The Hungry Heart: A Novel

by David Graham Phillips

"No, I don't believe you ever do."

"Let's have the ice cream. Chocolate. And I feel just like jelly roll."

XXVI

The pause before the first decisive step toward freedom—and perhaps away from Winchie—had shrunk to a day less than two weeks.

It is mercifully not in human nature vividly to anticipate catastrophe. Death is the absolute certainty; yet no living being can imagine himself dead. And it was anything but certain that Dick would ever assert his legal right and take away her child. In her anxiety about Winchie, she had been giving much thought to Dick's character, which would be the deciding factor. And she was surprised at the knowledge of it she had unconsciously absorbed. Except among fools—who, whether they look within or without, see nothing—it is a commonplace of experience to discover that what we fancied we thought about a certain person or thing is precisely the opposite of what we really think when compelled to interrogate ourselves honestly. That is why the whole world can live and die by formulas in which it has not the least actual belief. These discoveries of our self-ignorance always astonish us, no matter how often they occur. Courtney had got many surprises of this kind in the past two years; yet this find—her intimate knowledge of her "abstract" husband's character—seemed incredible.

It wasn't strange that she should know how he took his coffee, his favorite brand of cigarettes and of whisky, that he detested cold baths and would not wear underclothes with silk in them, or, if it could possibly be avoided, starched shirts—that he hated low shoes and high collars. As a "dutiful wife" she had made it her chief business, after Winchie, to see to her legal husband's material comfort, so far as he would permit it. But how had she come by a deep conviction of his honesty, of his truthfulness, of his incapacity for meanness of any kind? Where had she got her confidence in his sense of justice—he who had alienated her by his stubborn and tyrannical injustices to her? Why did she summarily dismiss as absurd the suggestion that his recent conduct was dictated merely by indifference to her or selfish consideration for his own comfort? These high ideas of him certainly did not date from their courtship and honeymoon; for, then she had no more interest or discrimination as to character than the next young person. There was no accounting for it. She simply found that these beliefs were immovably lodged under the opinion of him she had supposed was hers—the opinion that had made her love for Basil seem as right as if she had been a girl. So, while she feared he would take Winchie away from her, with a fear dark enough to shadow her days and make many a night uneasy, she was always saying to herself believingly, "He could not do anything unjust."

One evening she fell into a somber mood. It wasn't so clear as usual that Dick would see the to her obvious injustice of separating mother and child. She left Helen, went up and stole in to sit by Winchie's bed—a habit she had formed lately. She got so low spirited that, when she heard Helen go along the hall toward the upstairs sitting room, she slipped downstairs and out into the air to wander among the flowers and beneath the scented trees. There was a thin moon and one of those faint, soft, intermittent breezes that give the disquieting yet fascinating sense of spirit companionship. She strolled to the edge of the lake; the fireflies seemed the eyes of the breeze spirits that were whispering and friendlily touching her. She saw a boat with a single occupant a few yards down the lake, close in shore. Even as she glanced, a low voice—Basil's—came from the boat: "Courtney—may I come?"

She was not startled. Before the voice she had thought, "Basil will probably be trying to see me before long." She answered in the same undertone, "Helen may be looking this way."

"If you sit on the bench down here, I can come to you. The shadow's deep enough."

She hesitated, went to the bench he indicated. The press of the immediate had been all but keeping him out of her mind. But whenever she did think of him it was as her lover. With a nature as tenacious as hers habit is not dethroned in a day or demolished all at once by any convulsion however violent. Also, the more she suffered and the lonelier she felt—not a soul about to whom she could speak or hint any part of what was harassing her—the more tender grew her thoughts of the man in whom she had invested so much. Throwing good love after bad is not a rare human weakness—and Courtney was by no means certain in those depressed days that her investment had been bad, as such investments go in a world of human beings.