1

“WHY don’t you want me to get a job, Felix?”

It was mid-April, and the Park across the way had, all at once, turned that lovely young green of beginning grass and burgeoning trees. It was dusk, and Rose-Ann and Felix were sitting in their cushioned window-seat—a new addition to the household furnishing—arguing a point which had been coming up from time to time since their marriage.

“You have your work,” she went on.

“Yes,” he said, “and I’m doing all Hawkins’s work now, and in the fall I will get a respectable salary, I expect, so why need we—”

“I don’t mean that,” she said. “I mean your writing.” Ever since that morning at the St. Dunstan, Felix had been writing at odd times, at—heaven knew just what, he wasn’t sure himself—something that might perhaps be called a play, but so fantastic a thing as yet that he had not even ventured to show any of the fragments of it to Rose-Ann; she had been very nice about it, too, never asking him to let her see what he had done the night before ... to furnish the justification, as it were, for staying up until all hours. Felix wasn’t at all certain that they constituted such a justification. They were probably mere folly: but, so far, they were all he could attempt.

“You have your writing,” Rose-Ann was saying. “And I haven’t anything.”

“You used to write, Rose-Ann,” he said.

“I know. Not much.”

“You need not have given up your class at Community House,” he suggested.

“It wasn’t enough, any longer. I want something else.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Something to use up my energies. I can’t stay here and play keeping house in a studio. There’s no excuse for it. That’s why we have a studio, Felix! So we can each be free. Why are you so stubborn about it?”

“I’m not being stubborn, Rose-Ann. I’m just being candid. I can’t stop you from going out and getting a job. But I can tell the truth and say I don’t like the idea! And that’s all I can do. If it means so much to you, you’ll have to do it in spite of my not liking it, that’s all.... It isn’t as if there were some particular thing you wanted to do—I wouldn’t say a word against that. But work in general—work for the sake of work—that just means a little more money, which we don’t need, and your coming home tired at night.... After all, Rose-Ann, I want a wife....”

She grew suddenly cold. “Then you should have married somebody else,” she said. “I don’t want to be—a wife!”

And they went out to dinner in an estranged silence.

2

These silences, inexplicable and impenetrable, would spring up between them, and then as inexplicably dissolve—sometimes in tears, sometimes in laughter.

That night when they came home to their studio and started to undress for bed, Rose-Ann changed back suddenly to her accustomed self; and his own mood, a moment ago puzzled and angry, could not withstand the influence of her smile. Then both of them were sorry, and accused themselves inwardly of the fault.... Felix could see why she objected to being merely “a wife,” and wondered that he had been so crass as to say such a thing ... and they sought with passionate tenderness to make each other forget....

“Do I make you happy, Felix?”

“Yes.... And are you happy?”

“Yes,”—a little sadly, in spite of herself.

“Sometimes,” he said, “you seem for a moment to go far away from me, even when you are here in my arms. I can’t bear that.” He held her more closely, as though to reassure himself of the reality of her presence. “Then it all begins to seem like a dream again.... I’ve always been lonely for you, all my life, wanting you always ... and not believing I was ever going to find you ... trying to adjust myself to a world in which you didn’t exist. And sometimes, even now—But you are real, aren’t you?”

“I dreamed of you, too, Felix....”

“Isn’t it strange? And strangest of all, that the story should have a happy ending.”

“This—is just the beginning, Felix....”

A faint sadness in her tone, that he had heard before in the very midst of their happiness, frightened him.

“The beginning, yes,” he said. “The beginning of happiness.”

“And—afterward, Felix?”

“More happiness.... Doesn’t that satisfy you?”

“Yes, but—Oh, of course it’s beautiful and wonderful to me, Felix. But I’m afraid....”

“Of what, darling?”

“We love just being together, now. But will we always? I mean—doesn’t something happen to happiness, after a while? I know it sounds absurd. I don’t mean we’ll fall out of love—not that—but won’t we lose the beauty of this—this intimacy, in time? You know how other people sometimes seem—cooped up and used to each other—just that. It’s ugly, to me ... I suspect we are rather awful, Felix, talking about such things!...”

“No,” he said. “It isn’t enough to feel—we must know why we feel.”

She sighed. “I guess we are like that. We can’t even take happiness without asking why.”

It was true; they encouraged each other in what would have seemed, to some people, an exaggerated curiosity about things of no importance—and, to many lovers, a prying into matters best left alone. Do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy? They did not seem to fear it.

“I suppose,” said Felix reflectively, “people must care a great deal for each other.... It would be dreadful, this closeness, if one didn’t want it.”

“But does one keep on wanting it?... Yes, Felix, that’s what I’m afraid of. If this is only for a while—and then we were to be just like other people—sunk in a greasy domesticity—Felix, I couldn’t keep on living.”

He took her hand tenderly. “But we aren’t like those other people, Rose-Ann,” he said. He had a baffling sense of this speech contradicting something he had said or thought before....

“Do you really think our marriage is so different from other people’s, Felix?”

They seemed to have exchanged places in the argument—that argument, so absurd and yet so poignant, which kept arising, neither of them knowing why, nor quite what it was all about....

“Of course our marriage is different,” he was saying. “How many married people really want to know each other? How many of them can really talk to one another about what is going on in their inmost minds—as we do!”

“Yes, we do, don’t we,” said Rose-Ann, comforted to find in this complete candour of theirs an authentic superiority to the common destiny of tragic and ridiculous mutual misunderstanding.

“We shall always be finding out new things about one another,” Felix went on bravely. “That is what our marriage means—a knitting together of our whole lives, a marrying of our memories.”

“And our hopes, too, Felix,” said Rose-Ann. “And a creating of something new and beautiful—books, plays, poems.... But I forgot!” she laughed. “I mustn’t talk about your literary works till you let me. Must talk about something else!...

“Yes, Felix, we are different. We can say things to each other that ordinary lovers couldn’t. I wouldn’t have dared speak of my silly fears to anybody but you.... And—you can tell me things.... What you wrote to me, when I was home in Springfield, you remember, about that girl, Felix—I loved you for it. A sonnet you read me last night reminded me of her and you. I made you read it over twice—I didn’t tell you why. I still remember the way it begins.” Softly she said the lines:

“It made me love you all the more to know you felt so about your boyish love-affair—that you wanted to be married, that you really wanted your girl-sweetheart to have a baby, hers and yours.... I’m glad it didn’t happen that way, but I think you were a lovely, foolish, beautiful boy-lover to want it....

“Of course,” she added, “artists shouldn’t have families to support.... They are children themselves.—Do you know why I want to get a job, Felix? You mustn’t be angry at me—but if anything should happen, if you should lose your place on the Chronicle, or if you should get to feel that you need all your time for your writing, I would want to be able to make enough money so you could go on with your own work. You don’t mind my wanting that, do you, Felix? We’re not the conventional married couple, the wife sitting at home doing nothing while the man goes out to work every day! I want to be a real helpmeet—an artist’s wife, not an ordinary wife.”

“You’re a darling,” said Felix. “But—” a little uncomfortably—“I guess I can take care of myself; I shan’t need to be supported. Why don’t you go ahead and be an artist yourself?”

“Oh, Felix, I can’t!...”

“Why not? What kind of artist do you want to be?”

“Something I can’t be, Felix. If I tell you, you’ll understand.... But you won’t laugh at me?”

“Of course not, Rose-Ann.”

“But it’s really funny! Especially if you had seen me when I was a girl—shy, awkward, prudish—yes, prudish, Felix. When I was eighteen, I was the worst little old maid you ever saw. I read romantic books all the time, and real people seemed to me coarse and horrible. I hated everybody. I wouldn’t go to boy-and-girl parties, because of the—it still seems an ugly word to me—‘spooning’ that went on in the corners. I wouldn’t dance, I wouldn’t hold hands. I wouldn’t keep company. Oh, I was terrible. For a while I wanted to be a missionary in some savage country—”

“And teach the natives to wear clothes?—is that your secret ambition?” he laughed.

“No—for I got converted ... to paganism. When I was twenty-one years old. It was a book that converted me.”

“I really know very little about you, don’t I? All this seems so strange.... I’ve imagined you as always being what you are now. What book was it converted you?”

“It was ‘Leaves of Grass.’ You remember I told you how I decided to be a librarian, and took a course of training, and was made an assistant in the library at Springfield.... Well, there was a shelf of forbidden books—and one day I opened one of those forbidden books, and read a passage.... I’ll tell you: it was ‘A woman’s body at auction’—do you remember it? Uncouth, wonderful lines—not so much poetry to me as a revelation. I remember I stood there reading some of those lines again and again, and I went back to the desk saying them over and over to myself—just rough, plain phrases naming over one by one the joints and muscles and parts of the body, like an anatomy text-book—but making me feel, as no text-book had ever done, that these wonderful things were my body! Those lines still have a thrill for me—” And she chanted, solemnly, like a litany:

She paused, and smoked her cigarette silently, remembering. “I went around the rest of that day,” she said presently, “in a dreaming ecstasy.... I had read in some of my father’s books about the mystics, and I knew that I felt like them when they had seen God.... I looked every now and then with a kind of awe at my wrist or my finger-nail, saying to myself, These are not parts of the body only, but of the soul! And that night I took the book home, and read it in bed, happy and afraid....

“And now comes the part that is funny. There always is something funny, isn’t there, in trying to put a revelation into practice! But don’t laugh at me, Felix. Think what it would mean to a young-lady-librarian, a clergyman’s daughter, to discover that her body was a poem.... I got out of bed and took off my nightgown to look at myself in the glass. But it was a modest glass, fastened sideways to the top of the bureau, and it refused to show me all of myself at once; so I unfastened it, and wrestled it down from the bureau, and stood it upright against the wall. I was rather disappointed, Felix—my body wasn’t as beautiful as a poem ought to be; it was just a slim, awkward, twenty-one-year-old girl’s body, that was all.

“But there had been something beautiful about it for a moment—in the glimpses I had of it in the glass as I pulled it down from the bureau; then it had been—well, yes, beautiful, with the beauty of—flexed muscles and purposeful movement.... And I had a kind of vision.... Yes, really, Felix ... a wonderful and terrible moment, in which I seemed to see myself wrestling with life, in a kind of agony of creation ... and for a moment I seemed to know what my woman’s body was for. And then I sort of waked up, wondering what it was all about. I was thrilled and afraid....

“And then an idea came to me—I’m glad I can tell you this part, Felix—I said to myself: I will be a dancer! Yes, I decided to go to Chicago and learn to be a dancer....

“There was a boy who wanted to marry me—though I don’t know what this has to do with it; anyway, I would get away from him at the same time, by going to Chicago.... I was all on fire with the idea. I wanted to start right away with dancing. I couldn’t go to sleep. And—this is the part that seems to me the most terribly ridiculous of all—I went downstairs and brought back the Dan-Emp volume of father’s encyclopedia to read the article about Dancing....

“And there, in that article, Felix, I learned why I could never be a really-truly dancer—it seems that one must begin in one’s cradle!

“Well—I cried. I could cry now when I think about it. I’m a perfect fool, Felix.... But what’s the use of having a vision of one’s purpose in life, if one can’t do anything about it?... There seemed to be nothing to do except stay in Springfield and—marry that boy. And I couldn’t, I couldn’t do that. I thought of other things besides dancing that I might do, but they didn’t interest me. An artist’s model? Somehow I didn’t like that idea—not in modern terms—not at so much an hour; after all, I was a clergyman’s daughter, and it just didn’t seem respectable! I thought—if I had lived in Ancient Greece, I might have been a friend of Phidias or somebody, and seen myself carved upon the frieze of a temple ... or been one of the marble maidens of Keats’ Grecian Urn. Oh, I dreamed of all the lovely and impossible things in the world. And I decided—at least I wouldn’t stay in Springfield!”

“And so you came to Chicago....”

“Yes, and became a settlement-worker. It seems a pitiful climax to my story, doesn’t it? And yet, if one lives in twentieth-century America instead of in Ancient Greece, what is one to do? It seemed to me a good pagan life, to try to bring about a better world for everybody—a world in which beauty would count for something.... At one time I thought I was a socialist, but I found that I couldn’t bear to attend stuffy meetings, and that I couldn’t understand Marx and didn’t want to. And I wasn’t interested in woman suffrage, either. My life had to be centred around something personal. So—”

“So you taught those children how to play....”

“It was the Greekliest thing I knew to do.... If Aspasia had been born in Springfield, Illinois, she might have taken a class in a Chicago settlement!” Rose-Ann said defiantly—and then, doubtfully, “What do you think of it all?”

“I don’t know,” he said—“it leaves me bewildered—except that I think you’re a wonderful child.”

“It’s you who are wonderful,” she said, “to understand. I am a child, I suppose—and I want to stay one always. I don’t want to grow up. That’s very foolish, isn’t it? Do you know that horrible habit some married people have of addressing each other as ‘Pa’ and ‘Ma’—as soon as they have a baby, I mean? I suppose it’s meant as a joke. And I suppose it’s a joke, too, when a man refers to his wife as ‘the old woman.’ When I was a little girl, I vowed to myself that no man would ever have the right to call me his ‘old woman.’ Or ... but then, we shan’t ever have any children, shall we? You remember what I said—the talk we had in the hospital that day. I meant that, Felix.”

Felix’s mind was fumbling for the lost thread of their discourse. Rose-Ann’s talk had a disconcerting way of suddenly leaping from one idea to another. How did they come to be talking about children? She had brought them in, without rhyme or reason, more than once tonight. And each time he had remembered with a sense of discouragement and vague shame that moment at the hospital when he had not had the courage to tell her that he wanted to be—everything that it seemed he need not be after all. He wanted now to say something—but what could he say? Some other time, perhaps, when he had a chance to think things out more clearly.... It did not need to be settled now.

“Why,” he said confusedly, “we did talk about it, yes. I don’t suppose we can afford to—” He was going to add “right away,” but Rose-Ann interrupted him.

“Oh, dear!” she said, “I’ve forgotten—I promised to let my father know our address, as soon as we found a place to live, so he could come and see us, and I forgot all about it! Felix, will you bring me pencil and paper, please? I’ll write to him now.”

Rose-Ann’s troubled mind—too troubled to be aware of itself—had been seeking an answer to a question ... the question for which she had unconsciously sought the answer in “Leaves of Grass,” in the “Dan-Emp” volume of her father’s encyclopedia, in settlement work, and now in her marriage. There was an answer which she dreaded—and perhaps hoped—to hear. But in his chance phrase she had heard instead the definite ratification of their casual agreement that she was never to bear him a child ... and the question, which neither of them knew had been discussed, of whether the meaning of her vision, of her search, of her unsatisfied yearning, might not perhaps be found in the common, ordinary, the all too obvious rÔle of motherhood, was answered No....

Felix brought the pencil and a writing pad, and she sat and wrote, and smiled, and wrote again. She had become once more remote—a figure, it seemed to him as she sat there on the bed in the lamplight with her red-gold hair falling over her white shoulders, like a girl in a painting, as eternally lovely and unapproachable.

She stopped writing. “We’ve utterly forgotten the world ever since we moved into this studio,” she murmured.

“And a good thing, too,” said Felix, feeling in her words some threat against their peace and quiet.

“But we must let our friends know where we are—and that they can come to see us.... We might give a kind of house-warming.”

“A house-warming?” Felix repeated doubtfully.

“Yes—a big party—one of the kind you hate. But I’ll make it up to you by giving some cozy little parties.... There are people you ought to know, Felix.... Yes, I’m going to be a real artist’s wife!” She put her arms about him and kissed him, fiercely and tenderly.