“Well, I’m telling you, Dick, that if things get any worse we’ll have a time handling every one.”
Dick nodded and went away. He was in a nasty temper. He was becoming increasingly resourceless out of actual working hours. While he was at work he was all right. It was after six o’clock that things wore out. He plowed through diversions too quickly, try as he might to make them last. The crowd he had been “traveling with,” he told himself, were becoming very tiresome. He knew exactly when they would do everything they did—at what stage of the evening each one of them would change his temper or his way of talking, and it was all boring. He drifted into cafés, but the acquaintances whom he met there all knew about him and Cecily, and though plenty of groups tried to attach him, and would gladly have done so, he had an irritated sense of the comments about him that kept him from wanting to draw down the fire of more of them.
It irritated him, too, to know that his gayety was becoming more and more perfunctory and that he was not getting fun out of things which should have been fun. Several deliberate efforts to amuse himself had failed completely, ending with reaction and disgust. He had tried, in company with some men who were used to that sort of thing, to pick up some girls at a public dance hall—and long before the expected end of the evening, found himself so let down and bored that he left the crowd, with the flimsiest excuse. He had tried a bit of joyriding, but the seductions of that experience with the almost professional joyriding girl who knew just how to curve into the arm of the man at the wheel of the car had left him not only cold, but amused in a kind of sarcastic, unsmiling way. There were times when he felt that he had lost his youth and his power to be amused—his ability to enjoy things. Cecily had taken the verve out of the very things which had been contested points and for the right to enjoy which he had so stubbornly contended.
Also Christmas was approaching and the nervous effort to banish all thought of the holiday from his mind was wearing. With problems all day and little relaxation anywhere, Dick was beginning to show baggy pouches under his eyes and little lines trailed down from the corners of his mouth. In his office that afternoon he was so exacting that his exasperated stenographer, escaping finally from his criticism, told her friend in the next office that she “didn’t wonder Mr. Harrison’s wife wouldn’t live with him. He’s got a terrible temper—fierce.”
Poor Dick, when the office was empty and he had to leave it, strolling back to the club to a choice of chicken casserole or English muttonchop, without enthusiasm, trying not to notice that the shop windows were hung with tinsel and gaudy with that gaudiness which is so beautiful at Christmas time, swinging past the toyshops with carelessness, and then turning back to look into the window of one of them.
Then came the day before the holiday with one of those fine pictorial snowstorms to make it all the more festive, with the unavoidable truce with work and struggle which pervaded even the world of business, with the greeting on every one’s lips. It seemed to Dick that he could not turn around without stirring up some memory of his home. He could see it so clearly, decorated for Christmas with a green English holly wreath below the brass knocker on the white door, poinsettias in the hall, the tree in its corner of the long living-room and the fire blazing; Dorothea’s little mind aflame like her cheeks with excitement; Leslie walking stumblingly among his presents; the baby walking now, too, probably. He would catch himself wondering what new words Leslie had learned. He wondered if Cecily would have a Christmas celebration this year. Yes, she would. It was like her to uphold things for the children even if her own fun were shattered. But she must be short of money. At that thought the glimmer of tenderness in his heart went out. It was bad enough not to see the children, but not to be allowed to support them! To be treated as a criminal outcast! Well, he’d left of his own free will, he reminded himself, and went on to the embittering thought that he’d tried to solve things without a break. They couldn’t have gone on—silent evenings, the constant sense that he wasn’t pleasing his wife, that she felt he was deteriorating, the slight that her rigorous standards, single track virtues put upon him. He wasn’t happy; she wasn’t happy. It couldn’t go on. Matthew had said it couldn’t go on as it was. Probably not. Probably end in a divorce. That would be a nasty business; no worse than lots of other people went through, but Cecily would hate it. Poor Cecily! And in its endless track his mind pondered again whose was the fault and where the remedy.
He had a stupid supper at the almost deserted club, fancying sensitively that the few men sitting at nearby tables were pitying him. Then, following instinct rather than intention as he started out for his usual walk, he found himself headed in the direction of his former home. It was several miles, but he walked them quickly. In the familiar street which he had avoided since he had left Cecily, he felt a desire to escape notice. But he would not yield to that and kept his head up as he went along the side of the street opposite his own house.
There were lights in the house. That made him feel a little queer. He’d known of course that the place was inhabited, that life was going on there as usual, but the sight of the lights made it so much more real. The wrought iron porch lanterns brought out the holly on the door. It was not a wreath this year. A sprig of green tied to the knocker.
With the strangest clandestine feeling, Dick crossed the street and stood beside the gate. Three months and more since he had opened that high iron gate whose beautiful workmanship had made him so proud. He opened it now softly and went up the side of the brick walk, in the shadow cast by the great fir trees. There, under the living-room windows, he saw them all—Ellen holding the baby, Dorothea and Leslie on the floor beside the tree and Cecily in the corner of the big couch. As he saw, he knew what he had been hoping. There was no one else there.
The children had grown so unbelievably in three months!