I
YET something was hurting Gage Flandon. He had tried to decide that he was not getting enough exercise, that he was smoking too much, not sleeping enough. But petty reforms in those things did not help him. He felt surging through him, strange restlessness, curious probing dissatisfactions. He was angry at himself because he was in such a state; he was morbidly angry with his wife because she could not assuage what he was feeling nor share it with him.
Everywhere he was baffled by his passion for Helen. After six years of married life, after they had been through birth, parenthood together, surely this state was neurotic. Affection, yes, that was proper. But not this constant sense of her, this desire to absorb her, own her completely and segregate her completely. He knew the feeling had been growing on him lately since her friend had come to the city, but his resentment was not against Margaret. It was directed against his wife and that he could not reason this into justice gnawed at him.
He was spending a great deal of time thinking about what was wrong with women. He would hit upon a phrase, a clever sentence that solved everything. And then he was back where he had begun. He could resolve nothing in phrases. He and Helen would discuss feminism, masculinism, sex, endlessly, and always end as antagonists—or as lovers, hiding from their own antagonism. But they could not leave the subjects alone. They tossed them back and forth, wearily, impatiently. Always over the love for each other which they could not deny, hung this cloud of discussion, making every caress suspected of a motive, a “reaction.”
When Gage had been sent at twelve years of age to a boys’ military preparatory school, it had been definitely done to “harden him.” He was a dreamy little boy, not in the least delicate, but with a roving imagination, a tendency to say “queer things” which had not suited his healthy perfectly grown body, his father felt. Some one had suspected him of having hidden artistic abilities. His parents were intelligent people and they tried that out. He was given instructions in music on the piano and the violin. Nothing came of them but ridges on the piano where he had kicked it in his impatience at being able to draw no melodies from it. With infinite patience they tried to see if he had talent for drawing. He had none. So, having exhausted their researches for artistic talent, his parents decided that there was a flaw in his make-up which a few years contact with “more manly boys” might correct. They prided themselves on the result. He succumbed utterly to all the conventions of what makes a manly boy and came home true to form.
In college the quirk came out again once in a while. But Gage never became markedly queer. Impossible for an all-American half-back to do that. And he never mixed with the “queer ones.” What eccentricities he had, what flights of imagination he took were strictly on his own.
In due course he was admitted to the bar and on the heels of that came Helen. Those who saw him in his pursuit of Helen said that he seemed possessed. For once his imagination had found an outlet. For once all those desires which rose above his daily life and his usual companions had found a channel through which they could pour themselves. Eager for life as Helen was, full of dreams, independences, fresh from her years at college, she could not help being swept under by the torrent of desire and worship that he became. They soared away together—they lost themselves in marriage, in the marvel of child creation.
The war came. Gage met it gravely, a little less spread-eagle than most of his friends. He had a year in France and came back with a fallen enthusiasm. He never talked about that. He had plunged into money making. The small fortune his father had given him on his marriage had been absorbed in starting a home and Helen had nothing of her own. They needed a great deal of money and Gage got it, trampling into politics, into business, practicing law well all the time. He was now thirty-eight and had accumulated a remarkable store of influence and power. Very close to the Congressman from his district, keen and far sighted, as honest in keeping promises as he was ruthless in dealing with political obstructionists, he was recognized as the key man to his very important district. He knew politics as he knew law but he built no ideals on it. It was perhaps his very thorough knowledge of the deviousness of its methods which made him reluctant to have Helen meddle with it. For although he had accepted the suffrage of women as a political phenomenon which had to be taken in hand and dealt with, he had no belief that the old game would change much.
He nearly always looked his full age. His face was one of those into which deep lines come early, well modeled, but with no fineness of detail. And his large built body, always carelessly dressed, was the same. Yet there were times, Helen knew, when his eyes became plaintive and wondering and he looked as the little boy who was sent away to be “hardened” must have looked. Only he was learning to cover those times with a scowl.
He was finding that he could not quiet all the mental nightmares he had with his love for Helen. Because that love itself was infested by this strange new “woman problem.” What securities of opinion had been swept away by study, by war, what questions in him were left unsatisfied—those things were hidden in him. He had clung to love and faith in marriage. And now that stronghold was being attacked. He was hearing people who called it all fake, all false psychology. And he did not know how much Helen believed these people. He felt her restlessness in horror. He saw no direction in which she might go away from him where she would not meet destruction, where false, incomplete ideas would not ruin her. It was making him a reactionary.
For, because he had no solution himself, he was forced to fall back on negations. He denied everything, sank back into an idealism of the past.
“I liked that girl,” he said to his wife about Freda, “no fake.”
“None,” answered Helen. “I hoped you’d like her, Gage.”
“She says that the trouble with women is that they’ve lost the spirit of romance and that they’ve dug the romance out of men’s souls too.”
It was what he himself had said but it was easier to put to Helen in that way.
“Young thing—full of phrases.” His wife laughed lightly.
It was the night on which Freda and her mother were to dine with them. Gage, dressed before his wife, had dropped in to watch her. He loved to see her do her hair. She seemed exquisitely beautiful to him when she deftly parted and coiled the loose masses of it—more than beautiful—exquisitely woman. He loved to see the woman quality in her, not to awaken passion or desire but for the sense of wonder it gave him. He loved to cherish her.
“We’re all full of phrases,” he said, a little hurt already. “But she has something behind her phrases. She’s unspoiled yet by ideas.”
“She’s full of ideas. You should see the things that young modern reads. She’s without experience—without dogmas yet. But she’ll acquire those. At present she’s looking for beauty. You might show it to her, she may find it in Margaret; perhaps she’ll find it in her canting little mother.”
“She would find it in you if you’d let her see you.”
“Do you think I’m anything to copy? You seem dissatisfied so often, Gage.”
“Don’t, Helen.” He came over to where she sat and bent to lay his cheek against her hair. Her hand caressed his cheek and his eyes closed.
She wanted to ask him what would happen to them if they could not bury argument in a caress but she knew the torch that would be to his anger. He felt her lack of response.
“I’m not dissatisfied with you. I’m dissatisfied because I can’t have you completely to myself. I’m dissatisfied because you can’t sit beside me, above and indifferent to a host of silly men and women parading false ideas.”
“I’m not so sure they are false. I can’t get your conviction about everything modern. I want to try things out.”
“But, Helen, it’s not your game. Look—since Margaret came you’ve been dabbling in this—that—politics, clubs, what not. You are bored with me.”
“Impossible, darling. But you really mustn’t expect the good, old-fashioned, clinging vine stuff from me. I’m not any good at it. Now please hurry down, dear, and see if there are cigars and cigarettes, will you? And you’ll have to have your cocktail alone because if I had one before Mrs. Thorstad she’d think I was a Scarlet Woman.”
There was nothing for Gage to do but go with that familiar sense of failure.
After he had gone, Helen’s face lost some of its lightness and she sat looking at herself in the glass. Without admiration—without calculation. She was wondering how much of love was sex—wondering how she could fortify herself against the passing of the charms of sex—wondering why Gage had such a frantic dislike of women like Margaret who hadn’t succumbed to sex—wondering if that was the reason. She thought of the pretty Thorstad child. Gage liked her. That too might be a manifestation of vague unadmitted desire. She shivered a little. Such thoughts made her very cold. Then with a conscience smitten glance at her little porcelain clock she slipped into her dress and rang for the maid to hook it.
The nurse maid came and entertained Helen, as she helped her, with an account of the afternoon she had spent with Bennett and Peggy. Peggy had learned to count up to ten and Bennett was trying to imitate her. Helen wished she had heard them. She hated to miss any bit of the development of her fascinating children. It was a feeling that Margaret had told her she had better steel herself against.