“Oh, good!” Jack shouted.
“Well, I want Mr. Farley now,” Dorothy pouted. The fatigue of the journey had begun to tell on her.
Farley walked down to the car and saw his friends settled in their places. As the train pulled out of the station he stood on the platform and watched till it disappeared. Then he sighed and walked slowly back to the street. How fortunate some men were in this world, he thought. Douglas Briggs was an example. He had everything that could contribute to happiness—success, power, money, a happy home, a wife who must be a perpetual inspiration, and children. Farley cared comparatively little for money or power; he was content to follow his life in the world as it had been laid out for him; but sometimes he grew depressed as he thought that the deeper satisfactions, the love of a wife and of children, he should probably never know. For the past year this feeling had become a conviction. He encouraged no morbid sentiment about it, however. He had plenty of interests and pleasures; his work alone brought rewards that were worth striving for, and in his friendships, his interests and in books he found distraction and solace. He was one of those men who are never tempted to experiment with their emotions; so he had kept his mind wholesome, and he had never known the disappointment and the bitterness of those who try to substitute self-indulgence for happiness.
Farley himself hardly realized how much his view of life was influenced by his attitude toward women. He had the exalted view of women that only those men can take who have kept their lives clean. He had first become interested in Douglas Briggs through seeing Briggs’s wife. He thought there must be remarkable qualities in a man who could win the love of a woman like that. Until within a few months he had seen Helen only a few times. Now he felt as if he had known her always. He looked back on himself during the years before he first saw her as if he had been someone else, with a feeling very like pity. There were also moments of weakness when he thought with pity of himself as he had been since knowing her.
If Farley had realized the misery he had caused Helen Briggs he would have experienced an agony of regret. On the way to Waverly Helen kept thinking of her talk with him on the train. The revelation of his own character that Farley had given made Helen compare him with her husband. She had never before appreciated the rare qualities of the journalist, his inflexible honesty, his candor, his generous admirations, his supreme unselfishness. At the thought of his devotion to her husband Helen felt her face flush with shame. Douglas, of course, knew how much Farley admired him; but Douglas was used to admiration; he had received it all his life.
XIII
After Helen’s departure, Douglas Briggs felt a curious mingling of relief and depression. It was a relief not to have to face the constant rebuke that the sight of her gave him; and yet it depressed him during the day to think that when he returned home he should not find her there. He realized now many things about himself that he had been unconscious of before. In the happy time that seemed so far away now, during the stress of work, how he had loved to think of her at home there with the children. What a comfort it was just to know they were there and to feel that they were safe. And then, the walk home, with the expectation of finding the children and Helen in the nursery. The glad welcome! Then—but at this point he had to force himself to think of other things. That happiness could never be the same because in her eyes he could never be the same man. She must ever look back on those days with a kind of shame; she must feel that he had deceived her, that through it all he had been a hypocrite. With her severe standards she must think that he had never been what she believed him to be. She would judge him by that perfect father of hers, by her sturdy older brother, and by the two brothers who had entered the Church. At other times he would accuse himself of wronging her; she could not judge him so harshly; she could not put aside altogether the love she had once had for him. The love she had once had! He would feel a shock of horror. Why, she must have it still; she had told him a thousand times that nothing could change her love for him. After the children came they used to say that much as they loved the children they loved each other a thousand times more. And how they used to wonder if other husbands and wives loved as they did. They used to laugh and say that perhaps to other people they seemed as commonplace as others did to them. After a time he resolved to discipline himself when these thoughts came; if he were to indulge them, they would make life unbearable. He wondered vaguely if she ever had such thoughts now. Once they used to believe that they often had the same thoughts. In this way, in spite of his efforts, he found himself going back to his morbid fancies. Sometimes, on the other hand, he became rebellious and he pitied himself as a man unjustly and inhumanely treated. No woman had a right to treat a man like that, a man who had always tried to be good to her, too. No woman had a right to expect her husband to be perfect.
It seemed curious that at this time Douglas Briggs should have found solace in the companionship of Guy Fullerton. The boy’s eager interest in life and his simplicity of mind amused and interested the older man. In spite of his four years of money-spending at Harvard, Guy had not been spoiled; at moments his ingenuousness was almost childish. Douglas Briggs found that with Guy he could discuss matters he would shrink from mentioning in the presence of sophisticated and hardened men. In Guy, too, he saw many of the qualities that he himself had had as a boy, though he recognized that long before reaching his secretary’s age he had outgrown most of them. In his dread of being alone he made pretexts for keeping the boy with him in his few hours of leisure during the day. In the late afternoon they would walk from the house to the club where Briggs would let Guy order the dinner. They had a table reserved for them in the bay-window of the dining-room, by George, the fat and pompous head-waiter, whose display of teeth at the appearance of Douglas Briggs suggested the memory of a long line of tips. After finishing the meal they would often linger, sipping claret punch which Briggs allowed himself to encourage Guy to drink. He had begun to feel a paternal fondness for Guy; he enjoyed formulating before the young fellow a philosophy of life and offering stray bits of advice. Guy’s admiration for him stimulated him and, though he would have hated to acknowledge the fact, it supported him in a good opinion of himself. If in his talks there were matters that occurred to his mind only to be immediately suppressed, the reason was not less because he wished to conceal certain aspects of life from the boy than because he wished to keep the boy’s admiration untarnished. Occasionally he wondered if he ought not to do something for Guy, if he were not selfish in his keeping him in a kind of life that might harm him. If the young fellow stayed long enough in Washington he would probably become one of those miserable creatures whose days were spent in hanging on to the soiled skirts of the Government. It would be a pity to see Guy, for example, in the army of clerks who, at nine o’clock each day, poured into the Government offices and streamed out again at four in the afternoon. Briggs said to himself that he ought to find a chance for Guy to do work into some sort of independence where he could develop those qualities of faithfulness and intelligence that were plainly his inheritance even if they were somewhat obscured by his boyishness.
After dinner, when there was nothing to call him to the House, Briggs would occasionally be joined by a politician, or by one of the Army or Navy men who frequented the club. He dreaded meeting the officers even more than the politicians. He had grown tired of hearing of the exploits of the Spanish War, of the controversy between rival Admirals and of the rare qualities, on the one hand, of this General or that, and the injustice of the General’s advance over officers who had given many years of faithful work to the service. The jealousies and the rivalries among the heroes disgusted him, and the bragging among some of the veterans gave him a contempt for war. At moments he had a horror of meeting anyone except the young fellow who kept him from thinking about himself. He wondered if he had grown suddenly old. The talk of the club made him feel as if life had become sordid and mean, as if nothing was ever done from an unselfish motive. In these moods he would sometimes take Guy with him for a ride in the country on a trolley-car to Chevy Chase, where they would sit on the porch of the club and watch the fireflies gleaming over the green sward, or, as oftener happened, to Cabin John’s, where they amused themselves by studying the crowd. Cabin John’s used to remind Briggs of his early days in the country when he attended the church-picnics. He found himself now going back to those days very often. After all, he reflected, the plain democratic life was the best. And it was this very kind of life that he had been striving so desperately to get away from.