the next day george cutter’s spirits had revived and with them a certain hope. he resolved to have it out with helen. she was not reasonable. few women were, but he knew that she loved him. he might count on that.
in the evening after dinner they sat before the fire in the parlor. helen wore a dark dress, plain, durable, unbecoming. he considered this dress, the woman in it, with a coolly impartial eye. his heart failed him. he doubted if she could pull it off if she would. if, for example, she could be made to realize the importance of dressing handsomely and extravagantly every day. if she could be induced to live the life she would have to live. he admitted it was a sort of puppet existence. but as necessary to his success as the dummies in a shop window are to advertise the owner’s trade. ten thousand women did it all the time, liked it. still helen was not one of them. she was removed by nature, every instinct, from that class. he was half a mind to give up the whole thing. at this moment, helen[145] looked across at him. there was a hint of tears in her eyes, a fugitive smile on her lips as if this smile pleaded with him for a certain forgiveness.
he laughed. he stood up and took her in his arms.
“am i all right now, george?” she asked, as if she had been shriven by this embrace.
“absolutely,” he assured her.
they sat down. helen sighed, being now full of that sad peace which makes sighs.
“the trouble with you is, dear, that you are never wrong. that cuts you out of life. we who are in the thick of it must be a little wrong,” he explained.
“i suppose so,” she agreed.
“not so rigid. we can’t be,” he said.
she agreed to that also.
“if you could be a little less perfect, it would help me a lot.”
she smiled, implying that in that case she was in a position to help him. but what could she do? she had often felt how little service she was.
her meekness intrigued him. “how would you like to live in new york?” he asked.
“i would not like it,” she answered after a pause.
he might have known what her answer would[146] be, cutter reflected bitterly. his face reddened. his anger was rising.
“why? do you want to live there?” she asked, feeling this silence directed against her.
“oh, it makes no difference what i want, because if we lived on separate planets you could not differ more widely than you do from my way of life and my desires, my very needs,” he exclaimed.
this was unjust, she knew. still she felt guilty.
“george, i can’t pretend that i should like to live in new york, but if you want to go there, i will go. i must not stand ever in the way of your success.”
he sat in brooding, bitter silence, staring into the fire.
“we might live very quietly; at least i could, couldn’t i?” she asked timidly, ready to make every other concession.
“no; you could not. you’d have to play the game as other women do. you would not do that. you—your whole mind is against the idea—you would not adjust yourself. you would not even try to adjust yourself to the world as it is. you want to make one yourself, six hundred feet long and seven hundred feet wide with this house[147] in the middle of it. you have done it. look at it,” he exclaimed, with a glance that swept this room like a conflagration.
this was the first time she had suspected that the parlor was not furnished according to his liking. she was that simple, and he had been that patient.
“you have created a place to live in where nobody can live except as you do,” he went on.
he took no notice of the fact that she sat with one hand on her breast, staring at him with a look of mortal pain.
“well, i will be more considerate of you than you can be of me, helen,” he began again. “we will drop the idea of going to new york. you like this place. i might be contented here myself, if i had nothing to do except keep it. but i have my business, a man’s name and reputation to make. i will stay here when my affairs don’t require me to be somewhere else. you understand,” giving her an eye thrust.
“yes,” she answered, meeting this thrust steadily. she was dying to her happiness, not without reproach, but without fear.
he crossed his legs and swung his foot after this deed. he did not tell her that shippen had offered him a partnership in a big business the[148] night before. in view of her unreasonable prejudice against shippen, this information would only have furnished her with stronger objections to his plans.
the point was that she had failed him as a helpmate in the career he had chosen. he purposed to alter his course accordingly. he would do the square thing by her. she was his wife. he had that affection for her; but she should not block his way. he meant to get on with her or—without her. other men did. he knew successful men in new york, whose wives spent half their time in europe or somewhere else. he supposed he might do better than that. the bank in shannon would require a good deal of his time. he would come home occasionally. he must spend a few days out of every month there.
this was the end. helen sensed it. she saw his side of the situation. she had failed her husband. she had been obliged to do so. he had never expressed the least regret because she had not borne children, but she knew that if they had had children, this would have made all the difference. she supposed she herself might have been a different sort of woman if she could have been a mother. her influence as a wife had never reached beyond the door of their home. now she[149] had failed him at this upward turn in his career.
she had been a good wife to him according to the scriptures, but he needed another kind of wife, one who could fill a public position, a wife according to the world. she grasped this fact clearly, held it before her, regarded it with remarkable intelligence during a strictly private interview she had with herself on this subject some time the next day. she wondered how many wives combined the two offices which george required of her. if you were the social official of his home, if you “played the game,” as he called it, how could you be—well, the kind of wife she had been to george?
she thought of shippen in connection with this reflection. she could not have told why, but she did. she was not so stupid as not to suspect that shippen had something to do with this sudden desire that george had to live in new york. “playing the game” meant coming in constant contact with men like shippen, women like the women they had discussed that night at dinner—shippen and soubrettes; somebody’s wife they had seen in a café with a man who was not her husband and whom they had discussed with a curious sort of grinning admiration, as if this lady was a lady to be reckoned with.
[150]helen was wrong, of course, in the picture she drew of the game the worldly wife must play. but there was this much sanity in her point of view: such a wife cannot always choose her partner nor the card she must play. it is a skin game, matrimonially speaking, and sometimes the one skinned is the husband, more frequently it is the wife, even if it is only the gossips who do the skinning.
helen made her way through such reflections as these, not as i have written them down in words, but as one walking through the dark in a dangerous place, with cautious steps and outstretched hands, feeling the edges of strange abysses with her feet, touching unknown things that might be alive with reptilian life.
the private mental life of all women, good or bad, is usually morbid, consisting of thoughts or speculations which bring an emotional crisis and leave them in fears and tears more frequently than we can believe, judging by the faces they show.
helen passed at this time through some such crisis. she was not changed by it, because women of that sort are the “amens” of their sex. but she was confirmed. she remembered what george had said long ago about this belief in the freedom of love. she had often recalled it, always with[151] a pang of terror. if she had ever been jealous of him, it was in this indefinite way. now the way that led to such love seemed to widen before her eyes.
she was alone in her room, sitting on the side of her bed during this scene with herself. you know by your own experience, if you are a married woman, that you always sit on the side of your bed when you are dramatizing the sadder prospects of going on doing your duty by this husband—or of not doing it. you chose the bed instead of a chair because of a potential sense of prostration. you prepare yourself to fall back in a storm of tears or to sink upon your knees in prayer for strength to bear this “cross.” the more modern woman is said frequently to rise unshriven, stride majestically across the room and stare at her own proudly rebellious reflection in the mirror.
helen did none of these things. she simply sat there, dry-eyed, unprayerful, not rebellious, reviewing the future. this can be done with amazing vividness, because the future is always a repetition and development of the past. then she made a resolution. it was that later secret marriage vow a wife sometimes takes after she is acquainted with the deflation and vicissitudes of this[152] relation. whatever happened, she would be a good and dutiful wife to george. she would be patient. nothing should move her to reproach him. thus she abandoned her rights and self-respect. i do not say that she ought to have done this; i doubt it; but the fact remains that many women do it. and in the end they frequently become sanctuaries for disgracefully defeated husbands. but to say so is not to recommend the practice. my task is to show how it worked out in this instance. and you are warned therefore that a sanctuary may become a very fine edifice, even smacking a little of worldly grandeur.
