The Preliminaries Part 9

"I'm not ready for Jacob until I have been through the closets. They must be cleaned first.--I hate to clean closets! I hate to cook, to sew, to iron, to dust, to scrub! There are women who {135} like these occupations. Let such people a.s.sume them!"

"I can hear you, Clarissa, if you speak less oratorically. We are not in an audience-room," suggested her husband.

Clarissa was slender, fair, and dramatic. If she was in the room you looked at her. Her Norman nose was delicately cut, her manner fastidious, but her collars were carelessly put on, and her neckties had a vaguely one-sided effect. She just escaped being pretty and precise and reliable-looking by a narrow margin, but escape she did.

She was, instead, disturbing, distracting, decidedly lovable, not a little pathetic. Her face was dreamy, yet acute--the face of an enthusiast. The line of her jaw was firmly and beautifully drawn; her intellectual activity was undeniable, but philistines {136} mistrusted her conclusions at sight--and justly.

"This is not a good day on which to hold an argument," she went on with dignity, ignoring her husband's sub-acid comment. "It is too easy to be uncivil when one is so uncomfortable. But I have been thinking about these matters for a long time. I have been forming my resolutions. They are not lightly taken. I was almost ready, in any event, to tell you that I had decided to renounce the domestic life."

"To--?"

"To renounce the domestic life," repeated Clarissa with emphasis.

"Homes are an anachronism at the end of the nineteenth century, anyhow. It is time women had the courage of their convictions and sloughed off an anti-social form of habitat that dates from the Stone Age."

{137}

"Do you mean you would rather _board?_"

Clarissa stared. "What has boarding to do with it?" she inquired rather haughtily. "I am talking about the universal problem of woman's work. One's own individual makes.h.i.+fts do not affect that. But if it is ever to be solved, some woman must solve it. Men never will.

Sacrifices will have to be made for it, as for other causes. There are women who are ready to make them--and I have discovered that I am one of the women."

Professor Charleroy received this statement in absolute silence.

"As a temporary alleviation," Clarissa went on meditatively, "families might be a.s.sociated upon some group-system. The operating expenses of the individual establishments would be greatly reduced, and the surplus {138} could be applied to developing the higher life of the members of the group. It would be quite practicable, even in our present crude civilization, to arrange such groups. But of course that would be a temporary expedient. In the redeemed form of social life, it will not be necessary."

"What ails you, Clarissa? Did that lecture you delivered before the Sat.u.r.day Afternoon Club go to your head?"

Clarissa flushed. Her club paper on "After the Home--What?" was a sensitive subject. She already had been chaffed a good deal about it.

"Of course I know," she said with dignity, "that I am not a genius. I can't organize. I can't write. I'm not pretending to be in the cla.s.s with Ibsen or Olive Schreiner or Sonia Kovalevsky! No, nor with the American women who are going to work {139} out their ideas. I don't believe I'd make a good social worker, either. I have n't enough patience and tenderness. But I _can_ talk. You know I can talk, Paul."

Yes, he knew it. To his cost, he knew it. She had the gift of fluent, winning speech, speech with an atmosphere, a charm. Uncouth theories acquired grace on her lips, and plausible theories seemed stronger than they were. She ironed s.h.i.+rt-waists badly, and the starch stuck to the irons, but she could make the worse appear the better reason with deftness and dispatch. Somewhere, somehow, a coal from the sacred fire had touched her lips. You might be indignant, outraged, at her theories, but you never refused to listen while she set them forth.

"I figure it this way," she continued. {140} "In all great causes, the people who can think and write need the help of the people who can talk, to disseminate their ideas, to popularize them, to get them brought home to the people who don't think and don't read, and yet have influence. That shall be my _metier_. I can do it. I can do it well. I will do it for a living wage and put my heart and soul into doing it. Without going outside a very narrow field,--say, that of parlor talks,--I can yet be a promoter of great causes. I will be a walking-delegate from the Union of the Elect! I will fight the good fight for Utopia! Why, Paul, I can make it glorious!"

Her face shone with a wonderful light. Her slender, delicately rounded figure vibrated with enthusiasm. She did not see the expression on her husband's face. When great thoughts were {141} astir in Clarissa s brain, her high imperturbability, her bright serenity, were maddening.

To a.s.sail them, logic was as useless as pa.s.sion. She was simply in another world from this.

Her husband sat down heavily. He felt an unacademic desire to box her ears. Perhaps, had he done so, there would have been no story, for like most women with erratic nerves Clarissa Charleroy had the elemental liking for a masterful man.

However, her husband's Huguenot blood and scholastic training did not help him to carry out such primitive impulses toward domestic discipline. He was a man of st.u.r.dy build, with a fine head and brown eyes of the gentle, faithful kind. Conscientious, persistent, upright, he perfectly fitted that old-fas.h.i.+oned description our fathers loved, "a scholar and a gentleman." It {142} cannot be denied that this type is out of place in our modern life; it is especially at a disadvantage when confronted with such a modern wife as his.

"Do you mean to--to _leave_ Marvel and me?" he inquired in a voice that was not as even as he could have wished.

His back was toward the window. His wife could not see that he had turned white, but she did notice that he looked steadily down into the palms of his hands.

She faced him with a fine composure.

"I don't see that I'm much good here and I, myself, am certainly very miserable," she said. "There is so much antagonism between you and me, Paul. We think alike about so few things!"

"Do you think the antagonism lies {143} between you and me--or between you and our circ.u.mstances?" inquired the professor. His voice was controlled now, but cutting. "Also, do you feel any special antagonism to Marvel? She is rather like yourself, you know."

Clarissa nodded brightly. He was stunned to see that she approved this.

"That's better! Do fight me, Paul! It clarifies my ideas, and I see more definitely what I want. I wish you were a good fighter. I like hard knocks!"

"Good Lord! little girl, you don't mean all this nonsense--you can't.

Why, it's impossible. You're my wife. I've done my best. Some day I shall do better. We shall win to peace and comfort yet--if you stand by. My text-book--"

Clarissa waved a disdainful hand. Her blue eyes were liquid, wonderful.

{144}

"You don't seem to think of the cause, Paul! Don't you realize that _I can do good work for humanity?_ Everybody can't do that. Everybody is n't called to it. I am."

Paul Charleroy let this statement pa.s.s. It hung in the air between them, unchallenged, undenounced. Possibly it was true. But, the man was wondering dumbly, what became of other men to whom this thing really happened? Did it crush them all like _this_? How did they keep up hope, decency, honor? How did they preserve their interest in the game and make life worth living afterward? Already he felt heavy upon his heart a presentiment of airless days, of tortured nights. The loneliness of it! No tenderness anywhere in life for him? No love?

Then, what use to live? Humanity? Wasn't he humanity?

{145}

Nevertheless, when he spoke, he only said, "And Marvel? Is Marvel called to be motherless?"

Clarissa's serene face clouded faintly. The question of Marvel did, indeed, puzzle even her facility. And yet she had light on that problem also.

"If I really prove to be any good,--and I think I shall be a helper in a movement that is going to revolutionize the earth,"--Clarissa said gravely, "there are others to consider besides Marvel. It--why, it _may_ be, Paul that my duty is to the race! I'm not an especially good mother for Marvel at her present age--the young-animal stage of her development. All a child under twelve years needs is to be properly fed, and clothed, and taught the elementary things. It has all been standardized, and is a matter for experts, anyhow. Your sister Josephine {146} would be a better mother for her for the next few years than I. Why should I do what others can do better? When Marvel begins to _think_, it will be different. Then she will need my influence. I should like to let you have her for the next few years, and have her come to me when she is fifteen or sixteen. How would that suit you, Paul?"

Her husband moved his shoulders imperceptibly, but said nothing. The thing had pa.s.sed the point where rational speech, as he conceived it, was in place. If Clarissa did not see the shallowness, the sheer indecency, of discarding one's human relations as if they were old clothes, he could not make her see it. Was it only half an hour ago that he had come down the street in the spring suns.h.i.+ne, under the budding elms, bringing Clarissa a bunch of {147} daffodils and thinking of making a garden, and of all the dear, homely April tasks?

Clarissa a.s.sumed that his silence was one of acquiescence. Sooner or later people always acquiesced.

"It is really sweet of you to take it like this, Paul," she said warmly. "I never have understood why people should n't be thoroughly rational about these matters. There's no occasion for bitterness. I should like to have people say we had remained ideal friends. I shall always be as much interested in your welfare as in my own.--Yes, more.

I should never dream of marrying again, myself, but in time I think it might be well for you to divorce me and do so." Her mobile face became introspective, absorbed. "Ruth Lawrence is rather too sentimental, not energetic enough for a professor's wife. And Nora Mills is heartless.

I think {148} she would marry you for a home, but you must n't let her do it. There is Evelyn Ames. I think Evelyn would do. She is so gentle and reliable!"

She was actually absorbed in this problem, her husband perceived to his utter amazement. He s.h.i.+vered with distaste. This was too grotesque. It could not be true.

His wife looked at him for approval. She noted that the look of fear was gone from his dark eyes. Something unwonted, ironic, flashed there in its stead. It was neither mirth nor malice, yet approached both. He set his boyish-looking mouth firmly, and shook off his silence as one throws off a nightmare. He would meet her on her own ground, and be as indifferent as she.

"Really, Clarissa, _that_ is the first sensible thing you have said this {149} afternoon," he forced himself to say.--"Why, what's this?"

It was the small daughter of the house who chose this moment to emerge from under the table, clutching fast a jaded-looking doll and a handful of its belongings. Her round eyes were fear-struck and her quick glance curiously hostile, but she slipped silently from the room. Her presence there was soon forgotten by her parents--but children do not forget. Of all the incomprehensible words tossed to and fro above her head, Marvel remembered every one.

II

Marvel Charleroy found the letter in the box at the gate where the postman had left it. There was other mail; she glanced at the covers light-heartedly as she went toward the house. She was {150} not very familiar with her mother's handwriting and, for the moment, did not recognize it.

The house was low, gray-s.h.i.+ngled, and inviting. It had a kindly, human aspect, and though it was a modern structure built at the time of Professor Charleroy's second marriage, eleven years before, there was about it some thing of that quiet dignity we a.s.sociate with age. The branches of a wide-spreading old elm swept one of its chimneys; the lawn was broad, the lilacs and syringas tall; ranks of high hollyhocks in shades of rose and wine, rising against gray lattice, shut off the kitchen gardens at the rear. The beds that bordered the paths were planted to a tangle of old-fas.h.i.+oned flowers, gorgeous in the July suns.h.i.+ne. There was a subdued gayety about the whole aspect of the sheltered, sunny place, a {151} look of warmth and home and joy, that was especially dear to Marvel Charleroy. It satisfied in her some elemental need.

She preserved a vivid memory, of which she never spoke, of the box-like little house on Spring Street, her early home. She recalled that house as disorderly and uncomfortable during her mother's regime; as frigid and uncomfortable during the reign of her Aunt Josephine.