WHAT GOES ON INSIDE

Half an Hour in the Life of a Modern Woman

May 8.

Marise looked at the clock. They all three looked at the clock. On school mornings the clock dominated their every instant. Marise often thought that the swinging of its great pendulum was as threatening as the Pendulum that swung in the Pit. Back and forth, back and forth, bringing nearer and nearer the knife-edge of its dire threat that nine o’clock would come and the children not be in school. Somehow they must all manage to break the bonds that held them there and escape from the death-trap before the fatal swinging menace reached them. The stroke of nine, booming out in that house, would be like the Crack o’ Doom to the children.

Marise told Paul not to eat so fast, and said to Elly, who was finishing her lessons and her breakfast together, “I let you do this, this one time, Elly, but I don’t want you to let it happen again. You had plenty of time yesterday to get that done.”

She stirred her coffee and thought wistfully, “What a policeman I must seem to the children. I wish I could manage it some other way.”

Elly, her eyes on the book, murmured in a low chanting rhythm, her mouth full of oatmeal, “Delaware River, Newcastle, Brandywine, East Branch, West Branch, Crum Creek, Schuylkill.”

Paul looked round at the clock again. His mother noted the gesture, the tension of his attitude, his preoccupied expression, and had a quick inner vision of a dirty, ragged, ignorant, gloriously free little boy on a raft on the Mississippi river, for whom life was not measured out by the clock, in thimbleful doses, but who floated in a golden liberty on the very ocean of eternity. “Why can’t we bring them up like Huckleberry Finns!” she thought, protestingly, pressing her lips together.

Then she laughed inwardly at the thought of certain sophisticated friends and their opinion of her life. “I daresay we do seem to be bringing them up like Huckleberry Finns, in the minds of any of the New York friends, Eugenia Mills for instance!” She remembered with a passing gust of amusement the expression of slightly scared distaste which Eugenia had for the children. “Too crudely quivering lumps of life-matter for Eugenia’s taste,” she thought, and then, “I wonder what Marsh’s feeling towards children really is, children in general. He seems to have the greatest capacity to ignore their existence at all. Or does he only seem to do that, because I have grown so morbidly conscious of their existence as the only thing vital in life? That’s what he thinks, evidently. Well, I’d like to have him live a mother’s life and see how he’d escape it!”

“Mother,” said Paul seriously, “Mother, Mark isn’t even awake yet, and he’ll never be ready for school.”

“Oh, his teacher had to go to a wedding today. Don’t you remember? He doesn’t have any school till the afternoon session.”

She thought to herself, “What a sense of responsibility Paul has! He is going to be one of the pillars of the earth, one of those miraculous human beings who are mixed in just the right proportions, so that they aren’t pulled two ways at once. Two ways! Most of us are pulled a thousand ways! It is one of the injustices of the earth that such people aren’t loved as much as impulsive, selfish, brilliant natures like dear little Mark’s. Paul has had such a restful personality! Even when he was a baby, he was so straight-backed and robust. There’s no yellow streak in Paul, such as too much imagination lets in. I know all about that yellow streak, alas!”

The little boy reached down lovingly, and patted the dog, sitting in a rigid attitude of expectancy by his side. As the child turned the light of his countenance on those adoring dog eyes, the animal broke from his tenseness into a wriggling fever of joy.

“‘Oh, my God, my dear little God!’” quoted Marise to herself, watching uneasily the animal’s ecstasy of worship. “I wish dogs wouldn’t take us so seriously. We don’t know so much more than they, about anything.” She thought, further, noticing the sweetness of the protecting look which Paul gave to Medor, “All animals love Paul, anyhow. Animals know more than humans about lots of things. They haven’t that horrid perverse streak in them that makes humans dislike people who are too often in the right. Paul is like my poor father. Only I’m here to see that Paul is loved as Father wasn’t. Medor is not the only one to love Paul. I love Paul. I love him all the more because he doesn’t get his fair share of love. And old Mr. Welles loves him, too, bless him!”

“Roanoke River, Staunton River, Dan River,” murmured Elly, swallowing down her chocolate. She stroked a kitten curled up on her lap.

“What shall I have for lunch today?” thought Marise. “There are enough potatoes left to have them creamed.”

Like a stab came the thought, “Creamed potatoes to please our palates and thousands of babies in Vienna without milk enough to live!” She shook the thought off, saying to herself, “Well, would it make any difference to those Viennese babies if I deprived my children of palatable food?” and was aware of a deep murmur within her, saying only half-articulately, “No, it wouldn’t make any literal difference to those babies, but it might make a difference to you. You are taking another step along the road of hardening of heart.”

All this had been the merest muted arpeggio accompaniment to the steady practical advance of her housekeeper’s mind. “And beefsteak . . . Mark likes that. At fifty cents a pound! What awful prices. Well, Neale writes that the Canadian lumber is coming through. That’ll mean a fair profit. What better use can we put profit to, than in buying the best food for our children’s growth. Beefsteak is not a sinful luxury!”

The arpeggio accompaniment began murmuring, “But the Powers children. Nelly and ’Gene can’t afford fifty cents a pound for beefsteak. Perhaps part of their little Ralph’s queerness and abnormality comes from lack of proper food. And those white-cheeked little Putnam children in the valley. They probably don’t taste meat, except pork, more than once a week.” She protested sharply, “But if their father won’t work steadily, when there is always work to be had?” And heard the murmuring answer, “Why should the children suffer because of something they can’t change?”

She drew a long breath, brushed all this away with an effort, asking herself defiantly, “Oh, what has all this to do with us?” And was aware of the answer, “It has everything to do with us, only I can’t figure it out.”

Impatiently she proposed to herself, “But while I’m trying to figure it out, wouldn’t I better just go ahead and have beefsteak today?” and wearily, “Yes, of course, we’ll have beefsteak as usual. That’s the way I always decide things.”

She buttered a piece of toast and began to eat it, thinking, “I’m a lovely specimen, anyhow, of a clear-headed, thoughtful modern woman, muddling along as I do.”

The clock struck the half-hour. Paul rose as though the sound had lifted him bodily from his seat. Elly did not hear, her eyes fixed dreamily on her kitten, stroking its rounded head, lost in the sensation of the softness of the fur.

Her mother put out a reluctant hand and touched her quietly. “Come, dear Elly, about time to start to school.”

As she leaned across the table, stretching her neck towards the child, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror on the other side of the room, and thought, “Oh, how awful! I begin to look as Cousin Hetty does, with that scrawny neck. . . .”

She repulsed the thought vigorously. “Well, what does it matter if I do? There’s nothing in my life, any more, that depends on my looking young.”

At this thought, something perfectly inchoate, which she did not recognize, began clawing at her. She pushed it off, scornfully, and turned to Elly, who got up from the table and began collecting her books into her school-bag. Her face was rosy and calm with the sweet ineffable confidence of a good child who has only good intentions. As she packed her books together, she said, “Well, I’m ready. I’ve done my grammar, indefinite pronouns, and I can say all those river-tributaries backwards. So now I can start. Good-bye, Mother dear.” Marise bent to kiss the shining little face. “Good-bye, Elly.”

To herself she thought, as her face was close to the child’s, “I wonder if I look to my little girl as Cousin Hetty used to look to me?” and startled and shocked that the idea kept recurring to her, assuming an importance she was not willing to give it, she cried out to herself, “Oh, stop being so paltry about that!”

Aloud she said, “Don’t forget to put your rubbers on. Have you a clean handkerchief? Oh, Elly, look at your nails! Here, hand me the nail-file over there, Paul. I’ll clean them more quickly than you, dear.”

As she cleaned the nails, one eye on the grimly relentless clock, the ideas flicked through her mind like quick, darting flames. “What mediaeval nonsense we do stuff into the school-children’s head. What an infamous advantage we take of the darlings’ trust in us and their docility to our purposes! My dear little daughter with her bright face of desire-to-do-her-best! What wretched chaff she is getting for that quick, imaginative brain of hers! It’s not so bad for Paul, but . . . oh, even for him what nonsense! Rules of grammar, names of figures of speech . . . stuff left over from scholastic hair-splitting! And the tributaries of rivers . . . !” She glanced up for an instant and was struck into remorse by the tranquil expression of peace in the little girl’s clear eyes, bent affectionately on her mother. “Oh, my poor, darling little daughter,” she thought, “how can you trust anything in this weak and wicked world as you trust your broken reed of a mother? I don’t know, dear child, any more than you do, where we are going, nor how we are going to get there. We are just stumbling along, your father and I, as best we can, dragging you and your brothers along with us. And all we can do for you, or for each other, is to love you and . . .”

Elly withdrew her hand. “There, Mother, I know they’re clean enough now. I’m afraid I’ll be late if I don’t go. And you know she scolds like everything if anybody’s late.” She repeated in a rapid murmur, “The tributaries of the Delaware on the left bank are . . .”

Her mother’s mind went back with a jerk to the question of river-tributaries. “And what’s the use of cramming her memory with facts she could find in three minutes in any Atlas if by any strange chance she should ever ever need to know about the tributaries of the Delaware. As well set her to learning the first page of the Telephone Directory! Why don’t I do the honest thing by her and say to her that all that is poppy-cock?”

An inner dialogue flashed out, lunge, parry, riposte, like rapier blades at play. “Because if I told her it is nonsense, that would undermine her faith in her teacher and her respect for her.”

“But why should she respect her teacher if her teacher does not deserve that sort of respect? Ought even a little child to respect anything or anybody merely because of a position of authority and not because of intrinsic worth? No, of course not.”

“Oh, you know that’s only wild talk. Of course you couldn’t send the child to school, and keep her under her teacher, unless you preserve the form of upholding the teacher’s authority.”

“Yes, but in Heaven’s name, why do we send her to school? She could learn twenty times more, anywhere else.”

“Because sending her to school keeps her in touch with other children, with her fellow-beings, keeps her from being ‘queer’ or different. She might suffer from it as she grew up, might desire more than anything in the world to be like others.”

Elly had been staring at her mother’s face for a moment, and now said, “Mother, what makes you look so awfully serious?”

Marise said ruefully, “It’s pretty hard to explain to a little girl. I was wondering whether I was as good a mother to you as I ought to be.”

Elly was astonished to the limit of astonishment at this idea. “Why, Mother, how could you be any better than you are?” She threw herself on her mother’s neck, crying, “Mother, I wish you never looked serious. I wish you were always laughing and cutting up, the way you used to. Seems to me since the war is over, you’re more soberer than you were before, even, when you were so worried about Father in France. I’d rather you’d scold me than look serious.”

Paul came around the table, and shouldered his way against Elly up to a place where he touched his mother. “Is that masculine jealousy, or real affection?” she asked herself, and then, “Oh, what a beast! To be analyzing my own children!” And then, “But how am I ever going to know what they’re like if I don’t analyze them?”

The dog, seeing the children standing up, half ready to go out, began barking and frisking, and wriggling his way to where they stood all intertwined, stood up with his fore-paws against Paul. The kitten had been startled by his approach and ran rapidly up Marise as though she had been a tree, pausing on her shoulder to paw at a loosened hair-pin.

Marise let herself go on this wave of eager young life, and thrust down into the dark all the razor-edged questions. “Oh, children! children! take the kitten off my back!” she said, laughing and squirming. “She’s tickling me with her whiskers. Oh, ow!” She was reduced to helpless mirth, stooping her head, reaching up futilely for the kitten, who had retreated to the nape of her neck and was pricking sharp little pin-pointed claws through to the skin. The children danced about chiming out peals of laughter. The dog barked excitedly, standing on his hind-legs, and pawing first at one and then at another. Then Paul looked at the clock, and they all looked at the clock. The children, flushed with fun, crammed on their caps, thrust their arms into coats, bestowed indiscriminate kisses on their mother and the kitten, and vanished for the morning, followed by the dog, pleading with little whines to be taken along too. The kitten got down and began soberly to wash her face.

There was an instant of appalling silence in the house, the silence that is like no other, the silence that comes when the children have just gone. Through it, heavy-footed and ruthless, Marise felt something advancing on her, something which she dreaded and would not look at.

From above came a sweet, high, little call, “Mo-o-o-ther!” Oh, a respite Mark was awake!

His mother sprang upstairs to snatch at him as he lay, rosy and smiling and sleepy. She bent over him intoxicated by his beauty, by the flower-perfection of his skin, by the softness of his sleep-washed eyes.

She heard almost as distinctly as though the voice were in her ear, “Oh, you mothers use your children as other people use drugs. The child-habit, the drug-habit, the baby-habit, the morphine habit . . . two different ways of getting away from reality.” That was what Marsh had said one day. What terribly tarnishing things he did say. How they did make you question everything. She wondered what Neale would say to them.

She hoped to have a letter from Neale today. She hoped so, suddenly, again, with such intensity, such longing, such passion that she said to herself, “What nonsense that was, that came into my head, out on the road in the dark, the other night, that Neale and I had let the flood-tide of emotion ebb out of our hearts! What could have put such a notion into my head?” What crazy, fanciful creatures women are! Always reaching out for the moon. Yes, that must have been the matter with her lately, that Neale was away. She missed him so, his strength and courage and affection.

“I’m awfully hungry,” remarked Mark in her ear. “I feel the hole right here.” He laid a small shapely hand on the center of his pajama-clad body, but he kept the other hand and arm around his mother’s neck, and held her close where he had pulled her to him in his little bed. As he spoke he rubbed his peach-like cheek softly against hers.

A warm odor of sleep and youth and clean, soaped skin came up from him. His mother buried her face in it as in a flower.

“Ooh!” he cried, laughing richly, “you’re tickling me.”

“I mean to tickle you!” she told him savagely, worrying him as a mother-cat does her kitten. He laughed delightedly, and wriggled to escape her, kicking his legs, pushing at her softly with his hands, reaching for the spot back of her ear. “I’ll tickle you,” he crowed, tussling with her, disarranging her hair, thudding his little body against her breast, as he thrashed about. The silent house rang with their laughter and cries.

They were both flushed, with lustrous eyes, when the little boy finally squirmed himself with a bump off the bed and slid to the floor.

At this point the kitten came walking in, innocent-eyed and grave. Mark scrambled towards her on his hands and knees. She retreated with a comic series of stiff-legged, sideways jumps, that made him roll on the floor, chuckling and giggling, and grabbing futilely for the kitten’s paws.

Marise had stood up and was putting the loosened strands of her hair back in place. The spell was broken. Looking down on the laughing child, she said dutifully, “Mark, the floor’s cold. You mustn’t lie down on it. And, anyhow, you’re ever so late this morning. Hop up, dear, and get into your clothes.”

“Oh, Mother, you dress me!” he begged, rolling over to look up at her pleadingly.

She shook her head. “Now, Mark, that’s silly. A great big boy like you, who goes to school. Get up quick and start right in before you take cold.”

He scrambled to his feet and padded to her side on rosy bare feet. “Mother, you’ll have to ’tay here, anyhow. You know I can’t do those back buttons. And I always get my drawer-legs twisted up with my both legs inside my one leg.”

Marise compromised. “Well, yes, if you’ll hurry. But not if you dawdle. Mother has a lot to do this morning. Remember, I won’t help you with a single thing you can do yourself.”

The child obediently unbuttoned his pajamas and stepping out of them reached for his undershirt. His mother, looking at him, fell mentally on her knees before the beautiful, living body. “Oh, my son, the straight, strong darling! My precious little son!” She shook with that foolish aching anguish of mothers, intolerable. . . . “Why must he stop being so pure, so safe? How can I live when I am no longer strong enough to protect him?”

Mark remarked plaintively, shrugging himself into the sleeves of his shirt, “I’ve roden on a horse, and I’ve roden on a dog, and I’ve even roden on a cow, but I’ve never roden on a camel, and I want to.”

The characteristic Mark-like unexpectedness of this made her smile.

“You probably will, some day,” she said, sitting down.

“But I’ve never even sawn a camel,” complained Mark. “And Elly and Paul have, and a elephant too.”

“Well, you’re big enough to be taken to the circus this year,” his mother promised him. “This very summer we’ll take you.”

“But I want to go now!” clamored Mark, with his usual disregard of possibilities, done in the grand style.

“Don’t dawdle,” said his mother, looking around for something to read, so that she would seem less accessible to conversation. She found the newspaper under her hand, on the table, and picked it up. She had only glanced at the head-lines yesterday. It took a lot of moral courage to read the newspapers in these days. As she read, her face changed, darkened, set.

The little boy, struggling with his underwear, looked at her and decided not to ask for help.

She was thinking as she read, “The Treaty muddle worse than ever. Great Britain sending around to all her colonies asking for the biggest navy in the world. Our own navy constantly enlarged at enormous cost. Constantinople to be left Turkish because nobody wants anybody else to have it. Armenian babies dying like flies and evening cloaks advertised to sell for six hundred dollars. Italy land-grabbing. France frankly for anything except the plain acceptance of the principles we thought the war was to foster. The same reaction from those principles starting on a grand scale in America. Men in prison for having an opinion . . . what a hideous bad joke on all the world that fought for the Allies and for the holy principles they claimed! To think how we were straining every nerve in a sacred cause two years ago. Neale’s enlistment. Those endless months of loneliness. That constant terror about him. And homes like that all over the world . . . with this as the result. Could it have been worse if we had all just grabbed what we could get for ourselves, and had what satisfaction we could out of the baser pleasures?”

She felt a mounting wave of horror and nausea, and knowing well from experience what was on its way, fought desperately to ward it off, reading hurriedly a real-estate item in the newspaper, an account of a flood in the West, trying in vain to fix her mind on what she read. But she could not stop the advance of what was coming. She let the newspaper fall with a shudder as the thought arrived, hissing, gliding with venomous swiftness along the familiar path it had so often taken to her heart . . . “suppose this reactionary outburst of hate and greed and intolerance and imperialistic ambitions all around, means that the ‘peace’ is an armed truce only, and that in fifteen years the whole nightmare will start over.”

She looked down at the little boy, applying himself seriously to his buttons. “In fifteen years’ time my baby will be a man of twenty-one.”

Wild cries broke out in her heart. “No, oh no! I couldn’t live through another. To see them all go, husband and sons! Not another war! Let me live quickly, anyhow, somehow, to get it over with . . . and die before it comes.”

The little boy had been twisting himself despairingly, and now said in a small voice, “Mother, I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I can’t do that back button.”

His mother heard his voice and looked down at him uncomprehendingly for a moment. He said, less resigned, impatience pricking through his tone, “Mother, I told you I never could reach that button behind.”

She bent from her chair, mechanically secured the little garment, and then, leaning back, looked down moodily at her feet. The little boy began silently to put on and lace up his shoes.

Marise was aware of a dimming of the light in the inner room of her consciousness, as though one window after another were being darkened. A hushed, mournful twilight fell in her heart. Melancholy came and sat down with her, black-robed. What could one feel except Melancholy at the sight of the world of humanity, poor world, war-ridden, broken in health, ruined in hope, the very nerves of action cut by the betrayal of its desperate efforts to be something more than base.

Was that really Melancholy? Something else slid into her mind, something watchful. She sat perfectly still so that no chance movement should disturb that mood till it could be examined and challenged. There was certainly something else in her heart beside sorrow over the miseries of the after-war world.

She persisted in her probing search, felt a cold ray of daylight strike into that gloom and recognized with amazement and chagrin what else it was! Disgusting! There in the very bottom of her mind, lay still that discomfort at beginning to look like Cousin Hetty! And so that wound to her vanity had slowly risen again into her consciousness and clothed itself in the ampler, nobler garments of impersonal Melancholy. . . . “Oh,” she cried aloud, impatiently, contemptuous of herself, “what picayune creatures human beings are! I’m ashamed to be one!”

She started up and went to the window, looking out blankly at the mountain wall, as she had at the newspaper, not seeing what was there, her eyes turned inward. “Wait now, wait. Don’t go off, half-cocked. Go clear through with this thing,” she exhorted herself. “There must be more in it than mere childish, silly vanity.” She probed deep and brought up, “Yes, there is more to it. In the first place I was priggish and hypocritical when I tried to pretend that it was nothing to me when I looked in the glass and saw for the first time that my youth has begun to leave me. That was Anglo-Saxon pretense, trying to seem to myself made of finer stuff than I really am. It’s really not cheerful for any woman, no matter on what plane, to know that the days of her physical flowering are numbered. I’d have done better to look straight at that, and have it out with myself.”

She moved her head very slightly, from side to side. “But there was more than that. There was more than that. What was it?” She leaned her ear as if to listen, her eyes very large and fixed. “Yes, there was the war, and the awfulness of our disappointment in it, too, after all. There was the counsel of despair about everything, the pressure on us all to think that all efforts to be more than base are delusions. We were so terribly fooled with our idealistic hopes about the war . . . who knows but that we are being fooled again when we try for the higher planes of life? Perhaps those people are right who say that to grab for the pleasures of the senses is the best . . . those are real pleasures, at least. Who knows if there is anything else?”

Something like a little, far-away tolling said to her, “There was something else. There was something else.”

This time she knew what it was. “Yes, there was that other aspect of the loss of physical youth, when you think that the pleasures of the senses are perhaps all there are. There was the inevitable despairing wonder if I had begun to have out of my youth all it could have given, whether . . .”

There tolled in her ear, “Something else, something else there.” But now she would not look, put her hands over her eyes, and stood in the dark, fighting hard lest a ray of light should show her what might be there.

A voice sounded beside her. Toucle was saying, “Have you got one of your headaches? The mail carrier just went by. Here are the letters.”

She took down her hands, and opened her eyes. She felt that something important hung on there being a letter from Neale. She snatched at the handful of envelopes and sorted them over, her fingers trembling. Yes, there it was, the plain stamped envelope with Neale’s firm regular handwriting.

She felt as though she were a diver whose lungs had almost collapsed, who was being drawn with heavenly swiftness up to the surface of the water. She tore open the envelope and read, “Dearest Marise.” It was as though she had heard his voice.

She drew in a great audible breath and began to read. What a relief it was to feel herself all one person, not two or three, probing hatefully into each other!

But there was something she had not done, some teasing, unimportant thing, she ought to finish before going on with the letter. She looked up vacantly, half-absently, wondering what it was. Her eyes fell on Toucle. Toucle was looking at her, Toucle who so seldom looked at anything. She felt a momentary confusion as though surprised by another person in a room she had thought empty. And after that, uneasiness. She did not want Toucle to go on looking at her.

“Mark hasn’t had his breakfast yet,” she said to the old Indian woman. “Won’t you take him downstairs, please, and give him a dish of porridge for me?”