II
Wilfred raised his eyes from the typewritten sheets to ask sharply: “Are you listening Fanny?”
“Why of course!” she said, looking across in surprise.
“You seemed so intent on your stocking.”
“That’s automatic. My ears are yours. Go on.”
Five minutes later, Wilfred turned over the last sheet. He tipped the tin shade of the lamp in order to direct the light more fully on Frances Mary’s side of the table; and reached for his pipe. “That’s about all I can do to that,” he said, with an after gleam of pleasure in his eye.
“There are beautiful things in it,” said Frances Mary.
Wilfred was pulled up all standing. “Things?” he said, looking across at her, flicked on the raw. “Then you don’t think . . . ?”
“Something wrong,” she said, avoiding his glance; thoughtfully biting the darning needle.
“Oh, for God’s sake . . . !” said Wilfred, putting down his pipe.
“Why throw the second girl into the man’s arms?”
“But I’ve made it clear from the beginning that she was the right one for him.”
“I know; but the real business of the story is between the other two; and the pleasant touch at the end takes the edge off its grim reality.”
“A happy ending is not in itself inartistic,” said Wilfred combatively.
“Of course not! But in this case . . .”
“I could cut out their actual coming together,” said Wilfred, very reluctantly; “and just leave the second girl in the offing . . .”
She shook her head. “The suggestion would be the same.”
“It wouldn’t sell,” said Wilfred sullenly.
“This one was not supposed to be a seller,” said Fanny. “This was your holiday.”
“Damn it! if I cut her out altogether, I’d have to rewrite the whole thing!” he cried excitedly.
Frances Mary said nothing.
“Why didn’t you say so in the beginning?”
“It just struck me, Wilfred.”
He jumped up, half beside himself. “All my work has gone for nothing now!” he burst out. “I work for days and you destroy it with a word! You know I can’t afford to spend any more time on something that wont sell!”
He flung out of the room. Frances Mary, pricking her upper lip with the needle, sat looking at the door as if her whole being was outside it. She had been taught that it would make matters worse for her to follow. For many minutes she sat listening and waiting.
Wilfred came in again, horribly self-conscious. Marching up to his wife, and tipping her head back, he kissed her lips. She kept her hands squeezed together, and held her tongue; but could not help her lips from clinging.
“I’m sorry,” said Wilfred with a ridiculous hangdog air. “I’m so damned ill-tempered I’m a burden to myself!” He returned to his chair, keeping his face averted from the light.
Frances Mary’s head was lowered, and tears dropped on the stocking; but her mouth was happily curved.
“You’re right about the story, of course,” said Wilfred doggedly. “It’s hard for me to shake off the romantic stuff that I deal in every day . . . I ought to have a job of some kind. Pegasus becomes spavined in the milkcart. . . .” As he forced himself to speak on, it visibly became less difficult. It was almost cheerfully that he said at last: “I wont have to rewrite the whole thing of course. I can do it in a day if I get an early start. It will be twice as good.” He drew a long breath, and let it escape again. He reached for his pipe.
When she knew by the sounds that he was intent upon filling it, Frances Mary darted a look across. Her eyes, still wet, were lighted with fun.
After a bit she murmured: “You’re working too hard.”
He shook his head. “It isn’t overwork that makes me irritable. It’s the hundreds of little distractions and interruptions; ordinary business of life. When I’m working, it hurts like needles to be dragged back. So by the time night comes . . .” he finished with a shrug.
“I know,” she said.
“But it’s nothing to worry about,” he went on. “It’s not a disease, but a condition. It’s the inevitable result of our circumstances, and I must just put up with it until they improve, or until the children are old enough for school.”
There was a silence.
“This story ought to have your name on it, Fanny,” he said. “It’s as much yours as mine.”
“Nonsense! I only supplied the critical element.”
“Oh, critical or creative, what’s the diff.? They’re interacting. You have supplied a good half of both.”
“I’m not being self-sacrificing,” she said, snipping the darning cotton. “Some day I’m going to write again. When the children get bigger. In the meantime I don’t want to be a mere tail to your kite. Far better for me to be forgotten awhile, and come back with a bang!”
“What a lot you have given up!” said Wilfred; “. . . for this!” He looked around the family dining-room.
“This room is plenty good enough as long as the children overrun it,” said Frances Mary, a little up in arms.
“I spoke metaphorically, my angel,” said Wilfred, smiling.
“What! Do you think I would change back with that envious old maid?” said Fanny with a whole smile; “me, a woman married to her man! . . . After I have borne three children!”
“Too many,” he said gloomily.
She laughed. “Sure! My fault! . . . It won’t hurt me not to write for awhile. My book is lying at the bottom of my heart, soaking.”
“It will be far better than anything of mine,” he said. “My work has no time to lie in soak.”
“Don’t be so silly, or you’ll make me cry. . . . If a book should come of it, it would be entirely due to you, wouldn’t it? You got our children, and kept me while I bore them. That’s better than writing three books. . . . Oh, Wilfred!” she cried in a sudden rapture, “the children! Their little shells they got from us, but their souls are their own! I shall never become accustomed to it!”
An obliterating fire blazed up in Wilfred’s eyes. From across the table, sly and shining, they sought her eyes compellingly.
She quickly hid her eyes. The corners of her mouth were obstinately turned up “Certainly not!” she said in wifely tones. “After what you just told me! . . . One of us has got to show some sense!”
There was a silence. The dining-room was full of comfort.
“You are the one who has given up things,” said Frances Mary. “I have found myself in marriage, and grown fat; while you . . .”
“In seven years his face had become a little greyed; but was still capable of lighting up wonderfully,” chanted Wilfred.
“You goose!”
“I needed the halter,” said Wilfred. “I was all over the place.”
“Look here,” she said, “if by some miracle I should write a masterpiece to-morrow, it wouldn’t hurt you nearly as much as it would seven years ago, would it?”
“Oh no,” he said. “Then I was raw with vanity. The mere blowing of the wind hurt me.”
“Well then; it won’t be written for another seven years, if ever. By that time you will be more pleased than if you had written it yourself.”
“Not quite that,” said Wilfred grinning; “still . . .”
She picked up a fresh pair of socks. “You could do a little more on your novel now,” she hazarded.
He shook his head.
“We’ve got nearly three hundred dollars in the bank.”
“There’s my life insurance next month; and I have to get a little ahead with the next payment on the house.”
“I wish we’d never saddled ourselves with this house,” she said equably. “We ought to be renters; free to flit.”
“I know,” said Wilfred; “but it’s fine for the children to have a fixed spot to grow in; a rock to fix their little tentacles to—or should it be on?”
“I dunno. . . . Anyhow, there are those two stories you sold in England.”
“They only pay on publication. It may be six months before we get the money.”
“It’s all right if we don’t spend it more than once. Borrow until it comes.”
He shook his head. “That would only be another worry.”
“Wilfred, you don’t take chances enough,” she said. “Really, you don’t. We always get along somehow.”
“The children . . .”
“Bread and milk don’t cost much. And a dish of soup and greens.”
“Shoes do.”
“They don’t mind patched shoes.”
“I do.”
“Vanity again!”
“Sure! . . . I’m not satisfied. With this, I mean. We need so many things. It’s important that they should have a nice place to grow up in.”
Fanny’s thoughts veered off. Raising her head, she smiled away in the direction of the window. “Stephen was so funny to-day,” she said.
Wilfred took a light from her smile, “How?” he asked eagerly.
“When I lifted him out of the tub this morning he yelled bloody murder as he always does, and I said: ‘Oh, for shame!’ To my astonishment he stopped in the middle of a yell, and looked at me in such a funny, resentful way. It was the first time I ever reached his consciousness with words.”
“Really!” he said, with a look of serious pleasure. “I believe he is going to have a strong individuality.”
“Not a doubt of it,” she said.
Silence for awhile.
“Well, if you’re going to start right in on the grind again,” said Frances Mary, “you might take a little vacation; a walking-trip.”
Wilfred shook his head. “When I get a little further ahead.”
“That’s what you always say! One of the reasons we came out here was because it was a good walking center; yet I can’t drive you out!”
“Well, I might . . . !” he said, throwing up his head. “For three days. The weather is lovely. . . . And when I come back. . . . Oh, Fan . . . !”
She gave him smile for smile.
“Stanny would be keen about coming,” he went on. “If I dropped him a line to-night, I could spend to-morrow fixing this story; and we could start out together on the following morning.”
Frances Mary said nothing. Her silence changed the feeling of the room; and Wilfred looked across at her, sharply apprehensive. The silence lengthened.
“Oh, Fanny!” he said, “Why do you look like that?”
“I am not looking in any particular way,” she said, darning hard.
“You know you are! . . . Why this feeling against Stanny?”
Frances Mary dropped the sock in her lap. “I can’t help it, Wilfred. He dislikes me so!”
“You’re wrong, I tell you! It is only that he is terrified of you.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“He’s terrified of every respectable woman.”
“I’m not a respectable woman.”
“Then why not show him? You stick it on for fair when he is around.”
“It isn’t Stanny at all,” she said unhappily. “It’s you.”
“Me?”
“You are not open with me. These endless talks that you and Stanny have, that break off so awkwardly when I come in!”
“Just man-talk.”
“Don’t tell me that again! It’s only a pretext. There’s no such thing as man-talk or woman-talk—not with a woman like me!”
“A good deal of it is Stanny’s talk. I’m always trying to give him a more cheerful outlook. I never shall, of course.”
“A good half of it is your talk. Your eyes do not light up like that when you are talking to me!”
“Oh, but Fanny . . . ! Why . . . you and I communicate without talking.”
“No! You keep yourself to yourself until Stanny comes! . . . I am always perfectly open with you . . .”
“Indeed, you’re not!” said Wilfred quickly. “There is that whole novel at the bottom of your heart!”
“Well, if I do keep things from you, I don’t save them up for the first stranger!”
“Oh, Fan!”
“No, I won’t be Fanned, and shut up! What I say is true!”
“Of course there’s some truth in it,” said Wilfred slowly; “but how unfair! . . . It’s true that I can let myself go in a certain way with Stanny, that I can’t with you. What of it? Husbands and wives need not swallow each other. There’s nothing serious in it. Unless you make it serious by wrong thinking. You are always for facing things. Face this, and it will go up in smoke. . . . Stanny and I have a certain way of gassing at each other. We’ve always done it. Speculative. Neither takes the other seriously. It’s an enormous relief. Makes you soar for the moment. . . . I cannot talk to you in a speculative vein, because you always have a personal application in mind. You are jealously guarding your own. You refer all my ideas back to our life together. That dries me up. You get your feelings hurt. I have to be studying how not to hurt your feelings. —I don’t mind, dear. To be forced to think of somebody else was my saving. It’s not serious. But you see there is such a thing as man-talk. There is woman-talk too.”
“I let my women friends go when I married.”
“You should not have done so. A wife needs reserves . . .”
Frances Mary’s face was tragic. “You are reproaching me now because I . . .”
“Now, Fanny! Isn’t that exactly what I said!”
Her head went down. “Once you said I was disinterested,” she murmured.
“Well, I was wrong. And you knew it at the time! . . . I’m glad I was wrong. Disinterestedness is a good deal like soda crackers.” He reached a hand across the table. “Fanny, old girl . . .”
“Don’t . . . now,” she said sorely.
He couldn’t tell whether she was blaming him now, or herself. “Write to Jessie Dartrey,” he suggested. “She’d come out like a shot.”
“Poor Jessie . . . !” she murmured.
Wilfred breathed with relief. He saw that the corner was turned.
“Wilfred, I can’t help disliking Stanny!” she said with a rush, imploringly.
“It doesn’t matter—if you face it out with yourself.”
Frances Mary started busily to work on her sock again. Her expression assumed to wipe out everything that had been said since she dropped it. “If you don’t write to Stanny at once,” she said to Wilfred rebukingly, “you’ll miss the last collection. . . . And oh! don’t forget to carry your old shoes to the cobbler’s to-morrow. They wont see you through three days’ walking . . .”