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THAT day she brought an electric tea-pot. They laughed when she took it from its box, for she always brought something, she was trying to introduce an element of house-keeping into their business-like existence.
“But it will be very nice,” she said. “We can make our tea up here, all by ourselves, just as we like it. And I’ve brought a box of cakes from Sherry’s, the sort you like.”
Andrée was sitting at the piano, weary and a little dishevelled.
“It will be nice,” she said. “Better than going down to the tea-room, or having a tray sent up.... Gosh! I’ve been practicing over two hours!”
Al smiled.
“Doesn’t she look like a musical genius?” he asked Claudine. “With that hair?”
“Give me a cake!” said Andrée. “Mr. MacGregor came in last evening, Mother, and we played until someone downstairs asked us to stop.... But this one part of ‘Thais’ is lovely, even with a piano alone, isn’t it? We’re going to hear it again to-night.”
Claudine announced that the tea was ready and Andrée came over to sit beside her on the sofa. Al waited on them with a clumsiness which Claudine found very pitiful; she saw too that he was attempting an improvement in manners, not in a shamefaced way, as another man might have done, but carefully and frankly, watching them with earnestness.
Andrée rose.
“Come into the bedroom, won’t you, Mother?” she said.
Claudine followed her into the little room, so bare, so impersonal, and stood for a moment by the window looking out over Central Park, bright under a new fall of snow.
“It’s a rather nice view,” she said, politely.
“Mother, look here, darling! I want you to help me to get up something for Christmas, will you?”
“Of course I will! What had you thought of?”
“I don’t know.... Something nice and human.... You and Edna and Bertie.... Something like old times.... How’s Father?”
“Very well....”
“Does he ever mention my name? Lord! Isn’t it romantic? A young bride, cut off by her father.... I wish there were someone to appreciate the situation—and me.”
“I’m sure Alfred appreciates you, Andrée!”
“Well, he doesn’t. He doesn’t care about my music, and that’s me. He’s awfully fond of me, I know that, but he doesn’t think I’m really any more important than all the other young females of twenty with black hair. My ‘group,’ he’d call it. I wish he’d think a little more about me, and less about social justice. I’m sick of it!”
“My dear!”
“I am! Not sick of him, but just of his talking. Just imagine! When I’ve been playing extra well, I sometimes ask if I’ve been disturbing him—hoping he’ll say he liked it. But what do you suppose he does say? ‘Not a bit! I don’t hear it at all when my mind’s concentrated on my work.’ He’s writing some sort of silly book, you know.”
“You shouldn’t call it ‘silly,’ Andrée. It’s not fair. He’s not silly. He’s a very intelligent, earnest man.”
“That’s the trouble with him! He’s too earnest. When I want to talk to him about nice little things—about us—he’s always so—oh, so mighty! We’re all types, and everything we do is typical of something. Imagine! Last night Bertie brought in Gaston Matthews and Johnnie Martinsburgh—darling children—Bertie says it’s chic to live like this in a hotel, without any squaw atmosphere—and Al would talk to them about his theories. Of course, they listened to him; he’s generally interesting enough, but it’s—I hated it! I suppose I wanted to do the boring myself, about music. And I know so well what they’d think of him if he weren’t rich.... They call him eccentric now, but if he were poor!”
Andrée was lying on the bed, her arms clasped behind her head; how—intractable she looked, thought her mother!
“I’m thoroughly sick of it all! All this busy life.... I can’t be busy. I don’t know how. When I look back on the old days, it seems to me I spent most of my time sitting around with you or Edna. That’s what I want now, but there’s no one to sit round with. Even when Al isn’t working, he wants to ‘take advantage’ of his playtime and rush around and see instructive things and—”
“Andrée, it’s not kind or wise to dwell so much on his little shortcomings. He has so many, many fine qualities—”
“He adores you. Mother, do you want to go and talk to him while I’m dressing? It’s very unselfish of me, because I want you every moment.... And you’re right. He is rather wonderful. He’s not common inside of him, a bit. I don’t believe he ever had a vulgar thought in his head. He’s—really delicate. He’s a nice person to—to live with.... If he only wouldn’t talk so much!”
Claudine went back into the sitting-room and found her son-in-law hard at work with a German magazine and a dictionary.
“I’ve taught myself enough German to get the sense out of things,” he explained. “We get out a little magazine we call ‘Comrades,’ with all sorts of stuff in it from the European Socialist papers, as a step toward Internationalism. I’d be satisfied if I could get just that one idea more generally accepted in my lifetime—that all the people in the world are just about the same, everywhere, that they all want the same things, and suffer from the same causes.”
He stopped suddenly.
“Do you think Andrée’s well and happy?” he asked.
“Yes.... She was speaking about Christmas. She thought it would be nice to have some sort of little celebration.”
“Sure! “We’ll invite some people, and I’ll reserve a table downstairs in the dining-room—”
“I don’t think that’s quite what she meant. I think something more—intimate, Alfred....”
“I see! Then how about having a supper sent up here—champagne and so on?”
“That would be very nice, of course.... But—you know she’s very young for her years.... I thought if you and I could arrange a little surprise—a Christmas tree—”
“Great! I’ve never had one in my life!”
“You see, she’s always had one, since she was a baby. I suppose it seems silly—”
“Not to me, it doesn’t. It’s just one of those nice, pretty little ideas that I fall short in. My one idea is to buy things. It seems so wonderful to buy what you want. I’m not used to it yet.... Gosh! You can’t imagine how much I learn from you! That’s what we need—my kind. We need to learn how to live—oh—poetically, from the people like you. We never get those ideas. We’re too darned worried about food. At first I used to be pretty hard and vindictive, and talk about bringing the comfortable people down to earth. But now I’d like to take the other people a little bit off the earth—a little bit up.”
She thought as she went home in a taxi, what a loveable creature he was. He was everything that she had always imagined a husband ought to be, a comrade, kind, loyal, never interfering, never attempting to impose his own will. Their life was what she had often dreamed of; Andrée had freedom combined with love.
And yet—it wasn’t satisfactory; it was so little satisfactory that it frightened her.
“Somehow,” she thought, “all that isn’t enough.... That bond—that tie of sex alone—isn’t enough. Even love isn’t enough.... Perhaps there must be more obligation with it.”