"God! why are we so blind, so blind,—and our feet caught in the net of life before we know what is in our souls!"
For she realized that when she said she was middle-aged and anchored, it was but the surface truth. At thirty, with three children, she was more the woman, more capable of love, passion, understanding, devotion—more capable of giving herself wholly and greatly to a mate—than any girl could be. The well of life still poured its flood into her! Her husband could never know that agony of longing, those arms stretched out to—what? When would this torture of defeated capacity be ended—when had God set the term for her to suffer!
In the black silence that had fallen between them, Pole betook himself to the club, as his wife had suggested, for the consolation of billiards and talk among sensible folk, "who didn't take life so damned hard." In the intervals of these distractions his mind would revert to what had passed between him and his wife that evening. Margaret's last remarks comforted him somewhat. Nothing of a scandalous or public demonstration of her feeling about her marriage was imminent. Nevertheless, his pride was hurt. In spite of the fact that he had suspected for a long time that his wife was cold,—was not "won,"—he had hitherto travelled along in complacent egotism. "They were a fairly happy couple" or "they geed as well as most," as he would have expressed it. He had not suspected that Margaret might feel the need of more than that. To-night he had heard and understood the truth,—and it was a blow. Deep down in his masculine heart he felt that he had been unjustly put in the wrong, somehow. No woman had the right—no wife—to say without cause that having thought better of the marriage bargain she had "taken herself back." There was something preposterous in the idea. It was due to the modern fad of a woman's reading all sorts of stuff, when her mind was inflammable. He recognized that his wife was the more important, the stronger person of the two,—that was the trouble with American women (Larry always made national generalizations when he wished to express a personal truth)—they knew when they were strong,—felt their oats. They needed to be "tamed."
But Larry was aware that he was not fitted for the task of woman-tamer, and moreover it should have been begun long before this.
So having won his game of billiards Larry had a drink, which made him even more philosophical. "Margaret is all right," he said to himself. "She was strung up to-night,—something made her go loose. But she'll come around,—she'll never do the other thing!" Yet in spite of a second whiskey and soda before starting for home, he was not absolutely convinced of this last statement.
What makes a man like Larry Pole content to remain the master of the fort merely in name, when the woman has escaped him in spirit? Why will such men as he live on for years, aye and get children, with women, who do not even pretend to love them?
* * * * *
Meanwhile the wife sat there before the fire, her reading forgotten, thinking, thinking. She had said more than she herself knew to be in her heart. For one lives on monotonously, from day to day, unresolved, and then on occasion there flame forth unsuspected ideas, resolves. For the soul has not been idle…. It was true that their marriage was at an end. And it was not because of her husband's failures, his follies,—not the money mistakes. It was himself,—the petty nature he revealed in every act. For women like Margaret Pole can endure vice and folly and disappointment, but not a petty, trivial, chattering biped that masquerades as Man.
CHAPTER XXXIV
IN the weeks that followed the accident Margaret Pole saw much of Falkner. The engineer would come up the hill to the old house late in the afternoon after his work, or ride up on his bicycle in the morning on his way to the dam he was building. Ned—"the Little Man" as Falkner called him—came to expect this daily visit as one of his invalid rights. Several times Falkner stayed to dinner; but he bored Larry, who called him "a Western bounder," and grumbled, "He hasn't anything to say for himself." It was true that Falkner developed chronic dumbness in Larry's conversational presence. But Margaret seemed to like the "bounder." She discovered that he carried in his pocket a volume of verse. An engineer who went to his job these days with a poetry book in his coat pocket was not ordinary, as she remarked to her husband….