The Hungry Heart: A Novel

by David Graham Phillips

Next day Dick asked, "Have you thanked Basil for those flowers?"

"Certainly."

"I wish you had let me see the letter. I'll bet you made it all frost. You don't know how cold you are, Courtney. Sometimes you chill even me, well as I know you.... I guess I'll write Basil a note, too—and let him see that we did appreciate his thoughtfulness."

"As you please."

XIV

Five days since the letter to Basil, a fortnight since he went, and the first move toward freedom not yet made. Each day added its strength of loneliness and longing to the resolve that became the guiding purpose of her life when she sent him away. But she must restrain her eagerness, must compel herself to wait upon opportunity—upon the favorable gust of event or emotion. To be tactless and abrupt would mean defeat; for, hard though it was to realize, she must keep ever in mind that Richard had legal right over Winchie. Moral right she denied not only because he was as much a stranger to Winchie as to herself, but chiefly because a child belonged to its mother. Indeed, if she had not been brought up in a legal family it would not have occurred to her that in any circumstances she need disturb herself about having Winchie. There was nothing of pose or effusiveness about her love for him; it was that deep and utter love which is not conscious of itself, but simply is. She and the boy were as much part of each other as when his being was still hidden within hers. She knew that she and Winchie were one; but she also knew the man-made law. So in seeking her freedom she must move carefully. Sometimes she felt she must be dreaming; it simply could not be possible that in arranging her life she must take into account a person so utterly alien and apart as this nominal husband of hers.

She had rarely seen him since Basil left. He was exercising—walking or rowing on the lake—very early in the mornings. But he spent the whole day at his work. When he occasionally came to dinner or supper, he was deep in his problems, was as unconscious of his wife and child as his child was of him. Courtney was no longer unconscious of him. As before, she did not see him when she looked at him, did not listen when he talked, answered, if answer was necessary, by a sort of reflex mental action that never involved her real mind. But she had the sense of his presence—as keen when he was out of sight as when he sat working or in a deep abstraction before her eyes. And she was constantly revolving how to begin the revolt—for she saw more and more clearly that it would be regarded by him as a revolt against womanliness, against duty, against honor, against decency, would burst upon him like thunder from clear sky, no matter how adroitly she might begin. Until then his ideas of woman had impressed her only in a vague, general way. She had avoided thinking them out or hearing them from his own lips because she knew definite knowledge would only make the struggle to be a wife to him as far as she might the more painful, the more humiliating. But now, piece by piece, his conception of womanhood and woman's place fitted itself together in her mind from stray sentences dropped by him from time to time in their five years. Every day she recalled some forgotten or ignored remark that added to the completeness of the record—and to its discouragement. As to the position of woman in the scheme of things, he was untouched of any modern idea. He was just where his grandfather had been; and Colonel Achilles Vaughan had been where the whole world had been since the Oriental contempt for women reconquered Europe under the banner of the Cross.

In one of the last warm days she half sat, half lay in the hammock on the lake-front veranda, apparently idle, really with a brain as industrious as a beehive. Gradually, however, the beauty of the scene—summer dying like a lovely woman whose mortal disease only enhances loveliness—stole in upon her and won her for the moment. She looked at the wonderful colors far and near, she drank in the last potent draughts of summer's perfume. And suddenly she thought, "I would be divorcing all this, too!" These gardens that she had created; the house that she had made over. Why, these things were part of her very soul. The same life throbbed in them that throbbed in her boy and in herself—her own life blood! The place was in Richard Vaughan's name just as she herself was, just as Winchie was. But it was not his; it—all that made it individual—was hers!

Most of us pass through the world, leaving little more trace of our individuality than a traveler leaves in a hotel room. But Courtney had the creative instinct powerfully developed. She even never dressed in exactly the same way, no matter how simple her costume or how often she wore it; and her clothes were so individual that Richard the absent spoke of hats and dresses she had worn several years back. And this place—it was like the picture the artist keeps by him and touches and retouches. Also, she now realized for the first time how profoundly domestic she was by nature. Not by chance had she avoided the life of the gadabout and meddler which is chosen by so many women when they find themselves mismated, and so, without hope of the normal life. She had always classed herself with the flyabout sort of women rather than with the domestic sort; she had fallen into the common error of taking as representative of the domestic type those dreary rotters who sit at home inert and slovenly simply because it requires less effort to stay at home than to dress and issue forth. Now she saw that she was domestic, was a home-maker and a home-lover; and she understood a deeper depth of her unhappiness—the unhappiness that comes from being cheated out of one's dearest desires; for how incomplete must be any home without love of husband and wife. And she understood why, as she made her surroundings more and more like her dreams, her longing for love had grown apace; she was like the bird that builds its nest, and has nothing to put in it.

She had built this nest; now she must abandon it. Heavier and heavier grew her heart, as she thought of the years of thought and toil she had invested, as she looked about at the results. She rebuked herself almost fiercely—in terror of the weakness to which these lamentings might tempt her; in shame at the disloyalty to Basil. "I'm utterly selfish," she said to herself. "I'm shrinking from making any sacrifice at all." There she stopped short in a kind of terror. "Sacrifice"—what a strange word to use—what an ominous word—and how clearly it warned her that delay was eating out courage, was strengthening her natural woman's inertia. Sacrifice! She began to picture what the new life would be—perfect sympathy, companionship ever closer and closer, how she would grow and expand, how Winchie would thrive in an atmosphere of ideal love—and Basil and she would together create a place, a home which would be incomparably lovelier than this.... "Yes, I must establish my life on its permanent basis." Her life must be straightened out, must be settled right. Until it was based right, nothing could be right; mind and heart would always be uneasy, and from time to time in a turmoil. "Nothing is settled," her father often used to quote, "until it's settled right." He was thinking of large affairs, but the thing was just as true of the affairs of private life. Her and Richard's relations, her and Basil's relations, and therefore her and Winchie's relations, were awry, all awry. There had been successive adjustments; they had one after the other fallen to pieces—because "nothing is settled until it's settled right."