Edith Wharton - SSC 09 (22 page)

 
          
“Oh—how
lovely!” she exclaimed in the doorway. On the varnished white stair-rail,
facing her from a half-way landing, hung a panel on which skilful hands had
woven in tight violets and roses:

 
          
JOY
IN THE HOUSE

 
          
She
gazed at it with tear-filled eyes. “How lovely of you all,” she murmured.

 
          
“It
was his idea,” said Mrs. Robbit, with a fluffy gesture at her son.

 
          
“Ah,
but mother did all the other flowers herself,” the son interposed dutifully;
and between the two, the reassured Christopher capering ahead, Christine
re-entered her own drawing-room, saw the sunshine on the south window-seat, the
hyacinths in the Chinese bowls, and flowers, flowers everywhere, disposed to
welcome her.

 
          
“Joy
in the house,” her husband repeated, laying his lips on hers in an almost
ritual gesture, while Mrs. Robbit delicately averted her swimming eyes.

 
          
“Yes—joy
in the house, my daughter!”

 
          
“The
parenthesis closed—everything between wiped out, obliterated, forgotten,”
Devons continued with rising eloquence.

 
          
Christine
looked about her, trying to recognise them all again, and herself among them.
“Home—” she murmured, straining every nerve to make it feel so.

 
          
“Home,
sweet Home!” echoed her mother-in-law archly.

 
          
  

 
          
In
the nursery, she had to admit, Miss Bilk had introduced the reign of reason.
The windows were wide open day and
night,
Chris had
his daily sun-bath, his baby gymnastics, his assorted vitamins. And he seemed
not to dislike the calm spectacled guardian who had replaced his old impulsive
Nanny. After
dinner,
and a goodnight kiss to her
sleeping son, Christine said to her husband: “Yes, the boy looks splendidly.
I’m sure Miss Bilk’s all right. But it must have nearly killed Susan.”

 
          
Devons’s
rosy beatitude was momentarily clouded. “That’s just it. She made a dreadful
scene—though she knew that scenes were the one thing strictly forbidden. She
excited the child so that I had to send her off the same night.”

 
          
“Oh, poor Susan!
What she must have suffered—”

 
          
“My
dear, she made the child suffer. I overheard her telling him that you’d gone
away because you didn’t love him. And I will not permit suffering in my house.”

 
          
Christine
startled herself by a sudden laugh. “I wonder how you’re going to keep it
out?
”

 
          
“How?”
He shone on her admonishingly over his gold-rimmed
eyeglasses. “By ignoring it, denying it, saying: ‘It won’t happen—it can’t
happen! Not to simple kindly people like us.’” He paused and gave a shy cough.
“I said that to
myself
, nearly six months ago, the day
you told me you … you wished to travel…. Now you see …”

 
          
Compunction
flushed her, and she stood up and went to him. “Oh, you’ve been splendid—don’t
think I don’t feel it….” She drew a deep breath. “It’s lovely to be here—at
peace again. …”

 
          
“Where
you belong,” he murmured, lifting her hand to his lips.

 
          
“Where
I belong,” she echoed. She was so grateful to him for attempting nothing more
than that reverential salute that she had nearly bent to touch his forehead.
But something in her resisted, and she went back to her armchair. The gas-fire
sparkled between them. He said ceremoniously: “You permit?” as he lit his pipe,
and sank back in his armchair with the sigh of happy digestion. You had only to
forbid sorrow to look in at the door, or drive it out when it forced its way in
disguised as Susan. In both cases the end had justified the means, and he sat
placidly among the rebuilt ruins. No wonder he stirred his pipe with a tranquil
hand. He smiled at her across the fire.

 
          
“You’re
tired, my dear, after your night in the train?”

 
          
“I
suppose so … yes … and coming back. …”

 
          
He
shook a pink finger admonishingly.
“Too much emotion.
I want you to have only calm happy thoughts. Go up to bed now and have a long
quiet sleep.”

 
          
Ah,
how tactful, how thoughtful he was! He was not going to drag her back too soon
into the old intimacy…. He knew, he must know, how she was entangled in those
other memories. They kissed goodnight, stiffly, half fraternally, and he called
after her, as she mounted the stairs under the triumphal flower-piece that was
already fading: “In the morning Chris and I’ll come in to see how you’ve
slept.”

 
          
What
a good thing, she thought the next morning, that in the Stokesburg world every
man had an office, and had to go to it. Life was incredibly simplified by not
having one’s husband about the house all day. With Jeff there was always the
anxious problem of the days when he didn’t want to paint, and just messed about
and disturbed the settled order of things, irritating himself and her. Now she
heard the front door open and close at the usual hour, and said to herself that
Devons was already on his way down town. She leaned back luxuriously against
her pillows, smiling at the bright spring sunlight on her coverlet, the pretty
breakfast set which Martha had brought to the bedside (a “surprise” from Mrs.
Robbit, the maid told her), and Chris’s jolly shouts overhead. Yes, home was
sweet on those terms … “I’ve waked from a bad dream,” she thought.

 
          
When
she came down a little later she was surprised to hear her husband’s voice in
the hall. It had not been to let him out that the front door had opened and
closed. She paused on the landing, and saw him standing in the hall, his hat
on, his hand on the door-handle, apparently addressing himself to some one who
was already on the threshold.

 
          
“No, no—no publicity, please!
On no account whatever! The
matter is
closed
, you can say.
Nothing changed: not a cloud on the horizon.
My wife’s a
great traveller—that’s all there is to it. Just a private episode with a happy
ending—
a Happy Ending!” he added, joyously stressing the
capitals. The door shut on the invisible visitor and she saw Devons walk
humming toward the umbrella-stand, select another stick, tap the barometer on
the wall, and go out in his turn. “A reporter,” Christine thought, wincing
under the consciousness that it was to spy out her arrival that the man had
come, and thankful that he had not waylaid her in the hall. “Devons always knew
how to deal with them,” she concluded, with a wife’s comfortable dismissal of
difficulties she need not cope with.

 
          
The
house was exquisitely calm and orderly. She liked the idea of resuming her
household duties, talking over the marketing with the cook, discussing a new
furniture polish with Martha. It was soothing to move from one tidy room to the
other, noting that ash-trays and paper-baskets had been emptied, cushions
shaken up, scattered newspapers banished. Did the rooms look a trifle too tidy,
had their personality been tidied away with the rest? She recalled with a
shudder that chaotic room at the Havre hotel, and her struggle to sort out her
things from Jeff’s, in the sordid overnight confusion, while he sat at the
table with his face buried.

 
          
For
a moment, the evening before, she had wanted to talk to Devons of what was in
her mind, to establish some sort of understanding with him; but how could she,
when he declared that nothing was changed, spoke of her six months’ absence as
caused by a commendable desire for sight-seeing, tidied away all her emotion,
and all reality, as the maid swept away pipe-ashes and stale newspapers? And
now she saw that it was better so; that any return to the past would only stir
up evil sediments, that the “nothing has happened” attitude was the safest, the
wisest—and the easiest. She must just put away her anxious introspections, and
fall in with her husband’s plan. After all, she owed him that. “But I wish I
could forget about Susan. He wasn’t kind to Susan,” she thought as she sat down
at her writing-table.

 
          
She
caught the ring of the front door bell, and Martha crossing the hall. Her
mother-in-law, she supposed. She heard a woman’s voice, and rose to welcome
Mrs. Robbit. But the maid met her on the threshold, signing to her
mysteriously. “There’s a lady; she won’t come in.”

 
          
“Won’t
come in?”

 
          
“No.
She says she wants to speak to you outside.”

 
          
Christine
walked buoyantly across the room. Its brightness and order struck her again;
the flowers filled the air with summer. She crossed the hall, and in the open
doorway saw a small slight woman standing. Christine’s heart stood still. “Mrs.
Lithgow!” she faltered.

 
          
Mrs.
Lithgow turned on her a sharp birdlike face, drawn and dusky under graying
hair. She was said to be older than her husband, and she looked so now.

 
          
“I
wouldn’t send in my name, because I knew if I did you’d tell the maid to say
you were out.” She spoke quickly, in a staccato voice which had something of
Jeff’s stridency.

 
          
“Say
I was out—but why?” Christine stood looking at her shyly, kindly. There had
been a day when the meeting with Jeff’s wife would have filled her with anguish
and terror; but now that the Jeff episode was happily over—obliterated, wiped
out, as Devons said—what could she be to Mrs. Lithgow but a messenger of peace?
“Why shouldn’t I see you?” she repeated with a smile.

 
          
Mrs.
Lithgow stood in the middle of the hall. Suddenly she looked up and her eyes
rested on the withered “Joy in the House” that confronted her. “Well—because of
that
,” she said with a sharp laugh.

 
          
Christine
coloured up. How indelicate—how like Jeff!
she
thought. The shock of the sneer made her feel how deeply she herself had
already been reabsorbed into the pacifying atmosphere of
Crest Avenue
. “Do come in,” she said, ignoring the
challenge.

 
          
Mrs.
Lithgow followed her into the drawing-room and Christine closed the door. Her
visitor stood still, looking about her as she had looked about the hall.
“Flowers everywhere, joy everywhere,” she said, with the same low rasping
laugh.

 
          
Christine
flushed again, again felt herself more deeply committed to the
Crest Avenue
attitude. “Won’t you sit down?” she
suggested courteously.

 
          
The
other did not seem to hear. “And not one petal on his grave!” she burst out
with a sudden hysterical cry.

 
          
Christine
gave a start of alarm. Was the woman off her balance—or only unconsciously
imitating
Jeffs
crazy ravings? After a moment
Christine’s apprehension gave way to pity—she felt that she must quiet and
reassure the poor creature. Perhaps Mrs. Lithgow, who was presumably not kept
informed of the course of her husband’s amatory adventures, actually thought
that Christine meant to rejoin him. Perhaps she had come to warn her rival that
she would never under any circumstances consent to a divorce.

 
          
“Mrs.
Lithgow,” Christine began, “I know you must think badly of me. I don’t mean to
defend myself. But perhaps you don’t know that I’ve fully realised the wrong
I’ve done, and that I’ve parted definitely from Jeff …”

 
          
Mrs.
Lithgow, sitting rigid in the opposite chair, emitted one of her fierce little
ejaculations. “Not know? Oh, yes: I know. Look at this.” She drew a telegram
out of her bag, and handed it to Christine, who unfolded it and read: “I
thought I could stand her leaving me but I can’t. Goodbye.”