XXXV The Credo at Work
I
When school closed in June, Judith took Theodora for the long promised visit to New York. Sydney and Eileen were off for a belated honeymoon in the mountains of Colorado, and Lavinia Trench reflected that the coveted privacy had come at the crucial moment. She would be alone to think things out. David was away from home much of the time, and when he was in the house his wife was only mechanically conscious of his presence. She viewed the neighbours as through a mist. Orders were given to Drusilla, with the monotonous intonation of a talking machine. That the orders were rational was evidence of the complete detachment that could enable her mind to function without conscious effort. It was as if she had wound up the machinery of her being and had withdrawn, leaving it to the old familiar routine.
After three weeks, her cloistered retreat was invaded by the most disturbing member of her family. The passionate devotion that had centered in her youngest-born—to her purblind vision the most perfect copy of herself—had undergone insidious change, as she centered her interest in Eileen. Theodora was irritating beyond endurance. With the child in the house, there could be no peace. Reluctantly, almost bitterly, she came back to the dull reality of life. David was still in Jacksonville from Monday to Saturday. After a day or two, she consented to let Theo stay with Dr. Schubert and Nanny. To her daughter-in-law she confessed that it was not because the old doctor was so lonely, but that she could not endure the child’s incessant chatter. The dropping of a fork behind her chair would send her into a paroxysm of shaking—Lavinia, who had always laughed at nervous women.
II
One morning Judith stood with her husband at an upper window, watching the agitated woman as she paced up and down before the house. The postman was late.
“She watched for him just that way yesterday, Lary. And when he failed to bring what she was expecting, her disappointment was pitiful.”
“My mother is going through some deep transition. I wish I could help her; but she has always shut me out. She is a hundred times more frank and confidential with you than she has ever been with me or with her own daughters. Do you think, dear, you could induce her to tell you what is troubling her?”
“I have tried. She talks freely about the emptiness and misery of her life. She is gnawingly unsatisfied; but she gives no clue. Such devotion as your father’s ought to have won her, years ago. I spoke rather plainly to her about it. I knew it would anger her; but I wanted to shock her into some line of rational thinking. The mention of her husband’s tenderness only infuriated her. She said such cruel things about him. And, Lary, he is as much in the dark as we are. He talked to me about it, Sunday night. Is it possible....”
“What, dear?”
“I wondered if there might be something in her life—long ago—a scar that is still sensitive—some shock that left a buried impression.”
“A lover, you mean? I hardly think so. She has always teased or brutally insulted my father with the mention of an old sweetheart of hers. It seems, they were deadly rivals, and papa won her because of his clean morals. The other man was the rakish sort—and in a town like Bromfield—with my mother’s prejudices and the thing that in her case passes for religious conviction....”
Just then the postman rounded the corner. There was only one letter for the Trench household, but its effect was electrical. Lavinia took it from his hand and ran stumbling into the house. At the sill she dropped to her knees, regained her footing and hurried inside. She had not opened the envelope, hence its contents could not account for her perturbed state of mind. It came to Judith ... that the whole future hung on the tenor of a reply.
III
At noon she appeared in the dining-room of Vine Cottage. Her cheeks were pasty, ashen, but her eyes burned with insane luster. She must send an important letter to Sylvia, and it was too late— She floundered, catching a chair for support. Would Larimore send the office boy out with a special delivery stamp?
“I’ll take your letter with me, and post it at the office,” Lary said, annoyed by the crafty manner that marked his mother’s too frequent subterfuges.
“I haven’t written it yet. It isn’t the kind I could dash off in a minute. Sylvia wants me to be in Detroit by Friday noon. I’ll have to get word—”
“Papa won’t be home until Saturday evening,” her son said sharply. “You can’t go off without consulting him.”
The word “consulting” was unfortunate. It released a flood of martyrdom. Lavinia thought she owed a duty to her daughter that must outweigh any consideration or demand on the part of her husband.
“Let me see my sister’s letter. If there is anything serious, I can telephone.”
“I didn’t bring it with me. In fact, I accidentally dropped it in the grate and it was burned before I could get it out.”
“A grate fire in July?”
“I was burning some scraps—and it got mixed with them.”
“You are not going away until papa comes home. It isn’t fair to him—and if you insist—I shall call Sylvia by long distance.”
Judith averted her eyes. The sight of her mother-in-law’s baffled fury was more than she could endure. In the end the woman agreed to defer her trip until Saturday night. She would write Sylvia that she could not be spared from home.
IV
Early Friday morning she came with another request. She had a letter from her husband which she handed to Lary, ostentatiously. David was entirely willing that she should go to Detroit. In fact, he had promised Sylvia that they together would visit her as soon as the housecleaning and redecorating of the apartment was over. He would have earned a vacation when the Jacksonville contract was finished.
“Now, Larimore, if you will look after the ticket—and the sleeper berth—I’ll only take a suit case, and your father can bring what I need in his trunk. By that time, I’ll know about the weather, and what kind of clothes I need. I want the ticket via Chicago. It’s so much shorter than the other route.”
“Chicago?” Something feline, insinuating, in her tone arrested him. “There’s no direct route from Springdale to Detroit via Chicago. You would have to go to Littlefield and wait there for the St. Louis train—and in Chicago it would mean going from one station to the other. The last time you tried that, you got lost, and missed your connection.”
“But I must—that is, I’d prefer to go that way. It wouldn’t matter if I did miss my train. Sylvia wants me to do some shopping for her.”
“Shopping on Sunday, mamma?”
As the woman hurried from her son’s presence, Judith heard her mutter: “There’s more than one way to kill a cat.”
V
Saturday was consumed with the endless little things that went to the preparation for a journey. At noon Lavinia sent Dutton out to post a letter to Sylvia. It was plastered over the upper third with a combination of pink and green stamps. Lavinia Trench abhorred that sort of thing; but she would not ask Larimore for a proper stamp to insure Sunday delivery of her letter. She shunned him with an animosity that was not to be misinterpreted. He had angered her profoundly. She told Judith that she would go to the station in Hafferty’s cab and wait there until David came in. In such a case he would not mind sitting with her until her train arrived. She had evidently asked too many favours of her son. She had always supposed that sons were glad to serve their mothers.
Judith sought to analyse the woman’s torn state of mind. Did she always get into such a fever when she was going away from home? Lavinia had travelled much, in spite of her oft repeated assertion that she never went anywhere, never had any pleasure ... nothing but the dull drudgery of a wife and mother. Before her visit to Bromfield she had been in just such a mental state. But was it, exactly, this condition of mind? Two years ago, everything that Lavinia did—every subterfuge, every veiled speech or cruel innuendo—was carefully thought out. It all had a direct bearing on the main object. She must go to Bromfield, and she would not admit to her family—nor indeed to herself—that she had need to go. From infancy she had been devious, approaching her goal by the most tortuous path. She was this way in her housekeeping. One could not be a martyr if things were easy. The simple, natural way was hateful to her—the refuge of lazy wives.
This much Judith had set down, in her effort to understand her mother-in-law’s curiously warped psychology. But now there was a new phase. The episode of Sylvia’s letter, accidentally burned in the grate on a steaming July day, sufficed to betray a significant breaking-up of the tough fibre of an irrational but tremendously efficient mind. The mycelium of decay—some deadly fungus—had penetrated the heartwood of Lavinia Trench’s being. She went into a panic at the slightest turn in her plans. She no longer counted upon the unforeseen contingency, or guarded against it. That that crashing letter—the occasion for this hurried trip to Detroit—was not from Sylvia, Judith was morally certain. From whom, then? She laid the perplexity wearily aside. With one unknown quantity, she might have solved the equation. Here were two unknown and unknowable quantities, since Lavinia—after her two disastrous blunders—refused to talk except in monosyllables.
VI
When the suit case was in process of preparation, Judith invaded Mrs. Trench’s bedroom. She brought a dark negligée for the Pullman, in place of the delicate one that Sylvia had ridiculed, two years ago. As she offered it, her mother-in-law turned furtively to conceal something she was in the act of securing in the bottom of her small travelling bag. Her fingers caught at the edge of a night-dress, awkwardly, and the thing was revealed ... the borrowed volume of Browning.