Chapter TWO: The Forsaken Provider

§ i

“One of Gilbert’s bad mornings!” thought Miss Dorothy.

And she slipped into her place behind the coffee urn, a little more ingratiating, a little more careful not to disturb him, than usual. He sat at the head of the table, glowering behind his newspaper, and by the very sound of the grunt with which he answered the cousinly good-morning, she was warned of what might be expected. She sat very still, in order not to attract the lightning.

He ate his grape-fruit, quite reasonably, and a little dish of oatmeal, and then Delia brought in the eggs and bacon. He glanced at the plate suspiciously.

“Are these Murray’s eggs?” he demanded.

Miss Dorothy sent the girl a warning glance.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, sir.”

“When did they come?”

“ ... Yesterday, sir.”

“Let me see the box!”

“It was thrown away, sir.”

His face became alarming.

“Dorothy!” he said. “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe these are Murray’s eggs!”

He leaned across the table and sniffed at the dish.

“No!” he shouted. “They are _not_! I know it!”

He flung down his napkin and pushed back his chair. He had for a few weeks past been importing eggs for his special use from a fellow he knew in the country, and he knew that he was being duped, that these immoral women, Miss Dorothy and Delia, used _his_ eggs for other purposes, for the household, for puddings, perhaps even ate them themselves. His appetite was extremely delicate at breakfast, no one could quite comprehend how he felt, especially the morning after a banquet. Suddenly his anger turned into a frightful gloom.

“Take them away!” he said, with a sigh. “Take the damned things away and never bring me eggs again. Never!... Good Lord! I can’t trust _anyone_!”

Miss Dorothy flushed, and smiled nervously.

“Would you like ... a slice of ham, Gilbert?” she ventured.

“Nothing!... More coffee!”

He had put down his paper, and she was in the full glare of his bilious and lowering regard. He picked the thing up again, not to read it, for he had finished all that interested him, but as a screen to conceal from him this scene which he so hated to contemplate, from that dining-room where he had eaten so many hundreds of breakfasts. Claudine hadn’t really changed it, or anything else. By the time the old lady had departed this life, Claudine had no more ideas, no more desire to make changes. The huge sideboard opposite him was crowded with cut glass, silver, hand-painted china, wedding presents, Christmas presents, birthday and anniversary presents, milestones along the road of twenty years of married life. All very neat, comfortable and prosperous, and yet it offended him. He couldn’t really find fault with this home or this atmosphere, couldn’t well imagine anything much better. If he had been compelled to furnish a dining-room according to his own taste, he would have produced something very similar. He had even a sort of pride in the old furniture and the curtains and the presents. And yet it hurt and angered him so.

He looked up stealthily and saw Miss Dorothy, with such a pleased face, just about to begin her grape-fruit.

The face of a fool he called it to himself, a half complacent, half terrified countenance, a sallow, soul-wearying creature in gold eyeglasses, who existed through his benefactions, one of the thankless crew he laboured unendingly to feed and clothe.

And not one of them made the least effort to comprehend him. He was a man, and therefore to be humoured; he was a man and therefore to be conciliated. Like so many sun-worshippers did they all bow down before the inscrutable source of all comforts, all security, supplicating him to continue shedding his golden rays. Not from humility, you understand, or because they had the least admiration for his productivity, but because only in this way could they obtain what they wished. It was really a worship, with rites and sacrifices, and splendid rewards to be got if you understood how to go about it. Claudine and his two daughters and even the unfortunate Miss Dorothy had all a dearly bought knowledge of what topics would infuriate him, knew his good hours and his bad ones, could read the warning symptoms of his more deadly moods. They knew what he liked to eat and what he liked to hear. And nothing else. His queer, gloomy soul remained mysterious and solitary. In an alien world he groped for light, he existed like a sensitive child among impervious and indifferent adults. Even his children seemed to him possessed of worldly knowledge impossible to him; they were aware of things, they discussed things, of which he was ignorant. They were somehow freer and brighter.

To be considered cross when the spirit was writhing, crying for help ...! He was passionately convinced that his malign fate had driven him into an utterly wrong life and that somewhere else there was an utterly right life, beautiful and satisfying, which he ought to have been enjoying. He had no idea of making adjustments, or of trying to modify his environment; he wanted, most naïvely, to step into another world.

What it was he so thirsted for, he didn’t exactly know. It was not peace, or love, or fame, or money, or any of those things a man might legitimately demand from his destiny. He knew only that his daily bread was ashes in his mouth, that his soul found no nourishment, and pined and sickened, that it lived in a universe everywhere insipid and meaningless. And that with all his heart he resented this fate, above all, this marriage of his. Because it was his conviction, that he, as well as every other man on earth, was entitled to an ideal marriage, and a more or less ardent and beautiful wife. The men who got rather less than this had been cheated, defrauded of what he called “the greatest thing in life.” It never occurred to him that he was disappointed because he expected too much, he believed himself disappointed because he had received too little.

He never thought of Claudine without a savage resentment. She had swindled him. She was to have brought light, gaiety, charm, into his life, to have transformed it into something resembling her old Staten Island existence, she was to have been perpetually alluring, fairylike, sparkling. And she had failed in all of this. She was nothing more than a decorous and virtuous wife, and she regarded him with something criminally like aversion. She was cold. And he believed, like more than one other man--that her coldness was a fault in her own temperament, and not due to any lack of fascination in himself. It was certainly not a happy marriage. He had grounds for believing that she thought herself a martyr, and he _knew_ that he was one.

§ ii

Some occult sense warned him of the time. He glanced up at the clock on the mantelpiece, and caught sight of his own face in the mirror behind it. And he wondered, as he always did when he really, consciously regarded himself, _how_ it was he looked like _that_, how it was possible that his appearance should so little express himself. It was another cause for resentment.

A heavy, grizzled man of forty-five with a straggling little mustache over a brutally obstinate month. He had a surly way about him, but he was not unattractive; on the contrary, there was something about the gloomy and bilious gaze of his black eyes that engendered pity and good-will.

But neither pity nor good-will dwelt in Miss Dorothy at that particular instant. She was not resentful, because resentment didn’t belong in her stock of feelings, but she was _miserable_. He was upsetting all her neat little plans for the day, he was keeping back Delia. He was so late, why on earth didn’t he get up and be off to his office, where he belonged? Every moment of these days was so precious to her, when she was sole and undisputed mistress in this house which she had always regarded with awe. She could wish that the summer would last forever, and Claudine and the children never return. Think of the joy of going to market in the electric coupé! Think of the charm of eating her lunch alone, benevolent chatelaine of all this domain!

At last, with his terribly rough gesture, he shoved away the plates before him, so that they upset a milk jug, pushed back his chair in a way that made furrows in the carpet, and got up. He went heavily upstairs and took his straw hat from the gigantic hat-rack. He frowned, there was something he didn’t like about that dark hall, with the rug removed for the summer. There were certain changes from his mother’s day, the glass top of the front door was covered with shirred green silk, and over the open door of the front parlour hung a portière of bamboo tubes strung together with green and blue glass beads, hung there fifteen summers ago. On the shelf of the hat-rack was a little rubber plant in a horrible green scalloped bowl, and a clumsy bronze statue of a fat shepherd boy, holding out an altogether incongruous little tray for visiting cards, a wedding anniversary present from his senior partner. Each of these objects _per se_ he regarded with more or less admiration, but the ensemble disgusted him. He felt that there was something wrong here, and that it was of course his wife’s fault. He execrated her in silence.

He set off down the tranquil street, blazing in the July sun, removing his hat now and then to salute a familiar face. He knew so many people in the neighbourhood, through having lived there all his life, but they were not his friends, these people. They respected him as a man who paid his bills promptly and provided well for his family, but they didn’t like him, had no warm feeling for him. He was too gloomy, too preoccupied. He had an air of misery about him which was distressing to a hostess. Claudine was obliged to confess, and to apologize for his reluctance to make visits. She said he was such a man’s man! He was only happy among his business associates. But what she didn’t know, what nobody suspected, was the positive hatred concealed beneath his _farouche_ manner for all these respectable people. He despised them and loathed them, and was mortally sick of them, and worst of all, he couldn’t feel justified in such feelings. Theoretically they were what he admired, and he couldn’t see in what way he differed from them, and, yet he knew that he _did_. This feeling, like all his other feelings, he kept gloomily to himself.

He jumped on a crowded car going across the bridge, very hot, very angry at being jostled, and was carried off to New York, to make more money....

§ iii

Not only at home were his moods known and respected, at his office it was a recognized thing that the early morning was a bad time for him, and that it was most unwise to disturb him. As usual he strode through the outer office and shut himself into his own small room, without exchanging a word or even a nod. He looked through his mail which had been opened and neatly sorted for him, then pushed it aside, staring after it with a distrait and wretched look. He couldn’t put his mind on it, he hated every detail, every possibility.

“Why the devil am I slaving away here?” he asked himself. “Working day in and day out, so that she can go flaunting in fine clothes and idling away the whole summer up there in the mountains.”

He remembered the extensive wardrobe Claudine had taken with her. Never did she suspect, never could she have suspected, how he resented it. The primeval male in him would deny all luxuries to the unloved woman.

“_She!_ In her silk dresses--loafing all day long--servants to wait on her, _never_ does a useful thing! Good God! Think of the time and leisure she’s got, and she doesn’t even read the papers! Not even charitable! Useless, through and through.... Where would she be if it weren’t for me? She’s got everything she wants, without raising a finger for it. Food, clothes, jewels, money to spend, fool women to jabber with--”

It seemed to him quite intolerable to think of her privileges; he couldn’t have endured it at all if he hadn’t had a certain very curious consolation for his grievances. His delight was to picture his wife as cast away upon a desert island, and he gloated over her utter futility there. He could imagine how helpless she would be, how incongruous, she with her fastidiousness, her chilly dignity. _She_ wouldn’t be able to make herself dresses out of grass, sewing with a thorn for a needle. She wouldn’t know how, and couldn’t learn how, to grind flour from exotic roots, to tame birds, to construct houses. Incurably romantic Gilbert! That was his test for any woman; how she would look and behave on his classic desert isle. She must be lovely, strong, and young, and she must be altogether daring and brave and unwifelike, she must be resourceful and full of alluring wiles, she must urgently _need_ him, and yet be entirely independent.

He glanced at the clock, took up his hat, and went out to a celebrated café near by, had two whiskies and soda, and immediately felt much better. He would confess to you that he was rather too dependent upon “bracers,” but like all that army, he was merely waiting for a propitious day to renounce the thing entirely. Some day when he wasn’t worried or depressed. No hurry about it; it didn’t interfere with his business, and it helped him beyond measure through his fits of awful despondency. He was willing to admit that perhaps his health might be better if he drank less, but he couldn’t become really interested in his health.

He chatted with the other ten o’clock frequenters of the bar, whom he knew very well, for they came with great regularity. He felt ready for business now; he went back--in fact, he now entered the office officially for the first time, in his proper character, nodded genially to the cashier and to his stenographer, an ambitious young Cuban, and began to pace up and down the big sample room, planning his autumn campaign and reviewing his “line.” A very fine line this year; he looked upon it with satisfaction as it lay spread out before him on a big counter sloping steeply on both sides and divided into little compartments filled with red rubber cows and white rubber horses, big, brightly colored balls and tiny hard rubber ones, dolls in knitted dresses, rattles, teething rings. There were among these several novelties which he considered very promising....

“A gentleman to see you!” said the young Cuban, with his alert and zealous air.

“Who?”

“Mr. MacGregor.”

“Don’t know him. Where’s he from?”

“Didn’t say,” replied the young Cuban, with a creditable imitation of his chief’s brusque business-like tone.

“Bring him in!” said Gilbert.

He stood facing the door with a non-committal expression which would be either menacing or genial, as circumstances might dictate. But the man who entered was a type not familiar to him; he couldn’t place him; a big, shambling, rugged man of forty or so, a bit uncouth in appearance, but not without distinction. His face was ironic, but his smile was genial.

“Mr. Vincelle?” he asked.

“What can I do for you, sir?” inquired Gilbert, briefly.

“My name is Alexander MacGregor,” said he. “I have had the pleasure of instructing your elder daughter in music.”

Oh, a music teacher! Probably about a bill, or those outrageous “extra lessons” which his children were forever in need of.

“Sit down, sir, sit down!” said Gilbert.

Mr. MacGregor did so.

“I hope I don’t find you very busy!” he said. “This is quite a personal matter....”

“Cigar?” asked Gilbert.

Mr. MacGregor accepted one.

“It’s about Miss Andrée,” he said. “I understand that you’re going out there this afternoon, and I thought--”

They talked for more than an hour, and Gilbert was captivated. He liked this fellow! He liked his cool, manly air, his practical outlook. Mr. MacGregor began his proposal by stating his financial position, which was sound and satisfactory. He put forward his own good points with assurance and he affirmed that his age was an asset.

“Andrée is very temperamental,” he said, “and hard to understand. A young, inexperienced man wouldn’t be able to. She requires the greatest tact. A rare, peculiar nature. Only men of our age can appreciate it.”

Well, thought Gilbert, after all, why not? Wouldn’t he himself be a marvelous lover for a young girl, if she were the right sort of young girl? There was a sort of indirect flattery in Mr. MacGregor’s idea.

Moreover, he found Andrée an intensely irritating young woman, and he would be glad to see her safely married and gone away. She was a sort of ally to her mother. She was antagonistic; she didn’t admire him; she wasn’t the sort of daughter he had expected.

And he was delighted with Mr. MacGregor’s old fashioned idea of asking his permission before speaking to Andrée. It was really the first time he had ever been treated as a father should be treated. He took Mr. MacGregor out to lunch, to a sedate little second floor restaurant known only to connoisseurs. They ate largely and critically....

By two o’clock indigestion had engulfed Gilbert in black misery. He lingered at the table, chewing a cigar, and meditating. It was Saturday; the office was closed; he had nothing to do until train time. He ordered more liqueurs, more coffee, and refused to be parted from Mr. MacGregor, clung to him, in fact.

Of course, he said, it all depended upon Andrée herself. Of course it did, Mr. MacGregor agreed.

“See here!” said Gilbert. “Come out there with me, and we’ll see. You’ll have plenty of time to pack what you need for over Sunday. Come on!”

Naturally Mr. MacGregor went.