Chapter XI

And then suddenly came one of those swift unexpected tragedies which knock the heart out of life for those who see and must witness them. This came on Horatia like a thunderbolt. Life was magnificently clean about Horatia--clean and beautiful--and then it was sullied by a contact.

She had told Grace Walsh that she was to spend the night with Maud and then she changed her mind. Going home from the office late and entering quietly so as not to wake Grace, she heard voices. It was midnight and she wondered. The voices were from Grace’s room, not from the sitting-room, and Horatia stood weakly still in the dark and heard them. One was a man’s and the other was Grace’s and they were saying things, half-laughing things which turned Horatia weak and sick. Somehow she stumbled out of the room--somehow got quietly down the stairs and out of the building. She walked to Maud’s blindly and when Harvey let her in said that she was very dizzy and must go straight to her room. Not to sleep. To listen to what Grace had said and the man had said and to see things of horror. Life was like that, was it? Foul--ugly? Was that love too? They had used the word--that word--her word! No, no, no, she cried to her tortured brain--not love. But Grace. Why should Grace be like that? Had she always been? Grace who was fond of her. She was agonized not by the facts as much as by her vision, her hearing of them. Abstractly her brain tried to argue. Argue modern things she had heard. Suddenly she understood many things that had puzzled her about Grace--understood conversations which they had had together. She tried to get Grace’s view of this, tried desperately. Grace had a right to live--to be herself, to act as she pleased. But her senses, her heart kept denying that--kept suffering its denial.

Harvey told her flatly at breakfast that she must cut out the night work if she didn’t want to ruin her health--and her looks. He took her downtown in his car and left her at the office for Jim to worry over. Her white face and her shocked eyes told Jim that something had happened. But she could not tell him. She worked mechanically, facing the time when she would have to see Grace.

At six o’clock she took advantage of Jim’s absence to slip out and go over to the apartment. Grace was there. She was paring potatoes in the kitchenette. Sometimes they got their own supper.

Horatia did not take her hat off. She stood and watched the knife scrape the skin from the potatoes. Grace looked at her.

“Why, what’s wrong, my dear?”

Horatia’s knees were weak and queer. She felt herself apt to faint if she were not very, very slow and precise in what she said.

“I came back last night and heard--you.”

Grace’s face turned scarlet and then a different color--a color mixed of anger, shame and defiance. She seemed about to speak several times--several ways--and at last she succeeded.

“I really don’t see how it concerns you,” she said, viciously.

“No,” said poor Horatia, “I suppose it doesn’t. Only I can’t stay here.”

Grace’s expression hardened to an ugly sneer.

“So virtuous as all that,” she said. “Do I say a word when you go to Jim Langley’s rooms? Don’t play the high and mighty lady with me.”

Grace had lost her intellectuality like a dropped cloak. She was pure, raging passion, discovered in sin and accused. But Horatia did not stop to analyze. She was stricken with horror. She couldn’t speak and Grace raged on.

“You’re like all the rest. I knew you’d be or I’d have told you. Pretend to be broadminded and yet scurry to get behind a fence of conventions if your own skirts are involved. What business is it of yours if I have a lover? If he isn’t married to me? He would marry me if he could and if I’d let him. He’s married now to one of the silly fools who runs around with your sister. He can’t stand her. He hates her presence--and he loves me and I love him. We get what we can and then you come with your face of horror to preach to me--to tell me I’m not fit to live with! Fit to live with! I’m fit as the rest of the hypocrites that you live with. Women or men--they’re all alike--covering their traces better. I wonder where your brother-in-law spends some of his nights when he has to go out of town. Do you think those silly little doll-faced prattlers can hold a man? As for you--you go as far as you dare with Langley. How do I know how far you go? I don’t spy on you when you go to his rooms on Sunday! Not fit to live with! God, this prating of righteousness--sex righteousness, the most silly lying farce in the world. There is no such thing as righteousness. But there is love and passion, little white-face.”

Still Horatia did not speak. Before this ugly situation she had become powerless to attack or to defend. She had neither weapons nor skill for such a fight. And Grace tore on, through a tirade of defense and condemnation, revealing her shattered pride and her spirit torn by the sense of guilt, of satisfactions and strangled discontents, trying to believe in its own rectitude. But poor Horatia could not analyze it then. She was only able to see facts and to hear the anger and accusations against herself. She knew instinctively that Grace did not mean them but she had said them and in the saying had irretrievably marred and stained some things in Horatia.

Stray phrases hit her ear cruelly. Grace was now condemning her--now men--now women.

“Modern women! Modern with your tongues! Love should be free. Love should be above conventions. How often you’ve said it! And I with my real beliefs did not dare to tell you how I chose to carry out your phrases because I knew that you were only talking. Doing lip service to modernism! Easy, isn’t it? But before modernism--naked--you’d be horrified and pursing your shocked lips and running for veils.”

Horatia sank down in a chair and covered her face with her hands.

“My God,” cried Grace, “why shouldn’t I do as I please? Why should I say one thing and act another? If I know marriage is rotten why should I hold to its forms? Haven’t we all said marriage was archaic--love should be free?”

There was no answer.

“Come now, isn’t that one of the great Sunday afternoon subjects for discussion?”

Horatia nodded. “But this is different.”

“Why different?”

“Because it is furtive and hidden--don’t you see it’s--ugly?”

“It’s hidden because of just such cowards as you. You for whom I am not fit!”

“It’s not a question of fitness. I don’t condemn you, Grace. Perhaps you are right. Maybe I am cheap and cowardly. But I can’t--live with it.”

Generations of Grants and Ferrises living in holy wedlock speaking through her--rash current phrases, fine modern leniencies dropping from her before the facts of furtive illicit love and adultery. The education of modern thought and modern living dashed to the ground by the healthy instinct of race, healthy still in spite of its soaking in strong, acidulous, dangerous ideas. Poor Horatia--so feeble in her humiliation and yet stronger than ever before because there was only one thing that she could do. Living with Grace was not a debatable issue. It was an impossibility.

“Heaven knows that I don’t want to live with you,” said Grace hotly. “But I would like to have you see that wherever you turn you can’t do more than keep your own skirts clean. You can’t guarantee the skirts of others.”

She walked up and down furiously and Horatia, not looking at her, knew nevertheless how she looked. Her strong figure, her neat hair bound about her head, her smart tailored gown did not make a proper figure of passion but of restraint. But the passion was breaking through the physical restraints.

“You were born in West Park,” Grace went on, “and brought up in a quiet orderly way, told nothing ugly, seeing nothing ugly. I wasn’t. I was born in a cheap hotel in a small town. Two years afterward my mother either skipped or died. I suppose she skipped. And my father sent the woman who kept the hotel a little money to keep me. He was a travelling salesman--used to drop in now and then because I and the town were on his route. I lived in that place where people came and went--some of them decent enough--pale, dragged, gossipy women with fat, bloated men or fat, big-breasted, lazy, powdery women, and their men. They were not too attractive nor too delicate in their talk--these respectable ones. And there were others too--not decent and not caring to be. I heard things--saw things. I was well instructed in dirtiness young. And I couldn’t stand it. I broke away and went to work in a woman’s kitchen when I was fourteen. I washed dishes and cooked and made beds for domestic decency. So it was called and rated. I learned how cheap and dishonest a thing decency is. I was with that woman for two years. I helped her when her fourth child was born. And the sordidness--the hideousness of that unwelcomed birth ground some facts about modern decency into me. They rowed over that baby--talked about ‘blame’. The fears--the backbiting--the lack of love or even respect! I used to wonder what those people started on--and then and there I vowed never to marry.

“Well, I saved enough to go to High School. I had been through grammar school. I started High School when I was sixteen years old and I got through in three years. Meantime I was a ‘mother’s helper’. The irony of that phrase! I helped that mother by washing clothes and dishes and slaving way into the night sometimes. It was a hard little town. I wanted to go to college so I moved--with my package--it was a small package--of clothes to the University town--got some work, earned enough to start on and to buy some clothes and then went to the Dean to ask about working my way through. The Dean was the first woman I had ever met who seemed to care what happened to me. It was a queer experience. Funny, wasn’t it, the reputation I made in college. By the time you came on the scene I was quite a celebrity, going home for vacations with girls who were met at the stations by limousines and weaving a hazy fiction about my dead parents and good connections. Then--after college--jobs were easy.

“But I wanted other things by this time. I found myself wanting things I never had. Love--men----” Horatia, watching her now, saw her standing still, looking back at her own life with angry, thwarted eyes.

“I didn’t want marriage. I had no illusions about that. Marriage was quite the ugliest thing I had seen. But I did want a lover. And I found I could love--I can love! I’ve had three lovers in five years, and I believe in marriage less than ever. The men have all wanted me to marry them. But I won’t. People use marriage and then it uses them. It is meaningless. More and more people cheat it and pretend to hang on when they are sick of each other. When my lovers and I are through--we’re through. I tell you that that man who was here last night hates the sight of his wife. She must know it. Yet she rides in his car and takes his money and eats at his table. Isn’t that degradation?”

Horatia did not answer and Grace stopped talking too, for a while. They were aware of the awkwardness of the pared potatoes and the interrupted preparations for supper, which seemed to insist on a continued intimacy.

“Will you have supper?” asked Grace, with bitter casualness.

“I’ll help get it,” answered Horatia gently and turned her attention to details, striving, striving all the time to understand and help. They set the informal table and faced each other over it.

“Don’t you want to stay here? I’ll go,” offered Grace brusquely later.

“No--no----” Horatia protested. “I’m the one to go. I really ought to go to stay with Maud’s children for a while anyhow. She and her husband want to go to New York for six weeks and they have been asking me to stay at their house while they are away. I didn’t promise but I will go.”

“Tonight?”

Horatia hesitated.

“No,” she answered bravely, “tomorrow.”

Suddenly Grace burst into tears.

It was the first time that reality had closely touched Horatia and for the first time she realized that in dealing with personal realities, theories have little value unless they have been tested by experience. She had never been one of those who sought after modern ideas for their own sake but she had accepted easily and as a matter of course all the talk which went with her time--talk which was lavish in its use of phrases about the rights of the individual, freedom of thought, antique conventionality and the new everything. She believed in no church and she laughed at Maud’s rigors as to what was and what wasn’t proper. In college she had often expressed an opinion strongly indignant that women should be required or expected to be more chaste than men and held the double standard in abhorrence. And yet she was horrified to discover that the man in this case did not excite her really. He was condemned but it was a passionless condemnation that she gave him. But with Grace her horror at finding that Grace had made use of this little apartment for a furtive love affair turned her sick and yet miserable lest her fastidiousness might be only cheapness. The saddest point in the little tragedy was that Horatia could not know that she was learning one of the deepest truths which she would ever learn--that through all intensive modernism and intensive conservatism runs a thread of instinct that is stronger than either--a fundamental morality which drives the most hidebound conservatives into most radical actions and the most dangerous radicals into the most conservative actions. The thread may be tangled, and never untangled by some people in either group but, unbroken, it runs through life and always will, through Bolshevism and monarchism. Always irrefutable the fact confronts us that life is bigger than politics or economic conditions or theories about either.

When Grace and Horatia said a restrained good night and went to their bedrooms Horatia threw off her clothes and jumped into bed.

“If this affair was a block away it wouldn’t bother me at all,” she said to herself determinedly. “I’ve decided to leave. Now I must go to sleep.”

It was easy to say and impossible to do--easy to whip her actions into conformity but not so easy to control her thought. She was shivering with unpleasant contacts and she found herself standing on the floor in the darkness, longing to dress and run away again. She tried to laugh, to be “sensible,” assuring herself that all she needed was sleep and rest. But there was no such thing as sleep. The darkness was not soft and quiet. It was full of thoughts and pictures which did not soothe but tortured her. She had always let her last thought be of her lover. Now she wanted to forget about all men--even Jim. Grace had said--and so her mind raced on through the darkness and morning came again.

To be sure that there could be no more discussion she telephoned her sister at once and Maud’s flat definite tones coming over the wire, expressing pleasure at the news and plunging at once into a world of detail, reassured her. It was reassurance just to realize that Maud was getting up from her breakfast table and that her mind was anxiously turning on the problem of buying a new wardrobe trunk or making her old one “do.” There was something cheering in the impression that much of life was made up of just such innocent trivialities.

But at the office Jim saw the ravages of the day before increased and she seemed unnatural to him, as if she was trying overhard to be natural. He asked her to come into his office and shut the door on her entrance.

But at the touch of his arms she looked so pathetic that his worry deepened.

“You’re not yourself, darling.”

She shook her head weakly.

“I’m quite all right.”

“No--circles and shadows under your eyes--troubles in them--pale cheeks--what is it about?”

Horatia tried to smile and failed miserably.

“Tell me, dear.”

He was so easy, so unpassionate because of some wise instinct that she turned to him and the story came out. Grace had played her game silently and well, for Jim had not suspected the situation.

“You must leave her, of course,” he said with quick masculine intolerance for this business which affronted a woman dear and pure to him.

“Pull my skirts aside--I suppose so,” she said drearily, “that’s what hurts. My own reactions.”

“But you can’t help her by living there--and she had no right to expose you to such a situation. It’s damnable.”

She had never seen him so excited or so very angry. He strode up and down, his mouth set, eyes smouldering. She found that she was feebly arguing for Grace but there was reassurance in the way he swept her arguments aside. He wasn’t interested in Grace. He didn’t want to discuss Grace. What she did was her own business. Let it go at that. But to involve Horatia in a living arrangement and not explain her own method of life--that was outrageous.

Suddenly he stopped and held up her face in his hands.

“And you have been thinking that all men----”

Her eyes wavered and his filled with tenderest pity.

“No, darling,” he said, quietly, “it’s not true.”

Confidence swept Horatia’s soul like a clean wind. She lifted her eyes to her lover again.