March speculated rather actively upon the relation between Paula and her husband. There was no dark room in the composer's mind. He was the other pole from Aunt Lucile. All human problems set his mind at work. He was not widely read in the literature of psychology and he had a rough working theory which he regarded as his own, a dynamic theory. People got started off in life with a certain amount of energy. It varied immensely between individuals, of course, but one couldn't alter the total of his own. Upon that store you ran until you were spent. What channels this stream of energy cut for itself was partly a matter of luck, partly one of self-determination. The important fact was that there was only so much and that what went down one way did not also go down another. It might be a hundred rivulets or one river, it couldn't be both. This philosophy was largely responsible for the ordering of his own life, for his doing without possessions, for the most part without friends, for his keeping the brake set so tightly upon his sex impulses.
John must have come into Paula's life, he reflected, at a time when the musical outlet to her energies had been dammed up. Her main stream, like that of the Mississippi, had cut a new channel for itself. Had there been, he wondered, some similar obstruction in the main channel of John Wollaston's emotional life? Anyhow, there was no doubt that for the five years since this cataclysm had occurred, the course of true love had run smooth and deep. But suppose now that, through LaChaise's intervention, Paula's musical career was again opened to her, would the current turn that way? Would John be left stranded? Had Paula herself any misgivings to this effect?
That she was deeply troubled about her present relation with John and in general about John himself, would have been plain to a less penetrating eye than Anthony's. There was no open quarrel between them. Wollaston dropped into the music room sometimes, late in the afternoon, to ask how the opera was getting along. His manner to March on these occasions was one of, perhaps, slightly overwrought politeness, but the intention of it did not seem hostile. Toward Paula he presented the image of humorous, affectionate concern, the standard behavior of the perfect husband.
It was Paula, on these occasions, who gave the show away, betraying by a self-conscious eagerness to make him welcome, the fact that he was not. She made the mistake of telling him he looked tired and worried, facts too glaringly true to be bandied about in the presence of a stranger. He looked to March as if he were approaching the elastic limit of complete exhaustion. That it looked pretty much like that to Paula herself was made evident from the way she once spoke about him, her eyes full of tears, after he had left the room.
"He's working so insanely hard," she said. "Nights as well as days. I don't believe he's had five hours' consecutive sleep this week."
When March wanted to know why he did it, she hesitated, but gave him, at last, a candid answer. No one else would have answered it at all.
"I don't think it can be because he feels he has to," she said. "To earn the money, I mean. Of course, he's been buying a big farm, half of it, for Rush. But he said the other day that if I needed any extra money for this"—she nodded toward the score on the piano—"I was to let him know. Of course, he isn't happy about it and I suppose it makes him take things harder."
Naturally enough, March agreed with her here. John Wollaston was clearly a member of the gold coast class. It wasn't thinkable that his financial difficulties could be real. The unreality of them was, of course, the measure of the genuineness of his fear of losing Paula,—of seeing the main current of her life shift once more to its old channel. Did Paula see that, March wondered? What was it she foresaw?
He got a partial answer one day in the course of one of their quarrels about the opera. He had unguardedly given expression to his growing despondency about it.
"This thing can't go," he had said. "It's getting more lifeless from week to week. We're draining all the blood out of it and this stuff we're putting in is sawdust."