Chapter XIII: Book SIX: Wilson Avenue (9)

“I forget the rest of it.”

“You are forgetting everything that’s important!” Rose-Ann complained. “I’ll bet you know by heart Professor Humptydink’s law of dramatic crisis.”

“No—I’ve stopped that foolishness, thanks to you. If I ever write anything, it will be just what I want to write—and the devil take the Great American Public!”

“No, Felix—that’s wrong, too. It’s what one really wants to say that other people really like—I’m sure of it. Can’t you trust yourself?”

“I don’t know,” he said, looking up at the pale moon through a tangle of leafy branches. “Somehow I have the notion that anything I want to do will be foolish.... I used to trust in myself. I used to believe this sort of thing:—it’s by Bliss Carman, the man that wrote the vagabond poems.—

“‘_Keep thou, by some large instinct,
Unwasted, fair and whole,
The innocence of nature,
The ardor of the soul—_

“_And through the realms of being
Thou art at liberty
To pass, enjoy, and linger,
Inviolate, and free!_’”

“And don’t you believe that now, Felix?”

“That I can do as I please, if—”

“If it’s what you really please to do! Yes, Felix. You can have any happiness you ever want, if you really want it—not cynically, nor because other people seem to have it, but because it _belongs_ to you. I believe that. I don’t intend ever to keep from doing anything I want to do. And I shan’t be ashamed of myself, either. Do you remember the girl-goldsmith I told you about, in the story?”

“I remember her very well,” said Felix. “I know one of her speeches almost by heart. ‘The only sins are telling lies, and not keeping one’s body clean, and being careless about one’s work—ugly things. Beautiful things—the things people sometimes call sins—aren’t sins at all. Being in love isn’t ever a sin.’”

“Yes,” said Rose-Ann dreamily. “I want us to be like that—not afraid of life, or of any of the beautiful things life brings us.”

Well ... yes ... it sounded simple enough. To live life beautifully, and not be afraid! He had believed in that once. But now—or had he really ceased to believe it possible? At this moment, in the moonlight, it did not seem so absurd....

“Good night, Felix.”

“Good night, Rose-Ann.”

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XXXV. Civilization

1

THEY came back refreshed to civilization—to the studio, to a whirl of exciting parties, to books and ideas, to the problems of ambition, to the Chronicle office and a theatrical season just opening with hectic announcements of “Alias Jimmy Valentine,” “The Case of Becky,” “The Pink Lady” and “The Chocolate Soldier.”...

Hawkins was still in New York, assisting in the selection of a cast for his play—which to Felix’s complete astonishment (for Hawkins had not confided anything to him as to its theme or character) was announced as “Tootsie-Wootsie.” A farce!—with, as it further appeared, honeymoon couples and wrong bedrooms.... What? Hawkins, the serious Hawkins, who had so often called upon American drama to do its duty and deal with “the problems of the time”—he the author of a play called “Tootsie-Wootsie”?

The news of Hawkins’s play brought up in Felix’s mind a practical question which so far he had refused to consider. It had been exciting enough to be the acting dramatic critic of the Chronicle; he had not wanted to look ahead any further. But when one day at lunch he ran into Jennison (“the dean of the critical fraternity”), Jennison asked him, “Are you going to do the plays for the Chronicle?” “Yes, while Hawkins is away,” Felix told him. “Does Hawkins know it?” “Yes—he asked me to.” “Well,” said Jennison, smiling, “then he’s a damn fool!” That was old Jennison’s way of paying him an extravagant compliment. It was in its way an accolade. It was an initiation, by the grand past master, into the “critical fraternity.” And now Felix felt obliged to consider the question of Hawkins and Hawkins’s play in its bearing upon his own career.

If Hawkins’s play failed—and most plays did fail—Hawkins would return and resume his post on the Chronicle. In that event, Felix would be relegated to doing the odd jobs that Hawkins did not want to do. He might even be put back to regular reporting. After all, the present arrangement merely provided for a dramatic critic in Hawkins’s absence; it was not likely they would want two men continuously on the job. They had given Felix another raise that fall; and when Hawkins came back, he would have to earn his salary doing regular reporter’s work again, doubtless—if he _could_ earn it that way. It was rather a dismal prospect.... Felix hoped fervently that the serious-minded Hawkins would somehow, improbably, turn out a success as a farceur.

But if it was a success, and Hawkins resigned his position, how could Felix know he would get it? After all, he was only twenty-three years old. And though by a fluke he was actually _being_ for a while the dramatic critic of a great Chicago newspaper, the idea that he should retain this position and be confirmed in its title was incredible. He wished that he were not so fatally young....

Well—he could only wait and see what happened.

It was at this period that he began wearing a moustache—a short, well-defined moustache, aloof from the upper lip, trim and straight. Nothing boyish, certainly about that moustache!

2

Felix and Rose-Ann had come back to Chicago eager to see Clive Bangs again. They had been away just long enough to discover, in apparently all human beings except themselves, a fundamental lack of interest in all the ideas which most occupied their minds. Talk, with people in general, was limited to an exchange of views, if not on the weather, at least on things equally obvious. They felt the need for talk, and so did Clive; and all at once, after what now seemed to them these months of merely casual friendship, they became inseparable. The three of them lunched together daily at a corner table in a little Hungarian restaurant where they found what they considered the best food in Chicago—a fond trio, laughing, talking excitedly, arguing with the mingled gravity and extravagance of youth, sometimes rehearsing passionately in private the opinions which they would state tomorrow somewhat more soberly in print, and again discussing each other’s characters with ironic humour—perpetually criticizing and taking delight in each other’s criticism of life.

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XXXVI. “We Needs Must Know That in the Days to Come”

1

THEY had come back to civilization. But—unwittingly, at first—into this life of talk, of ideas, of theory, of vague ambition and of self-congratulatory superiority to the mere plain facts of life, they brought somewhat more than a memory of their vagabond adventuring. In their brief and joyous return to nature they had surrendered themselves to its purposes more deeply than they had been aware. But presently Rose-Ann announced that she would have to visit the doctor of whom Dorothy Sheridan had once told her. Rose-Ann did not say that she was with child—that phrase was never used between them in their few discussions of the incident. For that phrase would have implied that she intended to bear a child. It was discussed rather as an accident, an annoying but not serious interruption to their plans. Rose-Ann took the matter, not lightly, but in a soberly practical spirit. And so convincing was her tone that it did not occur to Felix to question the sincerity of her apparent attitude.

Secretly he was troubled. In spite of Rose-Ann’s confidence, he distressed himself with what appeared to be needless forebodings. It seemed to be true that real life was, in this matter as in others, different from fiction. In a story, this would have been a desperate situation; but in actual fact it appeared to have no such gravity. He hoped that was indeed the truth; and, afterward, it appeared that she had been right.... He wondered why he had been so absurd about it!

She would never know how absurd.... He would never tell her how, one night, walking alone along a dark stretch of lake shore, his courage had failed him utterly; how all the terrible things of which he had ever heard had rushed into his mind, filling and flooding it with a kind of nameless remorse, until he had ceased to be a man, and had become a mere terrified child—and how in the influence of that guilty terror he had sunk on his knees in the wet sand, praying to a God he did not believe in, whispering like a child to a kind Father: “God, don’t let anything happen to her!” He had not thought of her then as a free woman acting wisely in her own right—no, but only as a helpless and lovely girl, his beloved, given him to cherish and protect, whom he had let go down to the very gates of death—in vain! Not in the terrible triumph of creation, but meaninglessly.... And he prayed: “Give me back Rose-Ann!”...

No, he would never tell her what a fool he had been.

2

And he would never tell her—for he had safely forgotten now—the moment when, knowing that their lives could go on now as before, they had walked again in the Park under great trees that lifted their shivering glooms to the sky. Through the bushes had come the gleam of motor-cars that glided swiftly down the avenue. “You were a dear to worry,” she had said. “But you needn’t any more. Everything’s quite all right now.”

He had looked at her, cut through with a strange unreal pain, his whole mind quivering. Forces that he did not understand were hurling themselves on his heart, crushing and stunning it. He breathed with difficulty. He looked away from her. He could not speak.

But one forgets things like that. It would not be pleasant to remember them. Nor is it hard to forget unpleasant things in the midst of civilization, with its friendships, parties, talk, books and theories.

So, looking at life realistically, Felix felt that he and Rose-Ann were very fortunate, after all.

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XXXVII. Symbols

1

ROSE-ANN had become restless again. Once more she threatened to go out and get a job. Books no longer contented her; and if she had secretly cherished, as Felix had thought, some dreams of writing, they had vanished, like her notebook, which was no more to be seen. They gave wild parties, extended the number of their friends, and went to dinner-parties, where Rose-Ann shone as always, and even Felix began to be able to take care of himself. She went to the theatre with Felix and took down his criticisms on her typewriter from dictation, as she had a year ago. But these activities did not quite content her volatile spirit.

Her restlessness expressed itself, delightfully enough, in a resumption of the endless midnight talks which had marked the first period of their married intimacy. Their daylight hours together now seemed never to suffice them for talking. Those hours were too filled up with work, and play, and friends. During the day a thousand ideas, observations, comments, stories, had been stored away by each for the other’s benefit. A glance at dinner had meant: “Did you see that? Yes—we’ll talk about it tonight.” In these gatherings, however friendly and outspoken, something was always left unsaid, reserved especially for each other. The heart of every occasion was in its midnight aftermath, in the long wakeful hours in bed, remembering, criticizing, laughing, talking, talking.... Marriage had come to mean above all else the peculiar magic of that intimacy. Sometimes her voice would come mysteriously out of the dark at his side, and again the moonlight would creep in over the roofs and tease the scene with its glamour. Their beds, in summer two little oases of coolness in the sultry night, became in winter warm-coverleted citadels against the cold—two little friendly islands, with two voices floating pleasantly back and forth. “Light me another cigarette,” Rose-Ann would say sleepily. Tired, but kept awake by all they had to tell each other, the mere thoughts and incidents of the day made precious by this re-living of them together, they lay and talked out their hearts.

2

“Felix strikes me as rather paintable. Could you spare him a few afternoons for a sitting now and then? I mean, some time this winter? I’m getting interested in doing portraits again.”

“I’d love to have you!”

Dorothy Sheridan had come back from her fishing village, and a little trip abroad to boot, and she and the Fays were dining in a little restaurant to which she had taken them—not very far from their studio, a little Italian place frequented by artists, where the food was good and the prices low. The men one saw there wore soft collars, like Felix’s own, sometimes turned up to flare about the chin, sometimes open at the neck; one of the girls at the tables wore a Russian smock, like Dorothy Sheridan, and all of them seemed, like her, comfortably uncorseted. They all seemed to know each other, and each new person who came greeted the whole roomful. It was a friendly place.

Felix was rather amused at having his afternoons asked for and given away without his being consulted. But he was flattered by the invitation. He had never been painted, and he considered it a distinction.

“It will be a bore,” Dorothy warned him. “You’ll get awfully tired of it before I’m through. But I’ll do you in half a dozen sittings, I promise you, or give it up. Give him a cup of coffee, before he comes. I don’t talk to my subjects, and they are likely to fall asleep!”

They had been to Dorothy Sheridan’s studio that afternoon, and looked at her paintings and sketches. The paintings were, with one or two exceptions, in a vivid, splashing style that Felix liked. “I’ve changed my style since going to Paris,” she said. “These things are what they call over there Post-Impressionist. I’ll do you in my best Cezanne-Matisse manner, Felix, with some variations all my own. You won’t know yourself!”

Rose-Ann had been most impressed by some of Dorothy’s old sketches, particularly a series of lovely nudes done in pencil with a hard, vibrant line. Dorothy picked one of them out and gave it to Rose-Ann. “Here’s one that looks like you,” she said, appraising Rose-Ann’s figure with a judicious eye. “You can use it for a book-plate if you like.”

It was like Rose-Ann, Felix thought, when she pinned it on the wall that night—it had the same firm and delicate contours, the same sweet livingness of a body that is made for movement, for action, for intense and poignant use. The figure in the drawing was poised in the hesitant instant before flight, with head turned to look backward, and the whole body ready at the next moment either to relapse again into reassured repose or to put all its force into some wild dash for freedom. And somehow that too reminded him of Rose-Ann—of Rose-Ann’s soul.

Rose-Ann was looking at the picture with eyes in which some purpose fulminated darkly.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“That I shall never wear corsets again! It’s really absurd, isn’t it? To imprison one’s body in such a thing as that.... I’m going to burn mine up—now!” And presently, in her chemise and stockings, she solemnly knelt before the Franklin stove and laid the offending article upon the live coals.

“The last of my conventions!” she said, as if to herself.

And then, as it commenced to smoulder, and an acrid odour of burnt rubber emerged, she wrinkled her nostrils and put her thumb and finger to them. “It thmells bad!” she said. And reflectively: “I suppose conventions always do, at the end.... Well, it’s gone now, and my body is free.—Gone forever, leaving nothing but a ... faint unpleasant odour, shall I say?—behind.... Felix—would you mind if I cut off my hair?”

“Cut off—!”

“Short, you know. Like Dorothy Sheridan’s. I’ve always wanted to. And I never quite had the nerve. Living here, it seems only natural. You wouldn’t mind?”

She loosened her hair and it fell about her shoulders, like a flame. “I think it would curl if it were cut. It did when I was a little girl.”

“We’ve no scissors,” said Felix, practically—deferring in his own mind the question of whether he would like her hair cut short or not. He did not know. It would look well—there was no doubt at all of that. He had always wondered at the foolish vanity of women, in putting up with the inconvenience of long hair. He had felt that long hair was in some way a badge of woman’s dependence on man, a symbol of her failure to achieve freedom for herself. And yet ... when it came to Rose-Ann’s hair—

Rose-Ann read his face as a wife can. “No, I suppose not,” she said, and sighed. “No scissors! Well, there’s always something to prevent one from being rash. In the morning I shan’t want to—because I’m going out to look for a job....”

Felix smiled. “Wolf! wolf!” he mocked gently. He had heard that threat of a job too often to be alarmed about it now.

“You’ll see,” said Rose-Ann gaily.

3

Felix was accustomed, by masculine prerogative, to get up first on cold mornings and shake down the fire and make the coffee. But this morning, having dreamed that he had arisen and performed these duties (a very realistic dream—he had heard the noise of the poker among the coals and smelled the fragrance of hot coffee!) he awoke to see Rose-Ann coming toward him with a cup and saucer, on a lacquered tray.

“Your morning draught, my lord!”

“Rose-Ann!” he said angrily. She should have let him make that coffee....

She knelt and offered him the cup, with the air of a page-boy. Then it was that he saw that her hair was shorn. Short bronze locks fell clustering about her face in tiny curls, making it boyish, and yet, it seemed, more girlish than ever. She turned sideways as he stared, and tilted her head. For the first time its proud contour stood fully and beautifully revealed. “Isn’t that better than an old top-knot?” she said.

“But how—” he began.

“Borrowed scissors from neighbour,” she replied. “What are neighbours for, if not to depend on in an emergency?”

“Why is this an emergency?” he demanded, still withholding his approval. “Couldn’t you wait and go to the barber?” Some of the edges, he noted, were rather jagged.

“No, Felix. Don’t you remember Browning’s poem about the Statue and the Bust? One puts off things. ‘So days grew months, years.’ Moral: do it now.—But do you like me this way, Felix?”

“Of course I like you.” And then, since he did, he added: “Tremendously!”

“You—you approve?”

“Yes, but what of that? Can’t you do what you like whether I approve or not? Aren’t you a free woman?” he teased her.

“That’s what I said to myself. And so I did it. But—I’m glad you like it, Felix, because—because I’m not sure whether I do or not!”

He laughed. “It will grow again.”

“No—I shan’t let it grow again. I’m going to like it, I know—eventually; perhaps very soon. It’s just at first.... But I suppose that’s the way with freedom!... Drink your coffee, Felix, before it gets cold. I’ll bring mine over there, too. Do you love me—very much? Look out—you’ll spill the coffee!”

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XXXVIII. The Portrait of Felix Fay

1

ROSE-ANN’S bobbed hair was generally applauded. There were more studio parties. Felix frivoled, theorized, and wrote jocund dramatic criticisms, with the thought of Hawkins always at the back of his mind.

Hawkins’s play had been cast, re-cast, rewritten, and finally tried out “on the dog,” that is to say, an audience at Atlantic City. And something was still wrong. So the cast had been dismissed, the scenery stored, and Hawkins was desperately rewriting his play for the seventeenth time—this time in collaboration with an expert farce-builder. And Felix remained for a while longer the acting dramatic critic of the Chronicle. He figured that if enough misfortunes happened to Hawkins’s farce, his own tenure in office might last long enough to entitle him to it in the end. With the most amiable feelings toward Hawkins, he nevertheless fervently wished “Tootsie-Wootsie” the worst of bad luck.

Meanwhile, early in January, he began having his portrait painted by Dorothy Sheridan.

2

Having one’s portrait painted was decidedly an experience. When he came for his first sitting, he found Dorothy Sheridan in a big kitchen apron, with her sleeves rolled up, looking more as if she were going to cook a meal than paint a picture. She had called “Come!” to his knock, and when he entered she went on scraping the paint from a palette with no more than a casual nod to him. He put his hat under his arm, and shifting his stick to the crook of his elbow, took out a cigarette and lighted it; then turned and looked curiously and hesitantly about the room.

“There! Keep that! Just that way!” Dorothy Sheridan called. “That’s very good. Very characteristic. No, just as you were. That’s right—relax a little.”

She gave him these orders from half way across the large studio room, where she stood in a brusque commanding attitude. Felix obeyed.

“One minute!” And she ran up the steps to the mezzanine behind and above Felix, and presently he heard from overhead the swish of falling cloth. He half turned, and saw that she had flung over the edge of the mezzanine railing a long piece of rose-coloured silk, which reached the floor behind him.

“That’s for a background,” she said, and Felix resumed his pose.

She came back, pushed out an easel not far from him and a little to one side, and then took up a position at a distance from both him and the easel, armed with a brown crayon. She looked at him intently, with wide eyes, bending a little, with head forward and face uplifted. “Mm,” she said, reflectively, and walked swiftly up to the easel and commenced to draw upon the blank canvas with swift, vigorous strokes of her crayon. After a little, she walked back to her former place, resumed her wide-eyed stare, and then returned once more to the canvas.

After half an hour of this, looking at her subject and drawing on the canvas in turn, she threw down her crayon. “Can you remember that pose?” she asked.

Of course Felix could remember it. It was a pose into which he fell naturally. “Yes,” he said. “May I look?”

“If you want to,” she said indifferently, taking off her apron.

Felix strolled over and looked at the crayon sketch on the canvas. It was a bold caricature of himself, poised hesitantly with stick and cigarette, blithe, debonair, and above all a figure of indecision. Was that himself?

“That’s all for today,” said the painter. “Same time, same day, next week. Don’t forget.”

He went away, startled and puzzled.

Next week, as he came in, eager for one more look at that disconcerting caricature, he found the artist painting it out with a thin grey wash.

“Why do you do that?” he asked.

“Oh, that was only to get the pose,” she said. “This time I want to get the likeness.”

The portrait seemed to Felix completed at the end of an hour, when she declared the sitting over and took off her apron. It was utterly different from the crayon caricature which had preceded it on the canvas. Out of the misty grey background emerged a face and two hands, delicately painted, and catching the quizzical expression of mouth and eyes and the rather limp gesture of the hands, but in a manner which did not carry more than a few feet from the canvas. Moreover, this painting was utterly unlike the other things of hers that he had seen. He wondered, but the painter had hung up her apron and was looking at a portfolio of drawings, indifferent to his existence, so he withdrew.

The next time provided still a new surprise. The painter had just washed out the face and hands on the canvas with turpentine, and was scraping off the paint when he came in. Was this a confession of failure? or some new way of painting? or simply the way all painters went to work?

He was pretty certain, however, that the method pursued in this present sitting was extraordinary; for this time the painter measured his head with a pair of calipers, up and down and in every direction, and noted down the figures on a piece of paper and regarded them thoughtfully. Then she came up to him and felt of his skull with her hands; it was not in the least like a caress—it was exactly as if she were a surgeon, and he were a patient, about to be operated upon.

“Bones!” she said, as if that explained everything, and went to work on her canvas with a brush dipped in blue paint.... The result, which Felix viewed with a very queer sensation at the end of the sitting, was a skeleton-like figure done in blue, with arms and legs like pieces of steel machinery, and a face with dark blue eye sockets and a pale blue jaw.... “Lines of force,” explained the painter, and he went away not knowing whether to laugh or not.

This skeleton was obliterated at the beginning of the fourth sitting, as the other stages of the picture had been, and Felix wondered, what next? Colour, it seemed, this time! Great splashes and daubs of colour, put on anyhow, spread out with a palette-knife, or the painter’s thumb—a riot, an orgy of rose and green and purple-brown, with only a suggestion of Felix amid the chromatic swirls....

Felix described each of these stages to Rose-Ann with zest, and went with infinite curiosity to every new sitting....

The fifth time there was a blank new canvas awaiting him, and when he asked what had become of the other, she replied: “Burned it up. All covered with paint. Always use a fresh canvas if you can afford it.”

She emerged from her preoccupation with her palette long enough to become aware of his surprise, and to explain further:

“All that was just getting acquainted with my subject. Now we’re ready to begin.”

And taking up her position, a little closer this time to him and the easel, she bent upon him that wide-eyed, impersonal stare.... Felix was rather in awe of her by this time. She had ceased to seem to him the careless, slangy bohemian girl that he had first known. She was an expert and delicate technician. Those four portraits in succession had stunned his imagination. She seemed to him almost superhuman—with a little of the flavour of black magic in her. That wide-eyed impersonal stare was part of the effect. At first she seemed merely a pretty girl lifting her face to yours and looking at you, steadily; and if one was not used to returning the wide-eyed stare of a pretty girl, one became a little embarrassed—there is something so intimate about this meeting and touching through the eyes; one seems to be let in, unreservedly, to some mysterious depth. But, as the stare continued, piercing you, probing you, seeing you with calm indifference, you became uneasy and almost afraid—you wanted to look away, and that seemed cowardly and evasive, so you kept on staring back as long as you could ... until those dark blue eyes of hers seemed profound gulfs over which you hung, dizzy, tottering, about to drown.... And then, saying “Mm,” she went over to her canvas again and put on a little dab of paint. She had probably been considering carefully whether or not she had made your nose too long!

3

Felix raved in this fashion to Rose-Ann, who heard him with interest and in silence till he had finished.

“And what does the portrait look like now?” she asked.

“Well—very much like any other portrait, I must say. A little bolder, and lots of colour, but nothing startling. Or perhaps I’ve become so used to startling things by now that this seems a little tame.”

The last sitting was a prolonged one, in which the painter looked at him for what seemed hours at a time, and in which he could not rid himself of the perturbing conviction that she was seeing into his soul.... He was very tired when she finished at last—the sitting had as a matter of fact taken two hours, with only a few momentary rests—and Felix was in a mood of weariness and self-distrust when he went over to look at the completed portrait. Perhaps that accounted for what he saw:

Painted with an exquisite and mordant irony—with stick and cigarette, uncertainly halting, as if in front of life, the head tilted with a quirk of inquiry, the face curious and evasive, with something that was almost boldness in the eyes, something that was almost courage in the chin—Felix Fay, observant, indecisive, inadequate, against a rose-coloured background.

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XXXIX. A Date on the Calendar

1

THE memory of that portrait left Felix bewildered and irritated. It seemed that no one else saw in it quite what he had seen. Rose-Ann praised it—but with some reserve which made him feel that she did not really like it. Clive was delighted with the certainty with which the painter had captured his characteristic gesture.... Only he himself, apparently, saw it as a criticism, profound and harsh....

The painter herself least of all saw it as a criticism. “Is that what you really think of me?” he had asked her.

“I don’t think when I paint pictures,” she had said. “I’m too busy working out the problems of form and colour. Don’t you like it?”

“I like it as a picture. I don’t like it as a—a prophecy,” he said.

“A prophecy? Oh, there you come with your literary interpretations. Can’t you forget that stuff, and learn to look at a picture as a picture?”

She had ceased to be the Sybil, and become again the careless bohemian girl-artist, talking the talk of her tribe.... Pictures were just pictures—yes, he had heard that before.

Morose and fretful, he walked up and down in the studio in the evening, rejecting Rose-Ann’s plans for other entertainment; or sat at his desk, exasperatedly trying to force himself to begin work on some half-formed idea for a play. He was angry at himself for being the indecisive, inadequate figure of that painting. He saw now what being an artist meant—the calm energy, the technical erudition, the vast patience that was needed. He wished to be that kind of person. And the more he wished it, the more weak and petulant he seemed to himself. And what must he seem to Rose-Ann? She must despise him in her heart....

For a week he fidgeted and fumed about the studio, ashamed of his childish behaviour and yet unable to control it. He wondered why Rose-Ann did not tell him what she really thought of him.... It was as if he were trying, by a more and more outrageous parade of his weakness, to force her to break silence and speak out.

Late one afternoon, when he had crumpled up the sheet of paper on which he had been trying to write, and thrown it on the floor with a silly gesture of failure, she put down her sewing and came up to him.

She put her hand on his shoulder.

“What is the matter, Felix, dear?” she asked.

He drew himself away. “I wish you would let me alone,” he said.

“Very well,” Rose-Ann said gently, and went and put on her hat and cloak and left the studio.

2

For a moment he sat there, looking at the door through which she had gone with a sudden sense of utter desolation.

They had had quarrels before, but this was different. He had driven her away.... It would serve him right if she never came back....

Why had he been making such a fool of himself? Why had he been behaving like a silly child?

And all at once he felt that he knew the answer.... He was worrying about that damned job of his.

Rose-Ann had taken it for granted that he was secure in his position. He had pretended to weigh his chances, pro and con.... And all the while he had been deeply convinced that he was about to lose his momentary distinction. Hawkins’s play was being tried out again, this week. It would fail, he would give up his foolishness, return to Chicago, and Felix would be back precisely where he had started. That, of course, though he had not told Rose-Ann, was why he had felt she was right in not wanting to have children right away.

It was this impending crisis in his career that secretly worried him. For nearly a year he had been a dramatic critic—and he was about to lose his job. It was a degradation intolerable to contemplate, but impossible to prevent. How could he prevent it? In romantic novels, the hero wins his spurs. But there were, so to speak, only one pair of critical spurs at the disposal of the Chronicle, and they belonged to Hawkins! In a magazine story, Felix would go over to another paper and get a better job. But Felix disbelieved in his ability to hold with any distinction any ordinary reporter’s job. By some fluke he had made good as a dramatic critic. He saw people on the elevated turning the paper inside out to read first of all his column about the new play. He knew he had made good. But—dramatic editorships do not grow on blackberry bushes; dramatic critics die in their shoes at an advanced age. Hawkins’s folly had given him such a chance as would never happen again in a hundred years.

A chance? A brief hour of glory. An hour for Rose-Ann to be proud of him, to believe that he had risen by force of character to these heights, that he would continue to rise.... She would find out that it had been mere luck. She would find out that he could not even keep a job as a dramatic critic, let alone become a playwright. She would discover him for what he was—a weak, helpless, scared child.

That was why he had been behaving like a fool before her—to show her beforehand that he didn’t amount to anything.

Suddenly he commenced to laugh. The mood of the last week had vanished—it merely seemed funny now. Another attack of moon-calfishness, that was all! That painter-girl had awed him with her astounding technique, made him feel incompetent and helpless—thrown him back into a state of adolescent self-distrust. Yes, it was her fault, the pretentious hussy! And what, after all her fussing, did that picture of hers amount to? An ordinary portrait, that was all, with a touch of easy caricature in it.... Damn her!

And what if Hawkins did come back and take away his laurels? There were other jobs in the world. If not in Chicago, then—

Yes, in New York....

It didn’t make any difference what happened. He had been silly to worry about things. He would never worry again about anything. Rose-Ann was right. One must live fearlessly....

He wished Rose-Ann would come back....

3

The door opened, and she was there. He sprang up.

She shut the door behind her and put her back against it, and her hands, as if to support herself.

Felix stood staring at her in surprise. She was pale, and she had a heroic air, somehow. She tried to speak—twice—and made no sound, only a movement of the throat and lips.

“What’s the matter?” he asked anxiously, going up to her.

She put out her hands, as if to hold him away, and let them rest on his shoulders. She looked at him earnestly.

“Felix,” she said. “Felix.... I know what is troubling you.”

“Yes?” he said, confusedly.

“It’s that girl. You’re in love with her, Felix. Well—I keep my promise. You—you can—”

“What girl?” he asked, amazed.

“Dorothy!” she cried. “You’re in love with her. I knew it all along.”

“What!”

“Yes. I can’t bear to see you unhappy. I’d rather—”

He laughed and took her in his arms. “Little fool!” he said. “Little silly child! Dear little idiot!”

She burst out crying, and put her head on his shoulder.

“I’m not in love with anybody, you goose, except you,” he said. “What made you think I was? I suppose I have been acting crazy. I know I have. But it’s a different kind of craziness. I was worrying about—my job.”

“Your job?” She looked up from his shoulder. “Have you heard already? I just left Clive at the corner.”

“Clive? Heard what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“He was coming down to tell you the news. You don’t know it? Well—a telegram came this afternoon. From Hawkins. He’s resigned. And you’ve been appointed in his place.”

“Really!”

“Yes, of course. I knew that was what would happen. But Felix—are you sure?” She meant about Dorothy.

“You’re crazier than I am, Rose-Ann—that’s all.”

“Well—” and she dried her tears. “I guess I am a fool.... But Felix—I left Clive at the corner drug-store. I was very mysterious, and said he mustn’t come here to the studio, but that he was to wait there for me.”

“What for?”

“I—told him I wanted him to help me celebrate an—occasion. But—”

“What kind of occasion?” Felix asked sternly. “Did you tell him any of this nonsensical—”

“No, Felix, I didn’t tell him anything. But—but we can still celebrate an occasion, Felix.”

“You mean my job?”

“No—I mean the—the anniversary of our marriage....”

“You poor abused darling! What an idiot I am!” And he took her in his arms again.

“I’ll wash my face, and be sensible now,” she said. “You go and get Clive, and—and we’ll celebrate!”

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XL. Celebration

1

THERE was something puzzling to Felix about that celebration....

Surely no marriage anniversary had ever before been marked in quite this fashion—by a wife’s offer to give up her husband’s love to another woman!

Already Rose-Ann appeared to have forgotten that incident, as she sat, flushed and happy, at the table with Felix and Clive in the gay restaurant they had chosen. Or no, not forgotten it; for it might perhaps be that very memory, even more than the occasion itself, which made her so radiant—that secret, giving to a commonplace occasion a special quality of romantic uniqueness!

So Felix, watching her, thought he read her mind. And he was perturbed. She had enjoyed that fictitious renunciation. She had needed the taste, as it were, of bitterness, to savour their happiness. She loved him; and she had played with the idea of losing his love.... To have faced that danger—yes, to have faced it, even more than to have come off safely—intoxicated her. There was a new light in her eyes, a dancing light of joyous and reckless courage, a new pride in the toss of her head with its cluster of red-gold curls....

He felt that to her it was not enough to be happy; her happiness must be snatched from the jaws of peril. She was grateful to him, not for being in love with her after all—but for having given her occasion for a moment to think otherwise!

A strange creature to have for a wife, he meditated, watching her. She was more lovely tonight than she had ever been, he thought.... And by what bond did he hold this strange and lovely creature by his side? Not by the tie of any promise. She had made him no promises.... There was no security in their relationship; she did not want security! She wanted adventure; and so long as their marriage was an adventure—!

That was what they were celebrating—not the mere passage of one year of a lifelong marriage, but the beginning of another year of rash adventure.... And in what curious and fantastic ways would their love be tested in that year to come? He wondered....

2

“Have you heard about McQuish?” Clive was saying to Rose-Ann.

“No? What?” she asked.

“I told you,” said Felix, “that he had had a row with the Old Man over a book review he wrote.”

“Oh, yes, so you did. And that he’s talking of leaving to write a novel.”

“Chicago moves in a mysterious way its wonders to perform,” said Clive. “Do you remember, Felix, when you came on the paper a year or so ago?—McQuish was the Marvellous Boy, then. The Old Man was proud of him. He could write whatever he liked.... And now the Old Man reads every word he writes with a suspicious eye. They had this row last week; and it’s the beginning of the end.... I know: I had my day a little earlier than McQuish; now it’s all I can do to get along. That’s what happens to young intellectuals in Chicago. They are fed up on praise and petting for a year or two; and then they get thrown out on their necks. And a darn good thing, too! Otherwise we would stay here and write fiddling things for the daily papers all our lives. But now McQuish will quit and write a novel; and if I have any sense, I will do the same.”

“And my turn will come next, you mean?” Felix asked.

“Not for a while.... I’ve been trying to figure the thing out. Felix came here, you know, scared to death of Chicago; he can’t believe yet in his good luck! He didn’t really believe he was going to get Hawkins’s job. Everybody else knew he was slated for it.... When you go back to the office tomorrow, Felix, the Old Man will give you a cigar and tell you what a fine fellow you are. And it will take him all of a year to discover that you aren’t a fine fellow.... We are a deceptive lot, we young intellectuals; the powers that be think they can use us in their business; and it’s some time before they wake up to discover that we are playing a game of our own.... I give you a year at least to flourish in, Felix! And make the most of it—for about this time next year you will be pulling up stakes and departing elsewhere. What do you think, Rose-Ann?”

“I don’t care,” said Rose-Ann. “So long as things keep happening!”

3

They had said good-night to Clive and came back to the studio. Rose-Ann turned to Felix suddenly, just inside the closed door.

“You remember what I told you here—a little while ago,” she began.

“Yes,” he said, doubtfully.

She looked at him earnestly. “I meant it, you know,” she said.

“Oh—that!”

“Yes.... I’m terribly glad it wasn’t true, what I thought—about you and Dorothy. But if it had been—!”

“Don’t let’s talk about it,” he said uncomfortably.

“But Felix!” she protested.

“Well?”

“I know I was crying, and behaving like a silly idiot and everything—but you must believe that I meant what I said. Do you, Felix?”

Her face was grave now, her eyes solemn. Something in his heart leaped to rejoice in the courage that lay behind her utterance. He wanted to believe it, and at the same time he feared to believe it.

She read the doubt in his eyes.

“You don’t believe me?” she said. “If the time ever comes to prove it, Felix—”

He smiled. “We’ll cross our bridges when we come to them,” he said.

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Book Five
Garfield Boulevard

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XLI. Changes

1

THE second year of marriage began for Felix with a sense of uneasy anticipation. It was as if things—strange, unknown things—were about to happen.

He tried, by taking thought, to discover the reason for his vague anxieties. But, viewed rationally, they seemed absurd. He attempted to dismiss them.

He was happy. And Rose-Ann, in her own restless fashion, was happy, too. What could the future bring to disturb their happiness? Nothing!

His economic status, moreover, even upon Clive’s calculations, was secure for another year at least. And he was writing again, this time to please himself. Rose-Ann should have no cause for complaint upon that score....

And yet the vague anxieties persisted in the background of his thoughts.

It was as though he had in some way lost confidence in Rose-Ann.

He told himself that it was only that he knew her better now. He had been foolish to assume that he could trust utterly in her instincts for guidance. She was, like him, a bewildered wanderer, not knowing the right path. She was more like himself than he had ever dreamed.

He could not rely blindly upon her. He must decide things for himself.

It made him feel a little lonely, a little frightened—as one might feel in the woods, discovering that one’s guide is a romantic ignoramus like oneself!

2

That was one reason why he did not want to show Rose-Ann the new play upon which he was working. It would have pleased her—perhaps all too well! In this play, a variation upon the familiar triangle situation, the heroine kept her husband because she was not afraid to lose him....

Yes, that would have pleased Rose-Ann. Then why did Felix feel absurdly guilty of some kind of spiritual disloyalty to her in writing it?

He did not quite know; but it was true that when Rose-Ann was in the studio he could not with any freedom work on that play....

Rose-Ann felt this, and presently suggested that he try the experiment of working in a rented room somewhere not too far from the studio. He was surprised to find that in talking with Rose-Ann he indignantly repelled the idea as totally objectionable. He was absurdly angry at her for suggesting it.

It would have been intolerable if Rose-Ann had been jealous of his writing; and yet he was behaving as though she _ought_ to be jealous of it.... A strange quirk of the imagination!

Was he disappointed in her for not being the mentor and guide he had tried to believe her—angry at her for insisting upon his finding his own pathway through the woods?

3

When Rose-Ann brought up for a second time the subject of a work-room, Felix admitted that it might be worth considering. And that same day he went out room-hunting. He had not admitted to himself that he really wanted such a place—but when, in a house on Garfield Boulevard, he found a little room with a table and a cot, he decided that he must have it. He told the landlady he would probably need it only a short time, and paid two weeks’ rent, with the option of renewal....

He did not want to tell Rose-Ann about it. He said to himself that he wanted to wait until he found whether he liked it or not. And he did wait until he had spent an afternoon there writing, before telling her.

It was curious, the feeling of being in a room of his own that nobody in the world knew about, not even Rose-Ann! That afternoon he seemed to throw off some impalpable burden. He felt—free! He could sit there and write, or dream, as long as he wished, with nobody to call him to account for the way he spent his time. Not that Rose-Ann ever did call him to account in such a manner; it was the last thing in the world she would ever have done. But now, as never since his marriage, he felt utterly by himself.... He sat dreaming for a while, and then commenced to write swiftly a little play, something he had not thought of at all before, a light, bright, rather cynical and pretty little play that seemed to flow out by its own energy—a play dealing with characters as unreal as those of Congreve or Wycherly, inhabitants of the same polite and witty realm of the imagination as Millamant and Mirabell.

He told Rose-Ann that he had rented a room, but not that he had written a play—for it was a short one-act affair of twenty pages, which he had practically completed at a sitting. He took an inward satisfaction in this harmless secret; and he was pleased that Rose-Ann did not ask exactly where his room was, but only congratulated him on being so sensible.

4

It was only a few days later that Rose-Ann came home with the news that she had carried out her long cherished intention of getting a job. She had learned by accident that there was an opening in a moving-picture magazine. She had gone there, made an impression, and been engaged as assistant editor.

Felix had a guilty sense that his desertion of their studio, if only for an occasional afternoon, had been responsible for her action. Certainly he was no longer in a position to oppose her wishes in this matter. His plea had been that a job would deprive him of her society. He had—though, it is true, at her suggestion—entered into an arrangement which threatened to deprive her of much of his society. But, if there was any spirit of retaliation behind her decision, it was not apparent from her manner.

She was delighted with the new scope that this work gave her superabundant energies; and though it consisted chiefly of rewriting illiterate press-agentish articles, it yielded her a renewed sense of self-respect. And after observing, a little uneasily, for a week or two, its effect upon her, he found himself rather pleased.

Her office hours, though fixed, were not arduous. And if they had less time to spend together, that time had come to seem more precious.... They would be sitting together at breakfast in their studio, Rose-Ann in a flame-coloured silk kimono that matched her curls, pouring coffee for him; all the more delightfully his, because he realized that when the occasion had been prolonged another five minutes, she would glance at the clock, and run behind the screen, to emerge dressed for her day’s work—no longer his, but belonging to some impersonal enterprise for which he cared less than nothing....

They would meet again at luncheon at the little Hungarian restaurant. Clive would be there. And the fact that they were all three of them snatching this hour of golden talk and comradeship from the midst of a working day, gave a special zest to the occasion.... They were, it seemed, happier than ever before.

“I’ve always something I can do for my old magazine in the evening,” said Rose-Ann. “I won’t be lonely. Why don’t you go to your work-room?”

Two or three evenings a week he took her at her word, and in those solitary hours it seemed to him that his creative fancy had begun to bloom again.

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XLII. An Apparition

1

HE had occupied the room on odd afternoons and evenings for a month, when a strange encounter occurred—if seeing somebody could be called an encounter.

It was a warm evening early in April, when he did not feel in the least like working....

And besides, he had been looking over the three little one-act plays which were the fruit of his month’s work, and they seemed to him trivial and silly; if this was all he could do, he had better stop trying to write plays. He was glad he had not shown them to Rose-Ann. They were caricatures of life—not without some grace, touched with a queer, decadent, heartless beauty, but essentially worthless. Why should he write things like that? One’s work was a reflection of one’s mind, of one’s life, critics said. If he had judged those plays as a critic, he would have drawn from them certain inevitable implications with respect to the author’s philosophy and mode of life; they were apparently the work of a man who did not believe in anything, and who found in reality no true satisfactions—otherwise why should he turn to this unreal realm of modernized Pierrots and Columbines for solace?

Pondering this enigma, he sat in the open window and looked out on the street. And in the distance he saw a figure that he knew—a girl.

It was Phyllis, the girl who had been at their wedding. She was coming toward him, and he recognized her with certainty despite the fact that he had seen her only once before in his life.

She was coming down the street, on the opposite side; at the corner, she crossed over, coming toward the house where Felix was sitting perched in his third story window. She came straight to the front door of that very building, and then, after the slightest interval, Felix heard the door slam. She had entered the house.

Felix concluded that he must have been mistaken as to her identity. It was somebody else who looked like Phyllis—that was all. Phyllis was still at the Teachers’ Institute; Clive had spoken only the other day of receiving a letter from her. But—