The Breaking Point (3 page)

He stood smiling up at them, very tidy in his Sunday suit, very boyish,
for all his thirty-two years. His face, smilingly tender as he watched
them, was strong rather than handsome, quietly dependable and faintly
humorous.

"In the language of our great ally," he said, "Madame et Monsieur, le
diner est servi."

In his eyes there was not only tenderness but a somewhat emphasized
affection, as though he meant to demonstrate, not only to them but to
himself, that this new thing that had come to him did not touch their
old relationship. For the new thing had come. He was still slightly
dazed with the knowledge of it, and considerably anxious. Because he had
just taken a glance at himself in the mirror of the walnut hat-rack, and
had seen nothing there particularly to inspire—well, to inspire what he
wanted to inspire.

At the foot of the stairs he drew Lucy's arm through his, and held her
hand. She seemed very small and frail beside him.

"Some day," he said, "a strong wind will come along and carry off Mrs.
Lucy Crosby, and the Doctors Livingstone will be obliged hurriedly to
rent aeroplanes, and to search for her at various elevations!"

David sat down and picked up the old fashioned carving knife.

"Get the clubs?" he inquired.

Dick looked almost stricken.

"I forgot them, David," he said guiltily. "Jim Wheeler went out to look
them up, and I—I'll go back after dinner."

It was sometime later in the meal that Dick looked up from his plate and
said:

"I'd like to cut office hours on Wednesday night, David. I've asked
Elizabeth Wheeler to go into town to the theater."

"What about the baby at the Homer place?"

"Not due until Sunday. I'll leave my seat number at the box office,
anyhow."

"What are you going to see, Dick?" Mrs. Crosby asked. "Will you have
some dumplings?"

"I will, but David shouldn't. Too much starch. Why, it's 'The Valley,' I
think. An actress named Carlysle, Beverly Carlysle, is starring in it."

He ate on, his mind not on his food, but back in the white house on
Palmer Lane, and a girl. Lucy Crosby, fork in air, stared at him, and
then glanced at David.

But David did not look up from his plate.

The Wheeler house was good, modern and commonplace. Walter Wheeler and
his wife were like the house. Just as here and there among the furniture
there was a fine thing, an antique highboy, a Sheraton sideboard or
some old cut glass, so they had, with a certain mediocrity their own
outstanding virtues. They liked music, believed in the home as the unit
of the nation, put happiness before undue ambition, and had devoted
their lives to their children.

For many years their lives had centered about the children. For years
they had held anxious conclave about whooping cough, about small early
disobediences, later about Sunday tennis. They stood united to protect
the children against disease, trouble and eternity.

Now that the children were no longer children, they were sometimes
lonely and still apprehensive. They feared motor car accidents, and
Walter Wheeler had withstood the appeals of Jim for a half dozen years.
They feared trains for them, and journeys, and unhappy marriages, and
hid their fears from each other. Their nightly prayers were "to keep
them safe and happy."

But they saw life reaching out and taking them, one by one. They saw
them still as children, but as children determined to bear their own
burdens. Jim stayed out late sometimes, and considered his manhood in
question if interrogated. Nina was married and out of the home, but
there loomed before them the possibility of maternity and its dangers
for her. There remained only Elizabeth, and on her they lavished the
care formerly divided among the three.

It was their intention and determination that she should never know
trouble. She was tenderer than the others, more docile and gentle. They
saw her, not as a healthy, normal girl, but as something fragile and
very precious.

Nina was different. They had always worried a little about Nina,
although they had never put their anxiety to each other. Nina had always
overrun her dress allowance, although she had never failed to be sweetly
penitent about it, and Nina had always placed an undue emphasis on
things. Her bedroom before her marriage was cluttered with odds and
ends, cotillion favors and photographs, college pennants and small
unwise purchases—trophies of the gayety and conquest which were her
life.

And Nina had "come out." It had cost a great deal, and it was not so
much to introduce her to society as to put a family recognition on a
fact already accomplished, for Nina had brought herself out unofficially
at sixteen. There had been the club ballroom, and a great many flowers
which withered before they could be got to the hospital; and new
clothing for all the family, and a caterer and orchestra. After that,
for a cold and tumultuous winter Mrs. Wheeler had sat up with the
dowagers night after night until all hours, and the next morning had
let Nina sleep, while she went about her household duties. She had aged,
rather, and her determined smile had grown a little fixed.

She was a good woman, and she wanted her children's happiness more than
anything in the world, but she had a faint and sternly repressed
feeling of relief when Nina announced her engagement. Nina did it with
characteristic sangfroid, at dinner one night.

"Don't ring for Annie for a minute, mother," she said. "I want to tell
you all something. I'm going to marry Leslie Ward."

There had been a momentary pause. Then her father said:

"Just a minute. Is that Will Ward's boy?"

"Yes. He's not a boy."

"Well, he'll come around to see me before there's any engagement. Has
that occurred to either of you?"

"Oh, he'll be around. He'd have come to-night, but Howard Moore is
having his bachelor dinner. I hope he doesn't look shot to pieces
to-morrow. These bachelor things—! We'd better have a dinner or
something, mother, and announce it."

There had been the dinner, with a silver loving cup bought for the
occasion, and thereafter to sit out its useless days on the Sheraton
sideboard. And there had been a trousseau and a wedding so expensive
that a small frown of anxiety had developed between Walter Wheeler's
eyebrows and stayed there.

For Nina's passion for things was inherent, persisting after her
marriage. She discounted her birthday and Christmases in advance, coming
around to his office a couple of months before the winter holidays and
needing something badly.

"It's like this, daddy," she would say. "You're going to give me a check
for Christmas anyhow, aren't you? And it would do me more good now. I
simply can't go to another ball."

"Where's your trousseau?"

"It's worn out-danced to rags. And out of date, too."

"I don't understand it, Nina. You and Leslie have a good income. Your
mother and I—"

"You didn't have any social demands. And wedding presents! If one more
friend of mine is married—"

He would get out his checkbook and write a check slowly and
thoughtfully. And tearing it off would say:

"Now remember, Nina, this is for Christmas. Don't feel aggrieved when
the time comes and you have no gift from us."

But he knew that when the time came Margaret, his wife, would hold out
almost to the end, and then slip into a jeweler's and buy Nina something
she simply couldn't do without.

It wasn't quite fair, he felt. It wasn't fair to Jim or to Elizabeth.
Particularly to Elizabeth.

Sometimes he looked at Elizabeth with a little prayer in his heart,
never articulate, that life would be good to her; that she might keep
her illusions and her dreams; that the soundness and wholesomeness of
her might keep her from unhappiness. Sometimes, as she sat reading or
sewing, with the light behind her shining through her soft hair, he saw
in her a purity that was almost radiant.

He was in arms at once a night or two before Dick had invited Elizabeth
to go to the theater when Margaret Wheeler said:

"The house was gayer when Nina was at home."

"Yes. And you were pretty sick of it. Full of roistering young idiots.
Piano and phonograph going at once, pairs of gigglers in the pantry
at the refrigerator, pairs on the stairs and on the verandah,
cigar-ashes—my cigars—and cigarettes over everything, and more
infernal spooning going on than I've ever seen in my life."

He had resumed his newspaper, to put it down almost at once.

"What's that Sayre boy hanging around for?"

"I think he's in love with her, Walter."

"Love? Any of the Sayre tribe? Jim Sayre drank himself to death, and
this boy is like him. And Jim Sayre wasn't faithful to his wife. This
boy is—well, he's an heir. That's why he was begotten."

Margaret Wheeler stared at him.

"Why, Walter!" she said. "He's a nice boy, and he's a gentleman."

"Why? Because he gets up when you come into the room? Why in
heaven's name don't you encourage real men to come here? There's Dick
Livingstone. He's a man."

Margaret hesitated.

"Walter, have you ever thought there was anything queer about Dick
Livingstone's coming here?"

"Darned good for the town that he did come."

"But—nobody ever dreamed that David and Lucy had a nephew. Then he
turns up, and they send him to medical college, and all that."

"I've got some relations I haven't notified the town I possess," he said
grimly.

"Well, there's something odd. I don't believe Henry Livingstone, the
Wyoming brother, ever had a son."

"What possible foundation have you for a statement like that?"

"Mrs. Cook Morgan's sister-in-law has been visiting her lately. She says
she knew Henry Livingstone well years ago in the West, and she never
heard he was married. She says positively he was not married."

"And trust the Morgan woman to spread the good news," he said with angry
sarcasm. "Well, suppose that's true? Suppose Dick is an illegitimate
child? That's the worst that's implied, I daresay. That's nothing
against Dick himself. I'll tell the world there's good blood on the
Livingstone side, anyhow."

"You were very particular about Wallie Sayre's heredity, Walter."

"That's different," he retorted, and retired into gloomy silence behind
his newspaper. Drat these women anyhow. It was like some fool female to
come there and rake up some old and defunct scandal. He'd stand up for
Dick, if it ever came to a show-down. He liked Dick. What the devil did
his mother matter, anyhow? If this town hadn't had enough evidence of
Dick Livingstone's quality the last few years he'd better go elsewhere.
He—

He got up and whistled for the dog.

"I'm going to take a walk," he said briefly, and went out. He always
took a walk when things disturbed him.

On the Sunday afternoon after Dick had gone Elizabeth was alone in her
room upstairs. On the bed lay the sort of gown Nina would have called
a dinner dress, and to which Elizabeth referred as her dark blue. Seen
thus, in the room which was her own expression, there was a certain
nobility about her very simplicity, a steadiness about her eyes that was
almost disconcerting.

"She's the saintly-looking sort that would go on the rocks for some
man," Nina had said once, rather flippantly, "and never know she was
shipwrecked. No man in the world could do that to me."

But just then Elizabeth looked totally unlike shipwreck. Nothing seemed
more like a safe harbor than the Wheeler house that afternoon, or
all the afternoons. Life went on, the comfortable life of an upper
middle-class household. Candles and flowers on the table and a neat
waitress to serve; little carefully planned shopping expeditions; fine
hand-sewing on dainty undergarments for rainy days; small tributes of
books and candy; invitations and consultations as to what to wear; choir
practice, a class in the Sunday school, a little work among the poor;
the volcano which had been Nina overflowing elsewhere in a smart little
house with a butler out on the Ridgely Road.

She looked what she was, faithful and quietly loyal, steady—and serene;
not asking greatly but hoping much; full of small unvisualized dreams
and little inarticulate prayers; waiting, without knowing that she was
waiting.

Sometimes she worried. She thought she ought to "do something." A good
many of the girls she knew wanted to do something, but they were vague
as to what. She felt at those times that she was not being very useful,
and she had gone so far as to lay the matter before her father a couple
of years before, when she was just eighteen.

"Just what do you think of doing?" he had inquired.

"That's it," she had said despondently. "I don't know. I haven't any
particular talent, you know. But I don't think I ought to go on having
you support me in idleness all my life."

"Well, I don't think it likely that I'll have to," he had observed,
dryly. "But here's the point, and I think it's important. I don't intend
to work without some compensation, and my family is my compensation.
You just hang around and make me happy, as you do, and you're fulfilling
your economic place in the nation. Don't you forget it, either."

That had comforted her. She had determined then never to marry but to
hang around, as he suggested, for the rest of her life. She was quite
earnest about it, and resolved.

She picked up the blue dress and standing before her mirror, held it up
before her. It looked rather shabby, she thought, but the theater was
not like a dance, and anyhow it would look better at night. She had been
thinking about next Wednesday evening ever since Dick Livingstone
had gone. It seemed, better somehow, frightfully important. It was
frightfully important. For the first time she acknowledged to herself
that she had been fond of him, as she put it, for a long time. She had
an odd sense, too, of being young and immature, and as though he had
stooped to her from some height: such as thirty-two years and being in
the war, and having to decide about life and death, and so on.