Whenever he met me alone after this, however, he would confide the growing nature of his doubts and perplexities. Bessie was no more the girl she had been when he first met her than he was like the boy he had been at ten years of age. A great, a very great change was coming over her. She was becoming more aggressive and argumentative and self-centred all the time, more this, more that. She was reading a great deal, much too much for the kind of life she was called upon to lead. Of late they had been having long and unnecessary arguments that were of no consequence however they were settled, and yet if they were not settled to suite her she was angry or irritable. She was neglecting her home and running about all the time with her new-found friends. She did not like the same plays he did. He wanted a play that was light and amusing, whereas she wanted one with some serious moral or intellectual twist to it. She read only serious books now and was attending a course of lectures, whereas he, as he now confessed, was more or less bored by serious books. What was the good of them? They only stirred up thoughts and emotions which were better left unstirred. And she liked music, or was pretending she did, grand opera, recitals and that sort of thing, whereas he was not much interested in music. Grand opera bored him, and he was free to admit it, but if he would not accompany her she would go with one or both of those two wretched women he was beginning to detest. Their husbands had a little money and gave them a free rein in the matter of their social and artistic aspirations. They had no household duties to speak of and could come and go as they chose, and Wray now insisted that it was they who were aiding and abetting Bessie in these various interests and enthusiasms and stirring her up to go and do and be. What was he to do? No good could come if things went on as they were going. They were having frequent quarrels, and more than once lately she had threatened to leave him and do for herself here in New York, as he well knew she could. He was doing very well now and they could be happy together if only these others could be done away with.
It was only a month or two after this that Wray came to see me, in a very distrait state of mind. After attempting to discuss several other things quite casually he confessed that his young wife had left him. She had taken a room somewhere and had resumed work as a stenographer, and although he met her occasionally in the subway she would have nothing to do with him. She wanted to end it all. And would I believe it? She was accusing him of being narrow and ignorant and stubborn and a number of other things! Only think of it! And three or four years ago she had thought he was all wrong when he wanted to go rowing on Sunday or stay downtown to dinner of an evening. Could such things be possible? And yet he loved her, in spite of all the things that had come up between them. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t help thinking how sweet and innocent and strange she was when he first met her, how she loved her parents and respected their wishes. And now see. “I wish to God,” he suddenly exclaimed in the midst of the “oldtime” picture he was painting of her, “that I hadn’t been so anxious to change her. She was all right as she was, if I had only known it. She didn’t know anything about these new-fangled things then, and I wasn’t satisfied till I got her interested in them. And now see. She leaves me and says I’m narrow and stubborn, that I’m trying to hold her back intellectually. And all because I don’t want to do all the things she wants to do and am not interested in the things that interest her, now.”
I shook my head. Of what value was advice in such a situation as this, especially from one who was satisfied that the mysteries of temperament of either were not to be unraveled or adjusted save by nature—the accidents of chance and affinity, or the deadly opposition which keep apart those unsuited to each other? Nevertheless, being appealed to for advice, I ventured a silly suggestion, borrowed from another. He had said that if he could but win her back he would be willing to modify the pointless opposition and contention that had driven her away. She might go her intellectual way as she chose if she would only come back. Seeing him so tractable and so very wishful, I now suggested a thing that had been done by another in a somewhat related situation. He was to win her back by offering her such terms as she would accept, and then, in order to bind her to him, he was to induce her to have a child. That would capture her sympathy, very likely, as well as insinuate an image of himself into her affectionate consideration. Those who had children rarely separated—or so I said.
The thought appealed to him intensely. It satisfied his practical and clerkly nature. He left me hopefully and I saw nothing of him for several months, at the end of which time he came to report that all was once more well with him. She had come back, and in order to seal the new pact he had taken a larger apartment in a more engaging part of the city. Bessie was going on with her club work, and he was not opposing her in anything. And then within the year came a child and there followed all those simple, homey, and seemingly binding and restraining things which go with the rearing and protection of a young life.
But even during that period, as I was now to learn, all was not as smooth as I had hoped. Talking to me in Wray’s absence once Bessie remarked that, delightful as it was to have a child of her own, she could see herself as little other than a milch cow with an attendant calf, bound to its service until it should be able to look after itself. Another time she remarked that mothers were bond-servants, that even though she adored her little girl she could not help seeing what a chain and a weight a child was to one who had ambitions beyond those of motherhood. But Wray, clerkly soul that he was, was all but lost in rapture. There was a small park nearby, and here he could be found trundling his infant in a handsome baby-carriage whenever his duties would permit. He would sit or walk where were others who had children of about the age of his own so that he might compare them. He liked to speculate on the charm and innocence of babyhood and was amused by a hundred things which he had never noticed in the children of others. Already he was beginning to formulate plans for little Janet’s future. It was hard for children to be cooped up in an apartment house in the city. In a year or two, if he could win Bessie to the idea, they would move to some suburban town where Janet could have the country air.
They were prospering now and could engage a nursemaid, so Mrs. Wray resumed her intellectual pursuits and her freedom. Throughout it all one could see that, respect Wray as she might as a dutiful and affectionate and methodical man, she could not love or admire him, and that mainly because of the gap that lay between them intellectually. Dissemble as he might, there was always the hiatus that lies between those who think or dream a little and those who aspire and dream much. Superiority of intellect was not altogether the point; she was not so much superior as different, as I saw it. Rather, they were two differing rates of motion, flowing side by side for the time being only, his the slower, hers the quicker. And it mattered not that his conformed more to the conventional thought and emotions of the majority. Hers was the more satisfactory to herself and constituted an urge which he feared rather than despised; and his was more satisfactory to himself, compromise as he would. Observing them together one could see how proud he was of her and of his relationship to her, how he felt that he had captured a prize, regardless of the conditions by which it was retained; and on the other hand one could easily see how little she held him in her thought and mood. She was forever talking to others about those things which she knew did not interest him or to which he was opposed.
For surcease she plunged into those old activities that had so troubled him at first, and now he complained that little Janet was being neglected. She did not love her as she should or she could not do as she was doing. And what was more and worse, she had now taken to reading Freud and Kraft-Ebbing and allied thinkers and authorities, men and works that he considered dreadful and shameful, even though he scarcely grasped their true significance.
One day he came to me and said: “Do you know of a writer by the name of Pierre Loti?”
“Yes,” I replied, “I know his works. What about him?”
“What do you think of him?”