§ i
“TWICE in one day,” thought Al. “It won’t do! We can’t go on like this!”
He was walking up and down that bedroom he so hated, with its silly little four post bed and the thick carpet, and the offensive, dainty imitation masculinity of it—a woman’s idea of a man’s room. Two little blue shaded electric lamps, a fool of a little table—he kicked at the table as he passed it, and Andrée’s photograph on it fell down. He was profoundly disturbed, not so much angry as dismayed. Trapped; no way of getting out....
“Why, damn it all!” he cried. “I can’t be like this! This isn’t me! This isn’t what I meant! We are interfering—every hour of the day, with each other. It won’t do!”
The first thing had been his fault, he admitted; he shouldn’t have been so vehement, or so hasty. But it had been the sort of thing hardest of all for him to endure with patience.
He had gone into the kitchen, where he was not expected to go, because he had been hungry at a wrong time, and there he had seen a hideous thing. It might have looked to other people like a char-woman scrubbing the floor, but to him it was very much more than that. She didn’t even look up; what concern was it of hers who came and went in this house? She was a wretched little old woman; he stood in the doorway looking down at her, at the tiny knob of white hair on her bony skull, her narrow shoulders working stiffly, at her clumsy hands pushing the brush back and forth. She breathed hard from her puny effort; she tried to appear more vigorous when she heard someone enter, being well aware that for the char-women of the world effort is accounted of more worth than accomplishment. He stared and stared at her, crawling slowly on her hands and knees, doing this work in the stupidest and cruellest way.... On the kitchen table her lunch was set out for her on a newspaper by the superior visiting maid; no one would come near her or speak to her; she was shut up here to scrub alone.
“Here! Get up!” he said, abruptly.
She looked round with bleared and watery eyes.
“Get up!” he said, again.
“But I ain’t done,” she protested.
“Get up!” he shouted. He could not tolerate for one instant longer the sight of this old creature at his feet; it was obscene. She clutched at the table and pulled herself to her feet.
“I can do it, if yer give me time,” she said, with quivering indignation. “If I take longer, I don’t charge so much.”
Al knew everything in the world about her; she was the typical “case”; he knew where and how she lived, what she earned and how she spent it. He cross-examined her and she answered him mendaciously, but he was able to sift the truth from the lies.
“Now, see here,” he said. “You’re sixty-five or so.” She declared, for working purposes, that she was fifty. “You’ve earned a rest. You’ve worked all your life.”
“I’m able—” she began.
“You’re not. Now, see here! I want you to go home—now. I’ll see that you get a living allowance from—from a certain source every week. It’s not charity, d’you understand, not charity. It’s what you have a right to demand from society. You can consider me the agent of society.”
Her education was incomplete and she did not understand the meaning of his terms.
“The Society give me coal last winter,” she observed. “I didn’t never—”
He didn’t trouble to explain that he represented nothing more than impartial justice.
“Take this now and go home,” he said. “And for God’s sake, don’t go crawling round scrubbing up anyone else’s floors, ever! Get drunk, if you want—”
“Oh, I never, never, never—”
“It’s better,” he said. “Better than this. It’ll be your money—the allowance you’ll get. Little enough, but you can waste it any way you like. Try to live.”
From behind the kitchen door she took down a heart-breaking fuzzy black cape trimmed with jet, and the disreputable ghost of a hat; she tucked the money he gave her into a tremendous hand-bag and retied the clasps with string. She was not grateful, any more than one is grateful for sunshine; in an inexplicable world these benefits came sometimes upon the just and the unjust. She had had a neighbor, mother of nine children, who had been miraculously sent off to the sea-side for two weeks of rest out of forty years of life; she knew of other things like that. She was only in a hurry to get away before further investigation revealed little weaknesses that might repel the Agent of Society.
Al had gone to his wife about this, and she had been angry.
“Who’s going to finish the floor?” she demanded. “Jennie won’t do that rough work.”
“I don’t care if it’s never finished. I won’t have that sort of thing in my house. It’s just what I’d give my life to put an end to. It’s—”
“I suppose you’d admire me if I did it?”
“Yes, I should,” he answered. “You’re better able to do it than that poor old skeleton.”
“I don’t care much about your admiration,” said Andrée, slowly. “This is your house, is it? Not mine? That’s just the way Father talks. ‘My’ house ... ‘I’ won’t have this and that—”
“I didn’t mean to be arbitrary,” he said, quickly contrite. “Only, don’t you see ...?”
He went on, to explain. Andrée could, as usual, see his point of view, but she didn’t agree.
“She’s a wretched, drunken old creature,” she said.
“But, damn it all, why shouldn’t she be?” he cried. “What’s that got to do with it? You know plenty of people who drink, but you don’t suggest condemning them to servitude for life, do you?”
“If you want to run the house, you can,” she said. “You can settle this now. Jennie won’t finish that floor, and I certainly won’t.”
“Then I will,” he said, and he did. Andrée hated him for that; she was not too aloof to be unconcerned with what Jennie would think and say of that performance.
They had lunch in absolute silence; and yet, little by little, they were weakening. They were neither of them quarrelsome or resentful, and they had a marked respect for each other’s obstinacy. One hour more would probably have seen them reconciled and laughing, if Tomlinson and Bucks hadn’t appeared. These comrades were more than Andrée could endure; she had in the beginning made a frigid attempt to be polite on Al’s account, but her politeness was neither desired nor understood. Tomlinson was a big, stout, brutal fellow with a jaw shaved blue; he didn’t hesitate to express his opinion of Al’s mode of living, and he did it profanely.
“How the hell you expect to have any influence?” he shouted. “You preach one thing and you practise another. You and your —— flat and your servants and your —— fine clothes!”
He was a professional Socialist, a politician; he was honest enough in his aims, but quite otherwise in his methods. He had to consult Al frequently, because Al had a considerable personal following in various clubs and centrals, and was quicker and more intelligent than he. He admired Al; he told him frankly enough of his shadiest transactions, because Al, although tiresomely honourable, knew life and was not squeamish. He wanted him now to accept a nomination on their ticket, which Al refused. He had a great many reasons for refusing and Tomlinson a great many for his accepting; it was a very loud and furious argument, although neither of them was really angry.
Bucks didn’t enter into it. He was a bald, scholarly little man with a full brown beard, a sort of secretary and mentor to Tomlinson. He rarely talked; he sat and smiled and watched, and was ready to give data at any moment. Andrée would have rather liked him for his mildness and courtesy, if his collars had been cleaner; she was not constituted to rise above that.
She shut herself into her room while they stayed this day; every sound of that loud discussion reached her, and filled her with rage and disgust. And then, to cap it—
“It’s your wife!” shouted Tomlinson. “That’s what it is! Your damn society lady with her fine airs—that’s what’s ruining you!”
“You shut up and mind your own business!” said Al, and no more than that, no other defense or praise of her.
Perhaps she didn’t realize how tired he was, or how secretly guilty Tomlinson’s reproaches had made him, for after the comrades had gone, she took occasion to speak her mind, and she found him unusually irritable. They took a long stride forward in frankness that afternoon. She called him vulgar and coarse, and he said she was idle and selfish.
All this Al remembered now, walking up and down the room.
“It mustn’t be this way,” he thought. “It must not be. And I’m the one to change it. I’m older—I’m responsible. I knew there’d be difficulties—it’s my job to explain and to reason, and not to quarrel with her. There must be some common ground....”
“And even if there isn’t,” he went on. “Even if we never think alike, it needn’t matter. Good God! Haven’t I enough restraint and common decency to get along with the woman I love, even if she has different opinions? Let her be herself!”
He washed his flushed face in cold water and brushed his unruly hair; he subdued his spirit, and went to look for Andrée. He found her in the library, dressed for the street, drawing on her gloves.
“Going out?” he asked, unnecessarily.
She said “Yes,” curtly, and then her heart melted; he looked so neat and subdued and good.
“I’m going for a walk,” she said. “Do you want to come?”
They went out together into the bright Winter air; but try as they would, no words of reconciliation came from either of them. No words at all....
Was it some subtle reflection of her own mood that made him feel so wretched? He was quite as tall as she, he was properly dressed, he carried himself well, he was strong, vigorous, not bad looking. Why then should he feel so small, and so—he had no other word for it—so cheap—as he walked beside her that day? Of course she was beautiful, but she always had been; of course she was proud and a little disdainful, but that also was nothing new. She looked very lovely in her furs; he saw people turn to look at her.... And suddenly, as plainly as if she had spoken the words, he knew that she was ashamed of him.
He stopped short.
“I forgot....” he said. “There’s something I must finish. I’ll go back.”
She made no attempt to dissuade him, she let him go without a word, with a smile which he knew was one of relief. When he turned back, he saw her, still walking down the drive, a distinguished and beautiful creature.
“Snob!” he said to himself. “Vain, fickle, cold-hearted snob! She didn’t want me with her. She doesn’t give a damn where I go, or what I do.”
A terrible grief assailed him, which he imagined was anger.
“I might have known it!” he told himself. “They’re all alike—her sort. Pampered and flattered....”
He struggled desperately back to justice.
“I’m making a mountain out of a molehill.... She simply wanted to be alone.... Nothing very bad in that!... She’s only a kid, after all.... She cared enough for me to marry me.... She does care for me!”