Chapter XII: The Fugitive

AS for Madge, he was determined to keep out of her way while she was in Chicago....

Lucinda was at the apartment with his mother when he came home that afternoon. She had been taken to see the baby, and she expressed herself enthusiastically. Norman couldn’t help being touched. He had never heard her talk that way even about one of her pet dogs.... He was on the alert to ignore any reference she might make to Madge.... But she said nothing about Madge.

At last, in impatience, he remarked: “I understood Madge was coming to Chicago with you.”

“Oh, yes,” said Lucinda, and went on talking about the baby.

Had Madge seen the baby? He was curious to know, but he was determined not to ask....

Doubtless it was the part of a brother to show his sister about Chicago--take her to dinner and the theater, and so on. But when she had been so indiscreet as to come companioned by a girl he did not want to see, she would have to go without these brotherly attentions. He would let her look after herself.

Lucinda seemed not to notice that she was being neglected.... After all, she had been in Chicago before; and she was accustomed to Norman’s brotherly indifference.

But Norman suspected a plot. How could he not suspect it? Lucinda’s friendship with Madge, her bringing Madge to Chicago--doubtless she hoped to bring about a reconciliation. His mother, in spite of her protests, might be in on it. And so might even Dr. Zerneke. They all thought of him as a helpless male who needed a wife. It was all very well-meant--but he’d thank them just to leave him alone....

To block any plans they might have for an “accidental” meeting at Mrs. Czermak’s, he invented business engagements for all his evenings which would prevent his going there to see the baby this week. (And besides, he didn’t want to face Monica, either.) And with the idea that Madge might be at the apartment with Lucinda when he came home, he stayed away every night until very late.... At least, he did this until Saturday; and that evening, having found nothing better to do than sit in the Crerar library, he revolted. After all, his apartment belonged to him. It was rather absurd for him to be kept out of it that way. He went home.

All the week he had been having, in his thoughts of Madge, the same experience which he had had so often since his life ran off the smooth track of custom and habit into the jungle of uncertainty in which he had to find out for himself what things were like--the experience of seeing facts change their appearance before his eyes.... In this changing and surprising world, his feeling about Madge had remained fixed until now. He had been sorry to have hurt her--but glad nevertheless to have escaped from that marriage, because of what it would have meant. And now that certainty was being undermined. Since Madge had come to Chicago, he was remembering things about her--no, not things to make him regret that she had thrown him over, nothing to make him think himself still in love with her--nothing like that: yet sweet and brave and tender and funny little things, making of her a human girl and not a graven image of conventionality, an algebraic formula of bourgeois marriage. And in merely becoming in his imagination a person rather than a formula, she had upset him dreadfully--more than he was willing to admit to himself. For his campaign of life in Chicago was based implicitly upon an obscure but profound conviction that it represented a revolt against a system of respectability and hypocrisy. He wasn’t a theorist, and he couldn’t, or wouldn’t have wished to, put it in words. But there it was. And that obscure theory gave him courage and faith. But if it was not against the rock-walled citadel of Respectability that he had dealt his clumsy and cruel blows, but against the naked and defenseless breast of a girl--a girl who happened to be in love with him--then some of the meaning went out of his whole brave adventure. He didn’t want to face that possibility. He had tried to put aside these inconvenient and unsettling memories. But he wondered more and more what Madge was really like. Perhaps he would never be sure until he saw and talked with her again.

Anyway, what was there to be afraid of? If she was at his apartment this evening, well and good. He would find out what that respectable young woman to whom he had once been engaged to be married was really like....

But there was no one at the apartment.

He waited impatiently for his mother to come home.

She came at last, with Lucinda. They had been to the theater, they said. They did not mention Madge. But he knew quite well she had been with them. She must have gone on to the hotel alone to avoid meeting him. These elaborate evasions were rather silly, he thought....

Lucinda, in her exasperating fashion, got started on an account of the musical comedy they had seen, and could not be stopped until she had described it all. It was the same one Norman had seen the week before with Charlie Beckett. He heard her wearily to the end--noting that she had picked up some slangy terms of speech from Doris--and when she started to go, he said: “I’ll take you to your hotel.”

She seemed surprised at this offer--and indeed it was a trifle unusual for Norman voluntarily to act as her escort. “Oh, you needn’t bother,” she said. “I can get a bus over on the Avenue.”

“I’ll take you,” said Norman firmly.