Chapter XI: Book SIX: Wilson Avenue (7)

“So that,” Felix said, “was what was troubling you all winter. I thought you were trying to get some girl to marry you; and you were merely trying to get her to go to Chicago and get a job!”

“Am I to be given no credit for the disinterested and unselfish character of my worrying?” Clive asked gaily.

“I don’t imagine the girl gives you much credit for it,” said Felix. “Why don’t you marry her and be done with it?”

“Good heavens!” said Clive. “Must one marry a girl because he has talked to her about Bernard Shaw?”

“Must St. George marry the girl he has rescued from the dragon?” Felix retorted. “I only know it always happens in the story-books that way.”

“A fine realist you are, young man! Fortunately, there are other St. Georges in the world.—Why this sudden passion of matrimonial propaganda? Misery loves company?”

“I wouldn’t worry about Phyllis if I were you,” Rose-Ann said to Felix coolly. “She’s perfectly able to take care of herself. Her plan is all right. She’s very young, and it won’t do her any harm to wait a year or two and learn a trade before she comes here to live. I think she’s a very sensible young woman, myself.”

It was time for Clive to go, for he was living out at Woods Point again. They discussed the studio for a few minutes, and then Felix put on his hat and accompanied Clive to the platform of the Illinois Central station a block away.

“Spring!” said Clive, sniffing the mild March breeze. “Tomorrow will be warm.”

“Clive,” said Felix, “what’s the matter with you, anyway? You’re really in love with Phyllis!”

“Who knows?” said Clive. “Sometimes I think I am, myself!”

“Well, then?”

“But there’s another question you haven’t considered. Is she in love with me?”

“Ask her and find out!”

“Oh, I’ve no doubt she thinks she is, at this moment. Just because I don’t seem to care whether she is or not! She’s a queer girl, Felix. You don’t understand her at all....”

“You exasperate me,” said Felix. “Marry her, and put an end to all this foolishness.”

“But why should you assume that my intentions—if I have any—are honourable, young man! What makes you think I want to get married to anybody? I think I’ll wait and see how your marriage turns out first!”

Felix walked home slowly, but it seemed only an instant before he opened the door of the studio. “Who is it?” called Rose-Ann from behind the screen. “It’s me,” he said, and locked the door, and stood there for a moment.... He felt a kind of vague bewilderment.

He had been so immersed in the story of these other unhappy lives, so poignantly concerned with their tangled doubts and fears, that it was strange to return to this scene of his own untroubled happiness. The sense of those other tormented lives burned at this moment more vividly in his imagination than his own life and Rose-Ann’s....

“Coming to bed?” Rose-Ann called from behind the screen.

“No,” he said vaguely, “I think I’ll write for a while.”

“All right, then I won’t bother you. Good-night!”

“Good-night, Rose-Ann.”

He went over to his desk, and turned on the electric light, and dipped his pen in the ink, and then sat dreaming before a white sheet of paper.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

XXVI. What Rose-Ann Wanted

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:

“_We needs must know that in the days to come
No child, that from our summer sprang, shall be...._

“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:

“_Upper arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones,
Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, forefinger,
finger-joints, finger-nails,
Ribs, belly, back-bone, hips, hip-sockets....
O I say these are not parts and poems of the body only, but of the
soul!_”

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.

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XXVII. Parties

1

ROSE-ANN decided to give at least one or two of her “little” parties immediately; perhaps to encourage Felix to meet the larger ordeal. And to the first of these little parties, she planned to invite, with what seemed to Felix a reckless defiance of congruity, Clive, Dorothy Sheridan (who had in the meantime been in to see “what they had done to her old studio” and appeared to be satisfied that they had _not_ turned it into what she called “a Christian home”)—and the Howard Morgans!

A more ill-assorted company, Felix felt, had never been invited to sit at the one table—a poet who was also (or at least so Felix considered him) a social lion, a rough-mannered Bohemian girl-artist, a satirical young newspaper writer; and he, a frightened young husband giving his first dinner, was doubtless expected by his infatuated bride to bring music out of this discord! Well, let her find out.... It was a relief, anyway, to be told that he need not wear his evening clothes.

The party went off amazingly well. There was a certain constraint, at first, it was true; but it was not of the sort he had expected. Dorothy Sheridan had turned up with her bobbed hair elaborately and beautifully curled and wearing a gaily embroidered Russian smock. “I never wear smocks when I paint,” she said, “painters never do—but I like to wear them everywhere else. What kind of folks are these Morgans?” And being told by Rose-Ann—rashly, Felix thought—that they were “all right,” she said, “Then I can smoke,” and lighted a cigarette with an air of relief.... And when the Howard Morgans came, the great man was dressed in an old suit of corduroys, concerning which he appeared to be nervous. He looked at Felix’s clothes anxiously, and then at Dorothy Sheridan with her cigarette, and seemed reassured. He must have been reassured, for when the introductions were accomplished, he took out an old sack of tobacco from his coat-pocket and a crumpled package of straw-coloured paper, and rolled himself a cigarette.... Yes, that was all they were afraid of—that the occasion might not be sufficiently informal! And after they had ceased to be afraid of that, they got on vastly well, drank Felix’s cocktails with gusto, ate Rose-Ann’s dinner (it was, though one might not have known it, a delicatessen dinner) with unabashed appetite, and talked like old friends. Later in the evening, Clive turned to Dorothy Sheridan and demanded, “Come, you are not really one of _the_ Sheridans, are you? I can’t believe it!”—And she answered: “Well, I’m the black sheep of the family; I don’t live their life—I paint, and mind my own business—so you ought not to hold that against me!” From her manner, one would have thought that the Sheridans were a band of notorious criminals, but Rose-Ann told him afterward—what it seemed she had suspected all along—that Dorothy belonged to one of the—well, as Clive had said, one of “_the_”—families of Chicago.... Yes, they got along very well indeed, and Felix talked about everything in the world with complete unselfconsciousness....

2

Yes, that party was all right.... But a dinner for Will Blake of Community House, _and_ Paul, their old scenic-genius friend, now a prosperous designer of musical comedy settings in New York and just back in Chicago for a few days—_and_ (yes!) old Mrs. Perk ... that was simply, Felix felt, defying the gods. And yet it turned out to be an even more successful party than the other. Mrs. Perk was as delightful a dinner companion as any one could wish, and really made the party a “go.”... Or perhaps it was the studio: apparently everybody liked a touch of bohemia; apparently anybody in such a place could be completely human, natural, and at ease.... Or perhaps it was Rose-Ann: there was no doubt about it, she was a wonderful hostess....

And Rose-Ann had only just started, it seemed, on her social career. After the “house-warming,” which came next on their program, she intended to ask some of her “bourgeois” friends in to dinner, before they went away for the summer. “You haven’t been miserable at _these_ parties, have you?” she said. “Well, you’ll find the others just as easy. Everybody’s human—even in evening clothes, Felix. We’ll have to go to dinner at these other people’s houses, too, you know—and once you make up your mind to it, you can have as good a time there as you can here!”

All right.... He would try to enjoy himself, he promised obediently. But this house-warming presented difficulties. They were inviting everybody they knew—everybody!—people from Community House, from the Chronicle office, from Canal street, et cetera.... Such a crowd! “I shall have to introduce them to each other, and I won’t remember their names,” he said forlornly. “I never remember people’s names!”

“It’s all right!” said Rose-Ann. “After a cocktail or two, half of them won’t know their own names. Besides, this will be our last big party, ever. I promise!”

Well, it was a satisfaction to know that. But—cocktails, and Community House residents; Felix was not sure (even after seeing Will Blake flushed and merry with their California wine sherbert the other night!) how these two elements would mix. Eddie Silver after his ninth cocktail would scarcely be an edifying spectacle. “Don’t worry,” said Rose-Ann. “People are not so Puritanical as you think. Anyway, our respectable friends will come early and go early—and the others vice-versa.”

“I thought,” said Felix, “when I went to the hospital, that I had finished with boozing....”

“So you have,” said Rose-Ann cheerfully. “This is quite different!”

“And you a clergyman’s daughter!” said Felix.

3

Rose-Ann’s father was somewhat on Felix’s mind, because she had said he might come to see them any day. And if Felix felt some awkwardness in adapting himself to the convivial life, he felt still more embarrassment at the prospect of acting the difficult rôle of the son-in-law of a clergyman.... One had to, it seemed, be so many different things to get along with people! But he was learning. When these parties were over, he would commence to think about how to make himself agreeable to his father-in-law.

And then, late in the afternoon of the day of the house-warming, when Rose-Ann had gone out to buy something she had forgotten, and Felix was busy squeezing lemons, a tall, gentle, stooping man with a slight greying beard walked into the studio, looked about, smiled, and extended his hand.

“I suppose you are my son-in-law,” he said. “I see you’re getting ready for a party, so I’m just in time. Rose-Ann didn’t specially invite me, but I guess she’ll let her old dad come anyway.”

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XXVIII. A Father-in-Law

1

FELIX stood still for a moment with a lemon suspended in mid-squeeze.

“I know just how you feel,” said the old gentleman. “At such a moment as this, a father-in-law would be just the last straw!”

Felix laughed, and shook the extended hand. “Did I give away my dismay as plainly as all that?” he asked.

“I don’t blame you,” said the old gentleman, taking off his hat and overcoat, and sitting down. “Go right on with what you were doing, and we’ll talk. I feel rather well acquainted with you from what I’ve already heard about you. No, Rose-Ann didn’t say much, but I sort of always know what she’s up to. The marriage wasn’t exactly a surprise to me. And I shouldn’t have thought of coming down here to bother you, except that I thought it would be better for me to come than one of the boys. You see, I’ll have to report to them that it’s all right, or they’ll go on thinking that Rose-Ann has married some perfectly disreputable person.” He smiled.

“How do you know,” Felix asked, laughingly, “that I’m _not_ a disreputable person!”

“Well,” said Rose-Ann’s father gravely, taking out a cigar, “perhaps you are. Will you have one of these? No? They’re very good Havana cigars—I can recommend them; oh, I see you smoke cigarettes.... Perhaps you _are_ a disreputable person. But of a certain type that I can very well sympathize with, because I belong to it myself. Impractical. Yes, I can see you’re that. Not interested in making money. All that sort of thing. Yes, I’m afraid my sons would consider you a poor match for Rose-Ann. What they don’t understand is that she was bound to marry that sort if she married anybody. I’ll have to misrepresent you when I get back home. I’ll tell them that you’re an enterprising young newspaper man. You won’t mind that?”

“I should be delighted to have somebody think that of me,” said Felix.

“Well, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t.... I’ll be a little sad when I get home, and tell them that I’m afraid Rose-Ann will never be really happy with you—that you are too practical to appreciate the poetic side of her nature. Then they’ll be convinced that it’s all right.... I suppose it sounds odd to you, my speaking this way of my own sons?”

“Well—yes,” said Felix, “it does rather! But it’s refreshing.”

“I haven’t a scrap of family sentiment,” said Rose-Ann’s father. “I am interested in people only as individuals. And I must say that I have been cursed with four of the most practical and unimaginative sons that a ne’er-do-well father ever had. They will all end up as millionaires, I’m sure. By the way, I hope you’ve no prejudice against preachers?”

“Not your kind, anyway!” Felix laughed.

“I was reading a book the other day,” said the old man, “about women in the Middle Ages. It said that women often went into convents then, not because they felt particularly religious, but because they wanted to escape from the humdrum ways of ordinary life. A woman who went into a convent might become—a scholar, a ruler, a politician, the peer of princes! She could have friendships with distinguished men. She could be, in a sense that her married sister wasn’t, free.... And I thought how well all that applied to myself. If I had lived in a Catholic country, I would probably have gone into a monastery, and written a history of something. I did the next best thing, it seems to me now. I went into a profession where nobody is expected to succeed. I escaped from the bedevilment of business; I started out in business, you know, and left it for the ministry. Now I can be a little odd, and nobody minds very much. I am very fortunate, I think. The pulpit is a wonderful refuge. For instance—do you like to drink?”

“No—not really,” Felix said.

“No, I thought not,” said the old gentleman. “But you have to. You will have to consume your share of that enormous quantity of vile-tasting medicine you are preparing for your guests. Now, I am free from any such social necessity. It’s an enormous relief.”

Felix thought of his Eddie Silver parties in the past, and all the parties he seemed committed to in the future—and it seemed to him that Rose-Ann’s father was indeed very fortunate.

“I assume,” said the old man, “that you don’t particularly relish the idea of this party, anyway?”

“No, to tell the truth, I don’t,” said Felix.

“Of course not. What sane human being would want to spend an evening talking to forty people without saying anything to any of them? And yet ordinary people are supposed to like that sort of thing.”

“Rose-Ann promises that this will be the last one of this kind.”

“Hold her to her promise, young man!” said Rose-Ann’s father. “And be stern about it. Be ruthless. Rose-Ann,” he observed reflectively, “means well. But after all, she’s a woman. And when you know as much about women as I do, you will know that they are the natural ally of the world against the human soul. Now I have always had my _sermon_ as an excuse for getting out of everything I didn’t want to do. I always managed to make the writing of that sermon last me nearly all week. I locked myself in my study, and let the world rush past outside. In my study I could read and dream and think; I could be by myself. Aren’t you going to write a novel or something? A play, I believe it was Rose-Ann spoke of.”

“I’m—thinking about something of the sort,” said Felix. It was true, he reflected, he had not been able to get any writing done lately! One could not write with parties going on all the time....

“Well, you’d better get down to work on it right away. And get a room of your own somewhere to do it in. You’re just married, and your head is full of all sorts of romantic nonsense about Rose-Ann, who is a very fine young woman, but, after all, a woman; and the time to establish your right to be by yourself some of the time is at the very beginning. I see you have two desks up there in front. Do you expect to work there?”

“Yes. That one is Rose-Ann’s—”

“And the other is yours. And when you are in the middle of a sentence, you find that Rose-Ann has come over and put her arms around your neck. Very natural. Very charming. But how in the name of Prince Beelzebub are you going to get any work done under those circumstances?”

Felix smiled. It certainly was odd, to have one’s wife’s father take your side against her. But it was easy to see that he was thinking of his own case. He had doubtless had to lock himself in his study to be free from the encroachments of domesticity. But Rose-Ann was different; Rose-Ann did not come over and kiss him in the middle of a sentence....

“I see you don’t take my warnings seriously,” said the old man. “Well, don’t say I didn’t do my best for you. Here she is now.”

Rose-Ann came in, crying out, “Dad!”—and running up to him flung her arms about him. “You didn’t tell me you were coming!”

Her father set her on his knees.

“No, Rosie, I didn’t—and I see I’ve intruded on a wild party. But if you’ll not tell anybody I’m a preacher they won’t know it. I won’t spoil your party!”

“It’s only our house-warming, and of _course_ I’m glad you came. How do you like my husband?” She looked proudly at Felix.

“We’ve become very well acquainted,” said her father. “I’ve been warning him against you.”

“And you’ve been getting cigar-ashes all over my nice clean floor, too,” said Rose-Ann. “Why will you never, never learn to use an ash-tray?”

“I’m sorry, my dear,” said her father with a twinkle at Felix, “but I thought this was a studio, and that people in studios did just as they pleased.”

“Well,” said Rose-Ann, “if you’re not going to be a preacher tonight, you can help Felix get things ready for the cocktails. I have a million sandwiches to fix, myself. Take off your coat and put on this apron. How do you like our studio?”

“I was very much impressed by those desks up in the front there,” he said disingenuously, smiling at Felix.

“Yes, that’s where Felix is going to write his play, and I’m going to do—I don’t know just what, yet. But isn’t it all—wonderful, father!”

“Wonderful!” said Rose-Ann’s father.

2

Whether it was the effect of that talk or not, all Felix’s recent social sophistication had vanished utterly, and the party passed after the usual fashion of such events to a shy and bewildered person. He made desperate efforts to remember people’s names, and succeeded once or twice; at other times Rose-Ann intervened and performed that painful feat for him; and once when he saw two people beside him who had not yet been introduced, and whose names he knew as well as he knew his own, but which he could not to save his life think of, he slunk away in guilty crimson shame. An old lady—it seemed to him that he was a favourite prey of old ladies—got him into a corner and talked to him for a long time about telepathy, and the life beyond the grave. He could not recall ever having seen her before, and he wondered what she was doing at his house-warming. “Yes,” he said earnestly to her—“yes!” So convincingly, that Rose-Ann, who wanted him to meet Professor Hedding of the University of Chicago, left him alone until at last she caught his piteous glance of appeal and came and bore him away. Howard Morgan was there, at ease as always, his leonine grey head the centre of a phantasmagoria which he seemed to understand, to rule with a glance, a smile, a word. He was enjoying it all.

“No,” Felix said to himself, “I shall never be like that!”

His father-in-law wandered up to him as he stood helplessly aside. He seemed to Felix to be about to ask, “And is this the kind of life you are going to lead?” But instead, he remarked, “Your friend Mr. Bangs is a very interesting young man. We had a good talk. I like the way his mind works.”

It struck Felix as the oddest aspect of his fantastic fortunes that he should have a father-in-law—out of all possible fathers-in-law!—who so heartily approved of him, approved of his very weakness, and of his maddest friends! What he might have expected was: “If I were you, I don’t think I’d see too much of that young man—he has queer ideas.” But queer ideas, his own and Clive’s, were, it seemed, not merely tolerable, but commendable....

A little before midnight, the Rev. Mr. Prentiss took his daughter and son-in-law aside and said, “I’m getting sleepy, so I’m going to my train and try to get a little sleep between now and morning. No, don’t you bother about seeing me off. But you must come and visit us in Springfield. Sometime, I mean—no hurry—just whenever you feel like it.” He shook hands with Felix. “Do,” he said. Rose-Ann kissed him, and he slipped quietly away.

“Father likes you,” she whispered.

“He’s lovely,” said Felix.

“He told me—”

“What?”

“Never mind. I’ll tell you some other time.”

“What?” Felix repeated.

“Oh, I guess the same things he told you. He warned you against me. And he warned me, too.”

“Against _me_?”

“No. Against myself. Come, we must say good-bye to these people.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

XXIX. Interlude at Midnight

1

CLIVE stayed a few minutes after the others to give them some news. Phyllis, it seemed, was desperately discontented with the process of learning to be a teacher. And he had been talking with Howard Morgan about her—Howard Morgan had spent a summer in Woods Point, and remembered her as “the pretty girl who used to drive a taxi”—and he had become interested in her problem to the extent of offering her a position as his secretary (“if she can type manuscripts, and look up things in books”—he was at work now on a grandiose historical poem). That, Clive had remarked, seemed to solve the problem of coming to Chicago for her—if she accepted it. He wanted to know what they thought about it.

Rose-Ann had said, a little wearily, that that did seem to solve the problem for her.

“So you’re in favour of it?” Clive had asked, insistently.

Rose-Ann had shrugged her shoulders. “It’s not for me to decide!” she said, and so Clive, thanking her in an ironical voice, had gone away.

2

And as soon as he had gone Felix began—or thought he began—to understand what it was all about.... And yet, the fancy was so preposterous!

“I wonder,” he said cautiously, “why Clive made such a fuss about that offer of Howard Morgan’s?”

“Well,” said Rose-Ann. “Leave the door open a moment to let the smoke out....”

“What kind of reputation has Howard Morgan, with—with regard to girls?” he asked point-blank.

“Oh,” said Rose-Ann, “the usual reputation of handsome poets, old and young. Why?”

“Then,” said Felix, “—then that was what Clive was thinking about!”

“I suppose so,” said Rose-Ann. “I think the room’s aired out now. You can close the door.”

“But,” said Felix, “It’s monstrous!”

“What—oh, you’re still talking about Phyllis? But why be angry at _me_ about it?”

“I’m not angry at you, Rose-Ann; I’m disgusted with Clive for thinking of turning her over to that old scoundrel!... You don’t seem to care?”

“Must everybody in the world be sorry for poor Phyllis, and anxious about poor Phyllis, and worrying about poor Phyllis?” Rose-Ann demanded in a tone of exasperation. “I’m tired of her problems, myself. Can’t she decide what she wants to do without so much masculine assistance? After all, all I said was that it wasn’t my affair. Let her decide for herself.... And shut the door, please—it’s getting chilly....”

Felix shut the door.

“Well, this is over, anyway!” said Rose-Ann, walking back behind the screen, and kicking off her pumps.

Felix followed her. “What’s over?”

“This party,” she said, letting down her hair. “A lot of cleaning tomorrow, and then—never again.... Felix, I don’t want you to be a perfect host, after all. You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be.”

“But about Phyllis,” he said. “Surely you aren’t cold-bloodedly considering her becoming the mistress of that old—”

“Poets don’t have mistresses nowadays,” said Rose-Ann, impersonally, “at least, in Chicago. They have flirtations—and ‘affairs.’ An ‘affair’ may mean anything. Howard Morgan has been having ‘affairs’ for the last forty years. I was surprised that he didn’t have some pretty girl sitting on his lap tonight. He does it in such a fatherly way that nobody can object, not even his wife. After all, I repeat, it’s Phyllis’s concern, not mine.”

“You mean that she might be agreeable to such an arrangement?” Felix asked angrily.

“How do I know?” she said. “Put out the candle, will you, Felix?”

“I can’t understand you!” he said. “I thought you liked her?”

“I do,” she said. “At least, I’m willing to let her live her own life as she sees fit.”

“I’m not,” said Felix, blindly.

“No,” said Rose-Ann. “Of course you’re not. You want to save her from ‘that old scoundrel.’ But I don’t see how you can do it, Felix, except by divorcing me, and marrying her yourself. And just because you’re jealous of Howard Morgan—”

“Jealous! Rose-Ann!”

“—Is no reason for quarrelling with me....”

“I’m not quarrelling with you, Rose-Ann. But I think you are trying to quarrel with me. You behave as though you were jealous, yourself.” The idea had seemed absurd, until he stated it; then he looked at her wonderingly. “Perhaps you are!”

“Perhaps I am, Felix. But I wish you wouldn’t stalk up and down while you’re talking to me. Of course I’m jealous, Felix.”

“What in the world of?”

“Of Phyllis.... Oh, I know I’m not being reasonable, Felix. But I’m tired, and I’ve been scolded by my father, and made to feel like—like a wife. I suppose that’s why I’m behaving like one. And—and—damn it all, I’m going to cry.” And she did.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

XXX. Fathers and Daughters

1

FELIX, astonished and perturbed, came over and petted her. “What’s the matter, darling?” he asked.

“Oh, Felix,” she said, putting her head against his breast, “do you love me?”

“Of course I love you! Don’t you know it?”

“I suppose so. But—all this—I’ve felt separated from you. I’ve felt—I don’t know what—I suppose it was what my father said—that this was just going to be him and my mother all over again....”

“He said that!”

“No, that isn’t what he said. But that’s what it made me feel. Felix, we aren’t going to stop loving one another now, are we?”

“Of course not. But what was it your father did say?”

“Nothing—only he spoke of how many distinguished friends we had, and—I knew he meant it all satirically—and that you had the makings of a successful man in you, if they were properly brought out by an ambitious wife—meaning me. And I felt as though—as though—Felix, I don’t want to behave to you as my mother did to my father....”

“What do you mean?” he asked quietly, still petting her like a child.

“You know, they were married very young, and he gave up business for the ministry after they were married, and we were very poor until my brothers left school and commenced to make money—and I think she never forgave him for that. And I’ve always—”

“Can’t we live our own life and love, Rose-Ann, without letting it get mixed up with our fathers and mothers?” Felix asked sadly.

Rose-Ann rubbed from her face the last vestige of her tears. “That’s why I didn’t want father to come to see us,” she said. “In-laws always mess things up, don’t they?”

“Even when they are the nicest people in the world, like your father.”

“Felix—I’m so glad to be back with you again—I feel as though I had been away from you, somehow. I don’t like it.”

“Don’t go away again, Rose-Ann-dear.”

“I won’t.” She pressed her head closer against his breast. “I’ll never go away again.”

Again the storm had passed, leaving Felix again wondering how it could have arisen. Some of the things they had said to each other were really incredible. How hard and hostile they had been to each other! And—quarrelling over Phyllis! Why, the whole thing was absurd, the product of fevered imaginations.... Why had they both been so willing to indulge those grotesque fantasies about Phyllis and Howard Morgan?... And then, what of Rose-Ann’s freakish accusation against him—for that was what it amounted to!—of being in love with Phyllis? Phyllis, whom he had seen but once in his life, and that on the occasion of his own marriage! Had Rose-Ann really been jealous? It was too extravagantly farcical.

But oughtn’t they discuss these things, and settle them, once and for all? Wasn’t that what their mutual candour was for, to expose and kill these silly doubts and fears and suspicions? Or—did talking about such things only give them new vitality? Were these things too senseless to talk about?

“I love you, Felix.”

“I love you, Rose-Ann.”

There was a true magic, it seemed, in words like those! They brought happiness ... and forgetfulness....

“Darling....”

“Yes....”

“Did we have a quarrel?”

“I don’t know—did we?”

“Yes—but what was it about?”

“I can’t remember!”

“Neither can I!”

They laughed happily at their folly.

2

Yet Felix could not quite understand the turn of affairs which followed the brief and dynamic intrusion of Rose-Ann’s father into their domestic life. Rose-Ann had changed. The most obvious manifestation of that change was the complete abandonment of all her social plans.

She had intended to give a number of parties to her “bourgeois friends” that spring; but they were never given; and when Felix asked why, she only shook her head and said,

“You know you don’t like parties, Felix.”

Felix was quite aware that he did not like parties. But he had definitely assessed that dislike as a species of cowardice, which he must get over. Just because he did not like parties was the very reason why he should try to learn to like them. Other people liked parties; and he wanted to become as other people are. He had surrendered himself to Rose-Ann’s guidance. He trusted her as a mentor. He had worn evening clothes, learned to carve and serve a roast of beef, talked desperately about nothing to people whose names he could not remember, because she wanted him to. He had braced himself to endure the worst that the social life had to offer; he would do whatever she demanded. And now suddenly she had ceased to demand anything! There was a tremendous relief in this relaxation; but it left him puzzled and brooding.

“I understood,” he said to her hesitatingly one day, “that you had undertaken to civilize me. Have you given up the task as hopeless?”

“But I don’t want to civilize you, Felix!” she protested.

“I thought you did want to,” he said.

“I’m sorry you thought that,” she said.

“Then what,” he insisted, “do you want me to be, if not civilized?”

“An artist,” she said.

He laughed. “That is too easy,” he said.

“What do you mean?” she asked, looking at him with incredulous wide-open eyes and parted lips.

“Rose-Ann, I’ve always been an artist. That’s the trouble with me. I don’t say I’ve been a good artist. I’ve nothing to show for my art-ing except a barrelful of youthful poems, an unfinished novel that I burned up before I came to Chicago, and a few fantastic fragments of impossible plays. But I’ve been an artist all the same, and I’ll tell you why I’m sure of it. There are two kinds of people in the world—artists and human beings. I’ve never been a human being; so I must have been an artist. And I don’t want to be any longer!”

She looked at him, frightened at this heresy.

“But Felix!” she said.

“And I thought you were going to help me,” he said.

“To stop being an artist?” she cried, starting up as though a dreadful accusation had been flung at her.

“To be a human being,” he said, laughingly.

She looked at him with eyes of alarm.

“I can’t think you mean it!” she said.

“Perhaps I don’t.... It’s hard to tell what one really does mean,” he said, discouraged. “I don’t mean that I shan’t keep on trying to write plays—if that’s what you are afraid of.”

“I’m not afraid,” she said. “Only, Felix—”

“Yes?”

“You must do what _you_ want to do; not what you think I want you to do!”

“Why do you say that?” he asked; for it sounded cryptic, as if charged with hidden meanings.

“Because,” she said, “I think we’ve been going on a wrong basis. I’ve—done things to you I didn’t intend. I’m sorry.... And from now on I’m going to—let you alone.”