II
Helen entered the house quietly and leaving her gloves and wrap on the hall bench, went into the kitchen to see how things were going there. There was a pleasant air of competence about it. The maids were busy and the dinner in active preparation. Upstairs the nurse had the children. She played with them a little, a warm sense of satisfaction at her heart. It was so absurd to choose—to fake a choice. This other work, this other business could be done without sacrificing anything. Gage was absurd. She was no less a mother, not a bit less good a housewife because she was a delegate to the Republican Convention. It took a bit of management, that was all. If she was treating Gage badly she would feel different.
But there was a guilty feeling which she could not control. He was unhappy and she the cause. They had been too close for that not to hurt.
At seven o’clock, a little late for dinner, came Gage, a guarded courtesy in his manner. He asked her pardon for not dressing and handed her a sheaf of evening papers. She was thankful that they had been issued too early to contain the news of her triumph. It postponed certain altercations. She thought suddenly of her barrage of photographers and of what she had completely forgotten, Gage’s tremendous dislike of having her picture in the papers.
“I can’t bear the thought of your picture tossed about the country—looked at casually for an hour and then used as old newspapers are used—to wrap a package—line a stair-rug—heaven knows what!”
Of course it had appeared occasionally for all of that but Helen had made the occasions infrequent. She had always liked that prejudice of his. As she looked at him to-night she thought he looked tired. There were strained lines around his eyes, and he was very silent.
She said several little things and then, because avoidance of the big topic seemed impossible, joined him in his silence. He looked at her at last, smiling a little. It was not the smile of a rancorous man but rather a hurt smile, a forced smile of one who is going to go through pain wearing it.
“I have been congratulated all the way home on your account, Helen. It seems to have been a landslide for you.”
“There was hardly any opposition.” It was meager but she could not go on without seeming to run into a forbidden or aching subject.
There they had to stop. Helen had a vision of the closed topics between them, a sudden horror of this cleavage. Suppose he didn’t see that he was foolish, that she was not treating him badly, that she must lay up something for herself as a person against the day when he himself might weary of her as a woman. Fiercely she recast her arguments in her own mind. Yet there was that tired look in his eyes. You can fight rancor but not weariness.
“How is Miss Thorstad getting on?”
“Fine. It was a great hunch. You know she actually saves me a lot of thinking. It shows that a girl with wits is worth half a dozen expert stenographers. She has an air about her that is dignified and calm and yet she’s not a stick.”
“I imagine there’s a volcanic soul under that rather calm exterior.”
“Perhaps.”
“Gage, you look tired.”
He made a visible effort to rouse himself.
“Tired? Why, no, dear. Not especially.”
“What are we to do to-night?”
“I have some work to-night.”
She looked somewhat baffled as the door closed after him a half hour later. Then going to the telephone she called Margaret. Margaret was not at home. Helen read for an hour and went to bed early.
Gage had meant to work. But he was not working. He was fighting on through a cloud of bitterness and of thoughts which he knew were not wholly unreasonable. He was sitting at his littered desk, all the paraphernalia of work strewn about him and a picture of Helen on his desk confronting him, accenting his trouble. There she was. He had only to close his eyes and he saw her even more clearly, breaking through the clouded doubts of his mind as she had done in the first days of his marriage—clearness, peace, the one real beauty in the world, the one real truth in the world—Helen—love. And she had said she wanted to be “clean of sex!” He scowled at the thought but it danced before him defiling his memories. It would not go! From those early days, those days of the “hardening process” there had persisted always in Gage secret faith, fading now to a hope, flaring now to a conviction that sex was clean, was beautiful until some other agency defiled it. He remembered still his tortured adolescent mind revolving around the problems of the mysteries of birth, stirring him to wonder and the leering clandestine ugly talk which seemed an ugly wrapping around the wonder. He had always thought that his son would have no such tortures. His own proven conviction would carry the boy through all doubts. Now he seemed cast back in the mire of his own old doubts. Had Helen always felt defiled? Had all their life been a hideous mixture of shame and complacencies and hidden revulsions? Had they really conquered nothing? Or was there nothing to conquer? Was he over-fastidious, unmanly? Was the necessary thing to blunt once more, this time permanently, these illusions of his—to go home to Helen and play the part of the demanding husband, demanding concession in return for concession? Laugh at her whims, her fads, quarrel with her if necessary. If she must run to her conventions, let her go. And let him coarsen his feeling so it was willing to take what was left of her.
He wiped his forehead impatiently. It was damp and that sign of his intensity shamed him. He had learned that the revealing of emotion was man’s shame, to be hidden at all costs. Helen had given him a final lesson in that. Angrily he flung himself into his work, concentrating actually with his will for hours, mastering the intricacies of the question on which he must give an opinion in the morning. When he had done his notes lay ready. He cleaned up the litter of papers, a little frown on his face and looked at his watch. Nearly midnight. He must go home.
All the practical machinery of locking up, starting the car, steering, driving into the garage, locking the garage, turning out the lights in the library. Nothing was different from other nights. He was a man in his own house. But over the formalism of his actions and his deliberate definiteness of conscious thought his mind was in battle. He was trying to kill the part of him that cried out against going to his wife in such a mood. He was trying deliberately to kill it with a blunt edged thought which read “Be a man—not a neurasthenic.” He cursed himself under his breath. He was no damned temperamental actor to carry on like this (Always, always, that choking necessity for repressing these feelings, concealing the fact of feeling). A married man—seven years—rights—duties—nature—foolish whims—but above that persisted the almost tortured cry of his spirit, struggling with the hotness of desire, begging, for its life—“Don’t go home like a beast to her!”