CHAPTER XVII
GAGE FINISHES IT
THE Convention went on as Gage had predicted. It held few surprises. Here and there a wave of new sentiment was perceptible but the old rules held good. The tremendous heat was a factor. It made many of the delegates relapse very easily into the political fatalism which is the breath of life to party control.
To the women it was more interesting and more disappointing than it was to the men. They were interested because it was all new. They were disappointed because every one seemed to give in to the obvious so readily. Harriet Thompson and her group were somewhat grim—humorous enough. They had not expected anything else really.
It was an exhausting week. There was a threat that the Convention might go over into the succeeding week but that was unfulfilled. Saturday night Margaret and Helen went back to St. Pierre too tired and worn to even talk much to each other, thoughtful, depressed a little and revolving new enthusiasms at the same time. But now that they were emerging from the impersonal world in which they had been they felt the pressure of the personal responsibilities they both were speeding toward, perhaps, for they sat in silence in their compartment, each full of her own reflections. Younger and less experienced women would have welcomed the egotism of their own visions—the anticipations of scenes in which they would be central. Helen and Margaret, fresh from the lift of experience which was largely intellectual, did not look anticipative, or particularly happy.
Helen had wired Gage that she was coming and he met her at the station. One glance at his dark face told her all she needed to know of his mood. He took her bags, not offering to kiss her and she and Margaret, oddly constrained, got into the waiting car. Margaret was dropped at her apartment and there, at the door, Gage vouchsafed his only conversation. He asked them briefly if they “were satisfied with the show” and his voice was heavy with ridicule.
“I think we were,” said Helen, “we didn’t expect as much as you did, perhaps, Gage.”
A light answer, ringing sharply. Margaret went into her room and flung open the windows to air it. At the window she looked down the street but the Flandon motor had disappeared.
Helen kept wishing that it were not Sunday. Sunday was such a long, intimate, family day. She meant to have been very definite with herself about what her mode of approach to Gage would be. She found herself floundering again. Of course there could be no compromise now. This business with this girl had to be sifted through, admitted—faced. She supposed there was nothing at all left of any feeling for Gage. He had been outrageous and, even as she thought that, she worried about him. He did look so very badly. Other people must be noticing it too.
He said nothing. At the house he helped her out and went into the house with her. She sought the children. They were delightful and welcoming, full of questions, of tales about the fun they had while she was away, eager for presents. Helen kept the children with her, nervously, postponing the encounter with Gage, wishing he would go down to the city. But he did not. He hung about, ominous, smoking, reading, yet not reading with absorption, suddenly throwing book or paper aside and restlessly trying some new one, watching Helen.
She was pent up. There was such a contrast between the easy interchange of yesterday and the constraint of to-day. The house didn’t seem big enough to hold her and Gage. She went about her work trying to be normal, directing the maids, playing with the children, unpacking her bags. All the time she felt him watching her even if she were not in the same room, felt his brooding concentration on her, knew he was wondering what she thought about, whether she was glad to be back, what she was going to do about Freda Thorstad. For the first time in her married life, she had the sense of marriage as a trap. It had never been that. There were times when she had been a little restive, but she had always been building on a rock of belief in marriage, joy in it. It was different to-day. She felt as if she had come in out of the fresh air of clean discourse, free intercourse, into a narrow room where she was shut up with a growling man—a room heavy with discord, enmity, suspicion.