“No, Jasper isn’t up yet,” I replied, taking my hand away just in time to hear her insistent question. “All right.”
But the sunshine had been taken out of the room for me, as if a blind had been drawn. Was this what we had been working for—this? Failure might have drawn us together, might have made us need each other more—or did I not mean that it would have made my husband need me just a little? But now he was forever a part of a production—as long as “The Shoals of Yesterday” should live, its slave and its nurse. Nor did I want it to die precisely, nor quarrel with my bread and butter, but, like many another, wanted success without the price of success, and fame without the penalty. If, after the production, Jasper had to spend all of his time mollifying this girl, if he had to get right up out of bed to answer her demands, what had he gained? I was so tired of the whole circle of my life! Tired of plays and of writers, of actors and of stages, of newspapers and of telephones. The list ran on in my mind like a stanza of Walt Whitman. I could think of just as many nouns as he could, and of all of them I was tired. The thought of leaving New York altogether was to my mind like a fresh breeze on a sultry noon. There was nothing more to detain Jasper. Why not go?
I looked about the room where I was sitting with eyes suddenly grown cold to it. There was a hinge loose on the gate-legged table that had once been our pride, so that a wing would go down if one kicked it. The leather cushion on the big davenport in the windows was worn white. The curtains were half-dirty and stuck to the screen. The silver needed cleaning. The painted chairs, which furnished that intimate “arty” touch, were like a woman who has slept in her rouge without washing her face and needed touching up. The living-room was too near. I wanted rooms where to leave one was not to look back into it continually, rooms from which there was some escape, that did not merge into one another. Particularly desirable to me at that moment was a separate kitchen, incorrigibly isolated. I felt that I would not care if it were in the basement or in another building, if only I did not have to see the grapefruit rinds on the kitchen sink while I was eating my egg.
That house on the cape! Two thousand dollars! The price of a car, and Jasper had said he was going to get a car—to take Myrtle out in, probably. I decided right then that if he bought a car, instead of a house, I would never ride in it. (But I knew that I lied, even as I did so.) It seemed to me that our life here was ended. More real was the House of the Five Pines, the sand-dunes and the sea, the little road and the vessels in the harbor. They were enduring; they had been there before us and would indifferently outlast our brief sojourn, if we lived with them the rest of our lives. They were the sum of the hopes of simple men and the fabric of their dreams. I could hear the voices of the children who would run around in that great yard, if it were ever mine, and smell the hollyhocks that again would bloom in orderly rows against the freshly painted house.
I took the mail in from the janitor—a letter from Star Harbor.
Dear Madam:
Mattie “Charles T. Smith” was drowned yesterday while taking up her lobster-pots. I know that you will feel sorry for her demise, but Providence has now made clear the way for you to have the house you wanted. Please advise, as I would like to close the deal.
Yours truly,
John Bell.
I sat quite still, with the letter trembling in my hand.
Mattie had gone back to the sea, back to that ancient mother of hers out of whose arms she had been taken.