“But if this is going to happen to me often, what am I going to do?” he said. “I’ve lived those things. It’s been hell and heaven, Moira. I took two afternoons off from the office. I had to. It was all but impossible to go.”
She sat up in bed and gazed at him in profound reflection. She felt she knew what he meant. It was not childish, not perverse. How could such things be mixed up in the same day, this fine fervour of creation, and that mechanical, wretched work? What she most desired him to be he was now, and that he must continue to be at the cost of everything else. She suddenly saw life rosy and fresh ahead of them, untrammelled by anything base, full of brave expression.
“Never mind, never mind!” she cried excitedly. “Listen, you can hold on two months longer somehow. In two months my lease will be up. We’ve got eighteen hundred dollars between us now, and by that time we ought to have two thousand. We’ll just quit cold, Miles, drop everything. Somewhere in Europe we can live for nothing, live forever on that. Who knows what can happen before it is gone? We might never have to come back—never until we wanted to. You can go on writing and writing these gorgeous things!”
“My God,” he murmured, “it would be marvellous. It could be done.... O Magician!”
XX
The experience of that night was one of those moments on the Olympus of extravagant hope, before which it is merciful to draw the veil. In one hour they seemed to have attained all that life held for the most fortunate—freedom, work, love.
Therefore, had they stepped from the tropical belt to the Arctic circle; had they plunged from the top of a sunlit tower to the depths of a coal shaft, the change which came during the next month could not have been greater. Moira had never anticipated resenting her first baby. Preparations for the trip, expenditures for the trip, had first been slackened up in mid-career, as they waited apprehensively and then had been abandoned with the abruptness that only comes when death enters a house. There lay the paraphernalia of travel, new and useless. They had drifted into a state of divine negligence. Jobs and all practical affairs went along any old way; they were matters soon to be jettisoned like an old coat. Then came this reality as if the four walls of a prison had been dropped about them in a day.
It was not so bad as that of course, when the first rude awakening had passed. Life substitutes one enthusiasm for another. Miles recovered admirably at once; he spent his eloquence reassuring her that this was the best thing that could have happened to them. He had all the normal delight in the prospect of fatherhood.
But Moira was not so easily reconciled. She would always look upon that baby as something a little too unreasonably expensive. She was not ready for it, and had the plan of going abroad been broached earlier she would never have had it. She would have been more pleased had Miles not tried so hard to make her see it in a better light. She did not doubt his sincerity, nor that he would be one whose joy in children of his own would be unbounded. But she hated to think of his taking one burden after another from her shoulders until he would be carrying them all, while she waited helplessly. She had never thought him, as yet, strong enough without her.
So she did not relinquish her burdens until she had to. She worked on, until the last day she could without embarrassment. After a season of careful figuring she estimated that what they had saved, with Miles’ salary (which had been slightly increased not long before) would enable them to maintain their present comforts until she got back to earning. She hoped that could be managed somehow within two years.