Chapter XVI

To Horatia the affair was immensely serious, but, Langley’s attitude in _The Journal_ office the next morning, though anxious, was not yet gravely troubled. According to reason he should have been right, what had jarred between him and Horatia was nothing after all, but in fact it was Horatia who gauged the dangers of the situation correctly. What she herself did not realize was that the episode about Mrs. Hubbell was one which only added another fear and another doubt to the fears and doubts which already had invaded her mind, unacknowledged. And these fears and doubts were in the air of her generation. Her discovery about Grace had perhaps begun the uncertainty. Tricked once into belief in a person and deceived, she herself had learned to feel suspicion and fear. She had learned that the men about her were not necessarily faithful to their wives and try as she would to put the thought out of her mind it crept back sometimes while she was talking to this man or that. Langley had reassured her--had made her smile again--events had driven the memory of Grace out of her mind--but the stain remained, corroding the faith and beauty of her feeling for Jim more than she guessed. There had been the doubts created by her fears about money matters and as to whether she and Jim would be able to keep themselves orderly and happy on their income. There had been the fear of the pain of marriage as she hovered at the door of the little sick child in her sister’s house. These things once accepted as the lot of woman became a problem now that they were a choice and not a lot. Subtly too, the temptations of the luxury of the life of the married women whom she met around Mrs. Clapp had dulled the edge of her own desire to work after she married. And Horatia had found no anchor philosophical or sociological. She was one of those who drifted with people rather than with causes and it was a hard age into which she had come to maturity. She could not like so many contemporary women fling herself into a cause and put the cause (or pretend to put it) before all personal life, and yet she could not, like her grandmother, fling herself into the institution of matrimony and expect the institution to solve her problems. Her faith in marriage with Jim was a structure subtly undermined by the conditions surrounding her and upheld only by one great and mighty prop--the prop of faith in Jim. Jim would adjust the problem of how they should live--Jim would keep them from stupidity and shabbiness--against the furtiveness of the married scoundrel who sought illicit relations, Jim stood, magnificent in his love for her. Everywhere he supported her, held her up, made her strong. And then this had come, this little thing which had curiously grown into a big thing. It was not that she feared Rose Hubbell as a rival. In that she was quite honest. But she feared Jim. She feared herself if Jim should seem weak, if he should appear to be the tool of a woman, if he could be the prey of a conscienceless woman. What sort of weakness was it to which she was looking for strength? The more she thought about it the more reasonable her position seemed to her. There that dangerous touch of feminine dogmatism absorbed at Maud’s came into play. She was asking him to give up a meaningless relationship, to trust in her judgment, to fulfill her desire. If he would not sacrifice a thing which was worthless, if he would not trust her judgment, if he would not fulfill her desire, either he had not been honest in telling of the whole relationship between him and Rose Hubbell or he was a lover whose love was only skin deep. To such a preposterous pitch of unconscious arrogance had her feelings brought her. Those were sad days for Horatia. She struggled for a week, while it grew steadily more hot in the city. Frantically her mind circled on itself, seeking rest and peace. There were times when it seemed that to turn to Jim and bury her head on his shoulder would solve everything. But when she did that, as she sometimes did, she found that it solved nothing--that she always began again on her endless round of argument.

There came a day when she and Jim, sitting opposite each other in his office after the rest had gone home, faced decision.

“You’ll wear out, Horatia. I can’t bear this. Won’t you please let the matter drop?”

“It doesn’t drop me,” said poor Horatia. “It goes on to mount up to the big question of whether you love me at all when you can let me suffer so.”

“It’s bigger than this affair,” said Jim, “you’re right. If it were a question of that promise only, perhaps I could find a way to make it even if it involved abandoning a trust. But the thing is bigger. You ask me to promise you something for which you’d despise me if I agreed.” She began to protest, but he shook his head. “Not now, but ultimately. You ask me to promise because you don’t trust me. If I gave that promise I’d be less a man and you less a woman for forcing it. You see, dear, I don’t quite satisfy you or make you confident. This promise would help things for a bit. Then you’d find another difficulty in my nature--another flaw to make you doubt and perhaps you’d want to bind that too with promises. Rose Hubbell is no more to me than that blotter. But I am something to myself in my relation to Rose Hubbell as well as to the newsboy on the corner. And I must decide those relationships myself because I am a man. If you want this promise it’s because you fear the strength of my manhood--and that’s basic.”

He was so much older, so much wiser than the Horatia who, tired and pale, hardly heeded his talk.

“Oh, I’m frightened,” she cried, “all this arguing! If this happened afterwards----”

“I’d become a brute or you a shrew,” said Langley.

But what she had wanted was his denial that it would ever happen again.

“I’m afraid of you. You are hard and unyielding. You don’t bring me----”

“I don’t bring you rest or comfort,” he said bitterly. “But, my God, how I long to, Horatia. Only I love you too much to bring you false rest or comfort or to drug you with words. I too have come to fear myself. What have I to give you----”

They sat drearily fatigued, the paper-strewn table between them.

Horatia made no protest; she was or thought she was full of questioning herself. Yet what came next brought about in three breaths a vast surprise; one moment what Langley was saying sounded like a natural sequence, and the next all the values of life shifted, and they faced each other in a new, strange, graceless world.

“I want you to go away for a rest,” said Jim. “Go away and forget all this. Then if you never want to come back to me, it’s all right. But if you should, Horatia, I’ll be here--I’ll always be here--always waiting, always thankful for what you’ve done for me--what you’ve given me, and always knowing that it was far, far more than I deserved.”

It was youth, inexperienced girlhood that disregarded the magnificence of that appeal. Horatia was primitive, green enough to want to be overcome--to want to be forced into surrender. That he did not force her but left her path open seemed weakness--and something like coldness. An older woman would have known that it was strength and rare devotion.

She was silent and in a turmoil within.

“Then you’ll give me up?” she asked at last, evenly enough.

“I’ll never give you up, but I’ll never imprison you.”

“It all is the same.” Horatia spoke out of a weary effort to keep dignity, not to break down before the indifference of her lover.

The languor that was all he could have heard in her voice was hard on him. Langley put his head on his hands and hid the agony in his face.

“I told you once that you loved the romance you found in me,” he said without resentment. “Well, I’ve destroyed the romance. I’m just ordinary, cheap, uninspiring. But I’m not going to make you ordinary or cheap. There’s so much romance left for you to find.”

She stood up and struck her hands together angrily.

“Don’t mock at me.”

“For God’s sake, Horatia, I wasn’t mocking.”

“Let me go--I will go now. I’ll go--on my vacation.”

“Your vacation?”

“We’ll call it that. I’ll go for a month--two months. And if I can come back, I’ll come. But I’m afraid.”

“My darling--my darling--if you can’t, you are to find happiness more worthily.”

He took her in his arms hungrily, sacrificially. That should have told her. But she was hungering for prohibitions, for demands upon her. There was no warmth in her, and he let her go.

At the door she lingered.

“Can you get someone to fill my place?”

“Yes--don’t worry about that. Just rest.”

“I’ve been happy here.”

“You’ve brought life with you.”

The door closed after her. She went down the staircase slowly, miserably.

Langley’s face was grey and old.