dining-room, she went upstairs and sat down to watch for his return between the Nottingham lace curtains at the window. From the terrific height, on which she felt like a sparrow, she could see a row of miniature puppets passing back and forth at the corner of Fifth Avenue. For hours she tried in vain to distinguish the figure of Oliver in the swiftly moving throng, and in spite of herself she could not repress a feeling of pleasant excitement. She knew that Oliver would think that she ought to be depressed by his failure, yet she could not prevent the return of a child-like confidence in the profound goodness of life. Everything would be right, everything was eternally bound to be right from the beginning. That inherited casuistry of temperament, which had confused the pleasant with the true for generations, had become in her less a moral conviction than a fixed quality of soul. To dwell even for a minute on "the dark side of things" awoke in her the same instinct of mortal sin that she had felt at the discovery that Oliver was accustomed to "break" the Sabbath by reading profane literature.

When, at last, as the dusk fell in the room, she heard his hasty step in the corridor, a wave of joyful expectancy rose in her heart and trembled for utterance on her lips. Then the door opened; he came from the gloom into the pale gleam of light that shone in from the window, and with her first look into his face her rising joy ebbed quickly away. A new element, something for which neither her training nor her experience had prepared her, entered at that instant into her life. Not the external world, but the sacred inner circle in which they had loved and known each other was suddenly clouded. Everything outside of this was the same, but the fact confronted her there as grimly as a physical sore. The evil struck at the very heart of her love, since it was not life, but Oliver that had changed.

CHAPTER VI

THE SHADOW

Oliver had changed; for months this thought had lain like a stone on her heart. She went about her life just as usual, yet never for an instant during that long winter and spring did she lose consciousness of its dreadful presence. It was the first thing to face her in the morning, the last thing from which she turned when, worn out with perplexity, she fell asleep at night. During the day the children took her thoughts away from it for hours, but never once, not even while she heard Harry's lessons or tied the pink or the blue bows in Lucy's and Jenny's curls, did she ever really forget it. Since the failure of Oliver's play, which had seemed to her such a little thing in itself, something had gone out of their marriage, and this something was the perfect understanding which had existed between them. There were times when her sympathy appeared to her almost to infuriate him. Even her efforts towards economy – for since their return from New York she had put Marthy into the kitchen and had taken entire charge of the children – irritated rather than pleased him. And the more she irritated him, the more she sought zealously, by innumerable small attentions, to please and to pacify him. Instead of leaving him in the solitude which he sought, and which might have restored him to his normal balance of mind, she became possessed, whenever he shut himself in his study or went alone for a walk, with a frenzied dread lest he should permit himself to "brood" over the financial difficulties in which the wreck of his ambition had placed them. She, who feared loneliness as if it were the smallpox, devised a thousand innocent deceptions by which she might break in upon him when he sat in his study and discover whether he was actually reading the papers or merely pretending to do so. In her natural simplicity, it never occurred to her to penetrate beneath the surface disturbances of his mood. These engrossed her so completely that the cause of them was almost forgotten. Dimly she realized that this strange, almost physical soreness, which made him shrink from her presence as a man with weak eyes shrinks from the light, was the outward sign of a secret violence in his soul, yet she ministered helplessly to each passing explosion of temper as if it were the cause instead of the result of his suffering. Introspection, which had lain under a moral ban in a society that assumed the existence of an unholy alliance between the secret and the evil, could not help her because she had never indulged in it. Partly because of the ingenuous candour of the Pendleton nature, and partly owing to the mildness of a climate which made it more comfortable for Dinwiddians to live for six months of the year on their front porches and with their windows open, she shared the ingrained Southern distrust of any state of mind which could not cheerfully support the observation of the neighbours. She knew that he had turned from his work with disgust, and if he wasn't working and wasn't reading, what on earth could he be doing alone unless he had, as she imagined in desperation, begun wilfully to "nurse his despondency?" Even the rector couldn't help her here – for his knowledge of character was strictly limited to the types of the soldier and the churchman, and his son-in-law did not belong, he admitted, in either of these familiar classifications. At the bottom of his soul the good man had always entertained for Oliver something of the kindly contempt with which his generation regarded a healthy male, who, it suspected, would decline either to preach a sermon or to kill a man in the cause of morality. But on one line of treatment father and daughter were passionately agreed – whatever happened, it was not good that Oliver should be left by himself for a minute. When he was in the bank, of course, where Cyrus had found him a place as a clerk on an insignificant salary, it might be safely assumed that he was cheered by the unfailing company of his fellow-workers; but when he came home, the responsibility of his distraction and his cure rested upon Virginia and the children. And since her opinion of her own power to entertain was modest, she fell back with a sublime confidence on the unrivalled brilliancy and the infinite variety of the children's prattle. During the spring, as he grew more and more indifferent and depressed, she arranged that the children should be with him every instant while he was in the house. She brought Jenny's high chair to the table in order that the adorable infant might breakfast with her father; she kept Harry up an hour later at night so that he might add the gaiety of his innocent mirth to their otherwise long and silent evenings. Though she would have given anything to drop into bed as soon as the babies were undressed, she forced herself to sit up without yawning until Oliver turned out the lights, bolted the door, and remarked irritably that she ought to have been asleep hours ago.

"You aren't used to sitting up so late, Virginia; it makes you dark under the eyes," he said one June night as he came in from the porch where he had been to look up at the stars.

"But I can't go to bed until you do, darling. I get so worried about you," she answered.

"Why in heaven's name, should you worry about me? I am all right," he responded crossly.

She saw her mistake, and with her unvarying sweetness, set out to rectify it.

"Of course, I know you are – but we have so little time together that I don't want to miss the evenings."

"So little!" he echoed, not unkindly, but in simple astonishment.

"I mean the children sit up late now, and of course we can't talk while they are playing in the room."

"Don't you think you might get them to bed earlier? They are becoming rather a nuisance, aren't they?"

He said it kindly enough, yet tears rushed to her eyes as she looked at him. It was impossible for her to conceive of any mood in which the children would become "rather a nuisance" to her, and the words hurt her more than he was ever to know. It seemed the last straw that she could not bear, said her heart as she turned away from him. She had borne the extra work without a complaint; she had pinched and scraped, if not happily, at least with a smile; she had sat up while her limbs ached with fatigue and the longing to be in bed – and all these things were as nothing to the tragic confession that the children had become "rather a nuisance." Of the many trials she had had to endure, this, she told herself, was the bitterest.

Though her feet burned and her muscles throbbed with fatigue, she lay awake for hours, with her eyes wide open in the moonlight. All the small harassing duties of the morrow, which usually swarmed like startled bees through her brain at night, were scattered now by this vague terror which assumed no definite shape. The delicacy of Lucy's chest, Harry's stubborn refusal to learn to spell, and even the harrowing certainty that the children's appetites were fast outstripping the frugal fare she provided – these stinging worries had flown before a new anxiety which was the more poignant, she felt, because she could not give it a name. The Pendleton idealism was powerless to dispel this malign shadow which corresponded so closely to that substance of evil whose very existence the Pendleton idealism eternally denied. To battle with a delusion was virtually to admit one's belief in its actuality, and this, she reflected passionately, lying awake there in the darkness, was the last thing she was prepared at the moment to do. Oliver was changed, and yet her duty was plainly to fortify herself with the consoling assurance that, whatever happened, Oliver could never really change. Deep down in her that essential fibre of her being which was her soul – which drew its vitality from the racial structure of which it was a part, and yet which distinguished and separated her from every other person and object in the universe – this essential fibre was compacted of innumerable Pendleton refusals to face the reality. Even with Lucy's chest and Harry's lessons and the cost of food, she had always felt a soothing conviction that by thinking hard enough about them she could make them every one come out right in the morning. As a normal human being in a world which was not planned on altruistic principles, it was out of the question that she should entirely escape an occasional hour of despondency; but with the narrow outlook of women who lead intense personal lives, it would have been impossible for her to see anything really wrong in the universe while Oliver and all the children were well. God was in His heaven as long as the affairs of her household worked together for good. "It can't be that he is different – I must have imagined it," she thought now, breathing softly lest she should disturb the sleeping Oliver. "It is natural that he should be worried about his debts, and the failure of the play went very hard with him, of course – but if he appears at times to have grown bitter, it must be only that I have come to exact too much of him. I oughtn't to expect him to take the same interest in the children that I do – "

Then, rising softly on her elbow, she smoothed the sheet over Jenny's dimpled little body, and bent her ear downward to make sure that the child was breathing naturally in her sleep. In spite of her depression that rosy face framed in hair like spun yellow silk, aroused in her a feeling of ecstasy. Whenever she looked at one of her children – at her youngest child especially – her maternal passion seemed to turn to flame in her blood. Even first love had not been so exquisitely satisfying, so interwoven of all imaginable secret meanings of bliss. Jenny's thumb was in her mouth, and removing it gently, Virginia bent lower and laid her hot cheek on the soft shining curls. Some vital power, an emanation from that single principle of Love which ruled her life, passed from the breath of the sleeping child into her body. Peace descended upon her, swift and merciful like sleep, and turning on her side, she lay with her hand on Jenny's crib, as though in clinging to her child she clung to all that was most worth while in the universe.

The next night Oliver telephoned from the Treadwells' that he would not be home to supper, and when he came in at eleven o'clock, he appeared annoyed to find her sitting up for him.

"You ought to have gone to bed, Virginia. You look positively haggard," he said.

"I wasn't sleepy. Mother came in for a few minutes, and we put the children to bed. Jenny wanted to say good-night to you, and she cried when I told her you had gone out. I believe she loves you better than she does anybody in the world, Oliver."

He smiled with something of the casual brilliancy which had first captivated her imagination. In spite of the melancholy which had clouded his charm of late, he had lost neither his glow of physical well-being nor the look of abounding intellectual energy which distinguished him from all other men whom she knew. It was this intellectual energy, she sometimes thought, which purified his character of that vein of earthiness which she had looked upon as the natural, and therefore the pardonable, attribute of masculine human nature.

"If she keeps her looks, she'll leave her mother behind some day," he answered. "You need a new dress, Jinny. I hate that old waist and skirt. Why don't you wear the swishy blue silk I always liked on you?"

"I made it over for Lucy, dear. She had to have a dress to wear to Lily Carrington's birthday party, and I didn't want to buy one. It looks ever so nice on her."

"Doubtless, but I like it better on you."

"It doesn't matter what I wear, but Lucy is so fond of pretty things, and children dress more now than they used to do. What did Susan have to say?"

He had turned to bolt the front door, and while his back was towards her, she raised her hand to smother a yawn. All day she had been on her feet, except for the two hours when she had worked at her sewing-machine, while Harry and Jenny were taking their morning nap. She had not had time to change her dress until after supper, and she had felt so tired then that it had not seemed worth while to do so. There was, in fact, nothing to change to, since she had made over the blue silk, except an old black organdie, cut square in the neck, which she had worn in the months before Jenny's birth. As a girl she had loved pretty clothes; but there were so many other things to think about now, and from the day that her first child had come to her it had seemed to matter less and less what she wore or how she appeared. Nothing had really counted in life except the supreme privilege of giving herself, body and soul, in the service of love. All that she was – all that she had – belonged to Oliver and to his children, so what difference could it make to them, since she gave herself so completely, whether she wore new clothes or old?

When he turned to her, she had smothered the yawn, and was smiling. "Is Aunt Belinda just the same?" she asked, for he had not answered her question about Susan.

"To tell the truth, I forgot to ask," he replied, with a laugh. "Susan seemed very cheerful, and John Henry was there, of course. It wouldn't surprise me to hear any day that they are to be married. By the way, Virginia, why did you never tell me what a good rider you are? Abby Goode says you would have been a better horsewoman than she is if you hadn't given up riding."

"Why, I haven't been in the saddle for years. I stopped when we had to sell my horse Bess, and that was before you came back to Dinwiddie. How did Abby happen to be there?"

"She stopped to see Susan about something, and then we got to talking – the bunch of us. John Henry asked me to exercise his horse for him when he doesn't go. I rather hope I'll get a chance to go fox-hunting in the autumn. Abby was talking about it."

"Has she changed much? I haven't seen her for years. She is hardly ever in Dinwiddie."

"Well, she's fatter, but it's becoming to her. It makes her look softer. She's a bit coarse, but she tells a capital story. I always liked Abby."

"Yes, I always liked Abby, too," answered Virginia, and it was on the tip of her tongue to add that Abby had always liked Oliver. "If he hadn't seen me, perhaps he might have married her," she thought, and the remote possibility of such bliss for poor defrauded Abby filled her with an incredible tenderness. She would never have believed that bouncing, boisterous Abby Goode could have aroused in her so poignant a sympathy.

He appeared so much more cheerful than she had seen him since his disastrous trip to New York, that, moved by an unselfish impulse of gratitude towards the cause of it, she put out her hand to him, while he raised his arm to extinguish the light.

"I am so glad about the horse, dear," she said. "It will be nice for you to go sometimes with Abby."

"Why couldn't you come too, Jinny?"

"Oh, I shouldn't have time – and, besides, I gave it up long ago. I don't think a mother has any business on horseback."

"All the same I wish you wouldn't let yourself go to pieces. What have you done to your hands? They used to be so pretty."

She drew them hastily away, while the tears rose in a mist to her eyes. It was like a man – it was especially like Oliver – to imagine that she could clean up half a house and take charge of three children, yet keep her hands as white and soft as they had been when she was a girl and did nothing except wait for a lover. In a flash of memory, she saw the reddened and knotted hands of her mother, and then a procession of hands belonging to all the mothers of her race that had gone before her. Were her own but a single pair in that chain of pathetic hands that had worked in the exacting service of Love?

"It is so hard to keep them nice," she said; but her heart cried, "What do my hands matter when it is for your sake that I have spoiled them?" With her natural tendency to undervalue the physical pleasures of life, she had looked upon her beauty as a passing bloom which would attract her lover to the veiled wonders of her spirit. Fleshly beauty as an end in itself would have appeared to her as immoral a cult as the wilful pursuit of a wandering desire in the male.

"I never noticed until to-night what pretty hands Abby has," he said, innocently enough, as he turned off the gas.

A strange sensation – something which was so different from anything she had ever felt before that she could not give it a name – pierced her heart like an arrow. Then it fled as suddenly as it had come, and left her at ease with the thought: "Abby has had nothing to hurt her hands. Why shouldn't they be pretty?" But not for Abby's hands would she have given up a single hour when she had washed Jenny's little flannels or dug enchanted garden beds with Harry's miniature trowel.

"She used to have a beautiful figure," she said with perfect sincerity.

"Well, she's got it still, though she's a trifle too large for my taste. You can't help liking her – she's such jolly good company, but, somehow, she doesn't seem womanly. She's too fond of sport and all that sort of thing."

His ideal woman still corresponded to the type which he had chosen for his mate; for true womanliness was inseparably associated in his mind with those qualities which had awakened for generations the impulse of sexual selection in the men of his race. Though he enjoyed Abby, he refused stubbornly to admire her, since evolution, which moves rapidly in the development of the social activities, had left his imagination still sacredly cherishing the convention of the jungle in the matter of sex. He saw woman as dependent upon man for the very integrity of her being, and beyond the divine fact of this dependency, he did not see her at all. But there was nothing sardonic in his point of view, which had become considerably strengthened by his marriage to Virginia, who shared it. It was one of those mental attitudes, indeed, which, in the days of loose thinking and of hazy generalizations, might have proved its divine descent by its universality. Oliver, his Uncle Cyrus, the rector, and honest John Henry, however they may have differed in their views of the universe or of each other, were one at least in accepting the historical dogma of the supplementary being of woman.

And yet, so strange is life, so inexplicable are its contradictions, there were times when Oliver's ideal appeared almost to betray him, and the intellectual limitations of Virginia bored rather than delighted him. Habit, which is a sedative to a phlegmatic nature, acts not infrequently as a positive irritant upon the temperament of the artist; and since he had turned from his work in a passion of disgust at the dramatic obtuseness of his generation, he had felt more than ever the need of some intellectual outlet for the torrent of his imagination. As a wife, Virginia was perfect; as a mental companion, she barely existed at all. She was, he had come to recognize, profoundly indifferent to the actual world. Her universe was a fiction except the part of it that concerned him or the children. He had never forgotten that he had read his play to her one night shortly after Jenny's birth, and she had leaned forward with her chin on her palm and a look in her face as if she were listening for a cry which never came from the nursery. Her praise had had the sound of being recited by rote, and had aroused in him a sense of exasperation which returned even now whenever she mentioned his work. In the days of his courtship the memory of her simplicities clung like an exquisite bouquet to the intoxicating image of her; but in eight years of daily intimacy the flavour and the perfume of mere innocence had evaporated. The quality which had first charmed him was, perhaps, the first of which he had grown weary. He still loved Virginia, but he had ceased to talk to her. "If you go into the refrigerator, Oliver, don't upset Jenny's bottle of milk," she said, looking after him as he turned towards the dining-room.

Her foot was already on the bottom step of the staircase, for she had heard, or imagined that she had heard, a sound from the nursery, and she was impatient to see if one of the children had awakened and got out of bed. All the evening, while she had changed the skin-tight sleeves of the eighties to the balloon ones of the nineties in an old waist which she had had before her marriage and had never worn because it was unbecoming, her thoughts had been of Harry, whom she had punished for some act of flagrant rebellion during the afternoon. Now she was eager to comfort him if he was awake and unhappy, or merely to cuddle and kiss him if he was fast asleep in his bed.

At the top of the staircase she saw the lowered lamp in the nursery, and beside it stood Harry in his little nightgown, with a toy ship in his arms.

"Mamma, I'm tired of bed and I want to play."

"S – sush, darling, you will wake Jenny. It isn't day yet. You must go back to bed."

"But I'm tired of bed."

"You won't be after I tuck you in."

"Will you sit by me and tell me a story?"

"Yes, darling, I'll tell you a story if you'll promise not to talk."

Her eyes were heavy with sleep, and her limbs trembled from the exhaustion of the long June day; but she remembered the punishment of the afternoon, and as she looked at him her heart seemed melting with tenderness.

"And you'll promise not to go away until I'm fast asleep? – you'll promise, mamma?"

"I'll promise, precious. No, you mustn't take your ship to bed with you. That's a darling."

Then, as Oliver was heard coming softly up the stairs for fear of arousing the children, she caught Harry's moist hand in hers and stole with him into the nursery.

To Virginia in the long torrid days of that summer there seemed time for neither anxiety nor disappointment. Every minute of her eighteen waking hours was spent in keeping the children washed, dressed, and good-humoured. She thought of herself so little that it never occurred to her to reflect whether she was happy or unhappy – hardly, even, whether she was awake or asleep. Twice a week John Henry's horse carried Oliver for a ride with Abby and Susan, and on these evenings he stayed so late that Virginia ceased presently even to make a pretence of waiting supper. Several times, on September afternoons, when the country burned with an illusive radiance as if it were seen through a mirage, she put on her old riding-habit, which she had hunted up in the attic at the rectory, and mounting one of Abby's horses, started to accompany them; but her conscience reproached her so bitterly at the thought that she was seeking pleasure away from the children, that she hurried homeward across the fields before the others were ready to turn. As with most women who are born for motherhood, that supreme fact had not only absorbed the emotional energy of her girlhood, but had consumed in its ecstatic flame even her ordinary capacities for enjoyment. While fatherhood left Oliver still a prey to dreams and disappointments, the more exclusive maternal passion rendered Virginia profoundly indifferent to every aspect of life except the intimate personal aspect of her marriage. She couldn't be happy – she couldn't even be at ease – while she remembered that the children were left to the honest, yet hardly tender, mercies of Marthy.