PART V (continued 2)

What was she trying to think about, anyway? Women? Herself? Herself and Charles. And the children.

Men had personal lives, too. But didn't they make them, or try to make them, comfortable, assured, sustaining, so that they could leave them? Find them when they came back? And women having had nothing else, still centered there? She stopped in a block of traffic, looking about with eyes strained and vague.

Petulant, smug faces above elegant furs. Hard streaks of carmine for lips. Faces with broad peasant foreheads, with beak noses. Faces——

The rush carried her across the street. Letty and Marian, her daughters, growing up.

If I knuckle under now, she thought, what of them? She could feel them pressing against her, Letty's silky head under her throat, Marian's firm, slim body against her arm. What I do can't matter very much, directly, to them. They have to live, themselves. She was humble, feeling their individualness, their growth as a curious progression of miracles in which she was merely an incidental tool. Women devote themselves to their families, so that their daughters may grow up and devote themselves to their families, so that—— Catherine laughed. Some one has to break through that circle, she thought.

She entered the Park, walking more slowly along the winding path. If she had only sons—the thought of Spencer stood up like a straight candle flame in her murky drifting—that would be different. There was her own mother. Catherine could see her, being wheeled along the beach at Atlantic City, with her friend, Alethea, on a little holiday to recover from the shock of Spencer's accident. How does she manage it, that poise of hers, that sufficiency?

The walk had come to a cluster of animal houses. Catherine looked about her, and on a sudden whim went past the attendant into the monkey house. The warm, acid, heavy odor affronted her. She didn't want to be here. Years ago she had come in, before she married. She turned to go, and met the melancholy flat stare of a small gray monkey. The animal clung to the bars of the cage with one hand, the long, naked fingers moving restlessly, and looked at Catherine, while the fingers of the other hand dug pensively into the fur of her breast. Catherine felt her heart pause; she had a sensation of white excitement, as if she hung poised over an abyss of infinite knowledge, comprehension. A second monkey swung chattering across the cage and dropped from the bar, grabbing at the tail of the monkey that stared, and the moment was gone. Catherine went hastily out into the clear, sweet air. I hate them, she muttered, and hurried away across the brown, dead stretches of park. But she could not escape the vivid recollection of that earlier visit, years ago. She had seen then a female monkey nursing her young, and the pathos of the close-set unwinking eyes over the tiny furry thing had made the curve of long monkey arm a symbol of protective mother instinct.

They're too like us. That's why I hate them. And then, fiercely, men have climbed out of that. Some ways. But they want to keep us monkey women. Loving our mate and children. Nothing else.

She came presently to a stretch of water at the other side of the park, and stopped a moment on the shore. Blue, quiet, with long black reflections of trees from the opposite bank.

My mind has made itself up, she thought. Her pallor and sullenness had given place to an intense vitality in her wide, dark eyes, in the curve of her mouth. It isn't selfishness, nor egoism, this hankering of mine. It's more than that. I'll tell Charles—she laughed softly, out of the wholeness of her release from doubt—I'll tell him that I can't be a monkey woman. He'll help me. He must help me.

XII

She waited until the children were asleep and the house was quiet. Then she knocked at the study door, behind which Charles sat, working on a lecture. She scarcely waited for his "Come" but went in swiftly, closing the door.

"Most through work?" She drew a small chair near his desk. "Why, you aren't working." His desk was orderly, bare.

"Not just now." Charles leaned back. "I—" he hesitated. "You look stunning in that get-up," he finished.

"Yes?" Catherine's smile lingered. "It's not the get-up. It's me, inside."

"Handsome wife." Charles touched her fingers, spreading them wide between his own fingers, crumpling them together in a sudden violent squeeze. Then he leaned back again. "Just been thinking about you," he said.

"Yes? So've I." Vivacity in Catherine's voice, her gesture, a vivacity which had true life from deep inner light, not an external manner. "I wanted to talk to you."

"I've been wanting to talk things over with you." Charles looked away from her somberly. "For some time."

"It's about next year," continued Charles slowly, and Catherine thought, I'll leave the monkeys out, at first. "Our plans, you know."

Something arrested Catherine at the edge of speech, something like the damp finger of air from a cellar.

"I should have brought it up before you went downtown," he was saying. "You were down this morning, weren't you?"

She nodded.

"I didn't realize you were going. And anyway, to-day sort of brought matters to a head."

"Yes?"

"Well, it's my job. I went in to see the Head, to-day." Charles faced her, his eyes deprecating. "You gave me nerve to do that, Cathy. I'd been knocked so confoundedly hard—but I felt better to-day. That's you." Catherine's hands clung together in her lap. "I wanted to have exact data on where I stood. The trouble is, this place is too big. I mean the institution, not my own job. There are too many men eager for a foothold. The Chief was rather fine about it—about my work, especially. Praised it. You know. But he said I'd stepped somewhat out of rank, going abroad. Two men are ahead of me, in line for promotion. Can't have too many professors. Isn't room. All that guff, you know what it is." Charles brought his fist down on the desk. "I should like to get to a place where I can march ahead as fast as I can go. I talked over the whole situation with him, including the Buxton offer." His eyes were suddenly wary, inquisitive. "You remember that, of course? And he agreed with me."

"He advised you to leave the University?" Catherine heard her own voice, like a thin wire.

"He agreed that the chance for advancement, for future accomplishment, lay there rather than here."

"And you wish to go?"

"I had another letter to-day from the president there. It's a remarkable place, Cathy. Small, but endowed to the neck. A few of those small colleges are, you know. I'd have the entire department in my hands, with freedom to work out anything I liked. They want a strong department. Want a good man to build it up." His wariness, his searching of her face had dropped away in a rush of genuine enthusiasm. His words ran on, building the picture, his work, his opportunity. Then he switched, suddenly. "And the place is fine, too. Pretty little town, college community. Wonderful place for the children. The other night, as I told them about my childhood, I felt we had no right to imprison them here. It isn't decent. Shut up in a city, when they are just growing up. Do you think so? All this awful struggle to stretch our income, too. That would be over. More salary, almost twice as much. Living conditions infinitely better. Pleasant people to live near."

"When you got your appointment at the University here, you thought it was perfect. The institution, the city. Do you remember how you felt?"

"It did seem so, didn't it? But you have to watch a thing work out."

"You are sure you are judging Buxton fairly, and not in the light of what's happened in the clinic?"

"I've been thinking about it for months. I spoke about it in the fall——" He stopped suddenly, and Catherine saw the phantom that he had evoked: his own voice, harsh, "I think I'll take that Buxton offer, just to get you out of town," and her own answer, thrown back as she fled, "You'd have to be sure I would go!"

"I can't decide it alone," he went on hastily. "I'm just trying to show you how it looks to me."

"But you have decided." Her effort to keep her voice steady flattened all its intonations. "Decided that it is much the best thing for your career, much the best for the children."

"I can't drag you off unless you wish to go. I hoped you would like it, too. It—well, it is something of an honor, you know. The way they keep after me. There's a large appropriation for a laboratory. I'd have very little teaching. They seem to have some idea of a creative department."

Catherine was silent. There was something shaking and ludicrous, in the way that courageous light of afternoon had been snuffed out. Why, she had thought she stood at last in a clear road, where she could be sure of direction, and here she was only at the core of the labyrinth again, knocked blindly into an angle of blind wall.

"Catherine!" he cried out against her silence. "If it wasn't for this damned idea of yours, you'd care what happened to me!"

Whirling about in the lane of her labyrinth, shutting her eyes to its maze. "I do care, Charles. That's the trouble."

"After all, it's not just me. It's the children and you, isn't it?" He fiddled with the blotter, shoved it along the desk. "I think it will be infinitely better for you, too." His chin was obdurate. "New York is no place. Overstimulates you. At a place like Buxton, life is more normal. There's a woman's Faculty Club," he added, triumphantly.

Catherine laughed.

"Teas?" she said, "or literary afternoons?"

"They're fine women. Cathy, don't laugh. I hoped you would like it."

"Like it?" She flung out her hands, sensitive, empty palms upwards. "I've just been there! I know what it is like. But I know"—she was sober again—"why, there's nothing for me to do but say yes, is there? I can't say that Buxton offers me no opportunity, except to be a monkey woman, can I?"

"What?"

"Nothing." She doubled a fist against her mouth, and stared at him.

"You've been so sweet these last days." Charles reached for her hand, held it between both of his. "Things were ghastly mixed up, and then we seemed straight again, you and I. You know everything's been wrong since you first took that damned office job. I can't stand it! Our yapping at each other. I hoped you would want to throw it over. I do care about your being happy. Cathy, if you believe, honestly, that it's more important that you should stay here, I'll try to see it that way."

Her hand was reluctant, cold, in the warm, steady pressure of his.

"I can't believe it, alone." The labyrinth shut her in, black, enclosing. "You'd have to believe it, yourself. And you don't."

"It's different, considering the children, too, as well as you and me. What you do, in an office, takes you away from me. What I do, Cathy, that is yours, too, isn't it?"

His fingers crept up about her wrist; beneath them her life beat in heavy, slow rhythm.

"It knocks the stuffing fairly out of everything, if I think you don't care."

"Yes. It does that for me, too." Catherine smiled at him in a flicker of mockery. She caught a faint slackening of his fingers. Stella Partridge! But she knew, even in the impulse to have that out, to insist upon it as part of the winter, that it was better left untouched. Intangible, incomplete, a kind of subtle aberration, it would dissolve more quickly unexpressed.

"I'd be a beast to say I wouldn't go. A perverted, selfish wife. Wouldn't I? I can't be that. I'm too soft. Charles, I do desire for you every chance——"

"You're not soft. You're really fine. You——" He jumped to his feet. "And when we get out there, you'll see. You'll like it! Lots of things for you to do. You will be happy, Cathy. I'll make you happy."

Catherine, leaning back in her chair, lifted her face to look up at him. She heard in his voice the shouting down of fear; he had been worried, then. He had not been sure.

XIII

Catherine sat on the window sill, looking down at the shadows which slanted across the tree tops of Morningside. In the distance roofs still glittered in the afternoon sunlight. Beneath her the spring leaves were delicate and small, keeping their own fine shape, not yet making green masses. A little easterly breeze touched her warm cheek, and she thought, leaning from the window, that she sniffed in it the faint piquancy of Balm of Gilead buds. The last trunk was banging down the hall, its thuds like muttered profanities.

She turned back to the dismantled rooms. How queer they looked, small, dingy, worn. Mrs. O'Lay, in the kitchen, was assuring Charles: "Sure and you needn't worry yourself about that, Mr. Hammond. I'll clear out every stick. Them little things I've saved for myself. I can make use of them."

She was cramming things into the dumbwaiter. Catherine could hear the rustling of waste paper.

Catherine stood up, cautiously. She was stiff, almost dizzy, as if she had bent so long over packing boxes and trunks that her head couldn't without penalty be held upright. Well, it was done. Incredible and astonishing, that the disorder and confusion had come to an end.

"All ready, dear?" Charles stood in the doorway, buttoning his coat, patting his tie into place. "About time we got off."

"Be sure there is nothing left." Catherine went slowly through the rooms, listening to the walls return her footsteps emptily.

In the kitchen Mrs. O'Lay poked among the salvage, bundles, piles, an old black hat of Catherine's mounted rakishly on a box of breakfast food, a dingy cotton duck of Letty's, limp from loss of stuffing.

"I'll finish up here, Mis' Hammond." The broad red face was creased into downward wrinkles. "Sure, an' I hate to see the end of you," she said. "It's fine for you you got a tenant to come in right away, but we'll miss you."

"Taxi, Catherine!" shouted Charles.

"Good-by, God love you!" Mrs. O'Lay waved her out of the apartment onto the elevator.

"Well, we certainly got things off in great style, eh?" Charles beside her in the cab, the bags stowed at their feet, had his erect, briskly managing air. "Everything done, and time for dinner before your train."

Catherine was sunk in a lethargy of weariness; dimly she still sorted, packed, gave directions.

"You know, I forgot about the gas deposit." She emerged frantically from her lethargy. "Five dollars!"

"I'll see to it. Where's the receipt?"

"Let's see—in that envelope. I'll mail it to you. It was good of mother to take the children until train time, wasn't it?" Catherine sighed.

"I tell you, it was a lucky thing we got the apartment off our hands before fall." Charles patted her knee cheerfully. "Awful job, if we'd had to pack up at the end of the summer."

"Awful job any time!"

"Oh, well, a week in Maine will make you forget it all. Especially with the rent off our chests."

"You'll surely come in three weeks?"

"Positively. That finishes up everything. And I'll have to get away then if I'm to have any vacation. Say, be sure to tell old Baker he's got to take me down to the ledges for some real fishing. I haven't fished for two years, except for flounders."

"And Buxton the first of August?"

"Be hot there in August, won't it? Well, I'll have to go then. But I can find a house for us, and sort of learn the ropes before you blow in."

"I wonder——" Catherine's brows met in a deep wrinkle. "I can't remember which trunk I put the blankets in, and the linen. Hope they aren't labeled Buxton!"

"Oh, you got them where they belong. Don't fuss, I tell you. You let me drop you at the Gilberts' now, and I'll go on to the station. I can check these things, and that will give you a few minutes to rest."

"I don't care where you drop me." Catherine laughed. "All my poor mind does is to hunt for things in those trunks and boxes."

"You might as well stop worrying. They're settled."

Catherine stood at the entrance to the hotel, watching the taxi jerk its way along with the traffic. Charles's hand lay on the opened window, a resolute, capable fist. Every one was going home. Home from work. Shop girls in gay tweeds, already faded across the shoulders; sallow, small men in baggy trousers, with bits of lint sticking to them, from the lofts where they sewed—perhaps on more gay tweed suits, or beaded silk dresses for the trade. Moist, pale faces, with a startled, worn expression, as if the warmth of the day surprised and exhausted the city dwellers. And in Maine—a sharp visual image of pointed firs reflected in clear water, with a luminous twilight sky behind dark branches.

"Ought to be glad I'm going," she thought. "Instead of spending the summer here, with these people. And the children—I couldn't keep them here. Could I!"

Henrietta's maid admitted her to the quiet, orderly living room. Dr. Gilbert was in her office. She would be free soon. Catherine sat down at the window, looking idly out at the great steel framework which shadowed the room. How long ago she had looked down into pits of water and uncouth shapes of cranes! New Year's Day. And Henry had said, "You'd be a fool not to go."

The methodical arrangement of the room was restful, sane, after the hurly-burly of the last week. Distressing that confusion could so fray the edges of yourself. She closed her eyes, relaxing into a kind of blankness.

She opened them presently, to find Henrietta in the doorway, staring through her eyeglasses, her mouth firm and compassionate.

"Hello!" Catherine moved hastily erect. "Don't turn that professional stare on me. I won't have it."

"Hoped you were asleep." Henrietta came in. "Bill hasn't shown up yet. Perhaps we'd better go down to the dining room. Your train is so beastly early. Where's Charles?"

"Checking the trunks. He'll be in soon."

As they waited for the elevator, Catherine turned suddenly upon Henrietta.

"You know, Henry, I appreciate your not telling me what you think. I suppose you're disgusted, and you haven't said a word. Not since I told you we were going."

"Not disgusted." Henrietta thrust her eyeglasses between the buttons of her jacket. "I've been rather cut up about it. But it's your affair. I don't see that you could do anything else. Not now, at any rate."

"Perhaps some women could. I can't."

"Women can't alone." Henrietta sounded violent. "Not without men helping them. Being willing to help them. So long as their own affairs come first——"

The door of the elevator swung open.

"When Mr. Gilbert comes in, tell him we are at dinner. And Mr. Hammond, too."

"Yes, ma'am."

Henrietta nodded to the waiter, who led them into an alcove off the main dining room.

"Quiet in here." Henrietta settled herself briskly. Catherine was thinking: Henrietta manages her life so that things, mere things, never get in her way—laundry, or food, or packing. "I wanted to see you make a go of it," said Henrietta. "You're so darned intelligent. It's the children, I know. If it weren't for them, you could stay here. If you would. Probably Charles would pull you along by a heartstring even then. Now, Bill—— But I'll let him speak for himself. He has some news."

"Perhaps"—Catherine did not glance up—"perhaps, Henry, I've just been knocked flat at the end of the first round. Who knows? I may get my wind back—in Buxton."

"What can you do in a country town?"

Catherine did not answer; Charles was coming toward them, buoyant, touched with excitement, and behind him, Bill. Charles tucked the checks into her purse.

"I'll mail these others to the Dean," he said. "Great place we're going to. The Dean himself has offered to see to our chattels. Going to store them in some building on the campus until we come. Real human beings in Buxton!"

Catherine looked silently at Bill, as he took her hand for a brief moment. She hadn't seen him for weeks; he had been out of town again. His glance was grave, a little pleased.

"Tell them your news, Bill."

"Oh"—he shook out his napkin—"I'm off to South America next week, to build a bridge."

Henrietta explained. Huge engineering project, throwing a link across mountains, a road for commerce. Difficult enough to interest even a clam like Bill.

Catherine listened rather vaguely; Bill was moving his knife, his salt, his roll, to illustrate. Saves hundreds of miles in shipping, you see, if the thing can be done. A straight line from the interior.

"How long will it take?"

"Can't tell exactly until I see the ground. Perhaps a year. Or longer."

Catherine flung her glance at Henrietta, and found her watching Bill, her blue eyes calmly reflective. Not a trace of dispute, not a faint echo of bitterness, although Henrietta was looking less at Bill than back into whatever secret, intimate hour of decision lay behind the present announcement. This was what Henrietta had meant. That Bill would go alone if he wished, not for an instant expecting Henrietta to drop her life and follow.

"And you're just staying here?" Charles was naïve, surprised.

"Naturally." Henrietta grinned at him. "I can't move my practice. It's a long time, but perhaps one of us can wriggle in a vacation."

"Well!" Charles leaned back. "If my wife——" he broke off, suspiciously.

"Henrietta might reasonably object to being deserted," said Bill quietly. "But she's good enough to see why I wish to go."

Charles paused an instant over that, and then with a shrug came out on clear, safe ground with a question about the work. Catherine listened. She was tired. Her thoughts crawled obscurely, undirected, in a fog of weariness. Charles would pull her along by a heartstring, Henrietta said. Probably. She lacked that cold singleness which Henrietta kept. But Bill never tried to pull Henry by a heartstring. He hid away from her.

"You're not eating a thing, Cathy," said Henrietta. "Too much packing, I suppose. I hope you'll loaf for a while. Do you have the same woman who took us for peddlars?"

"I think so." Catherine stared out of her fog.

"Amelia will have the house opened and ready. Catherine can loaf all summer." Charles was hearty, assured. "It's been a hard winter, some ways."

The talk went on, with coffee and cheese, and Catherine drifted again in her fog. Perhaps one person always hides away. Bill had said something about that, once. In every combination of people, one hides. But if you hide away, then you shouldn't sulk. Play fair.

Dinner was over. Time to go. Henrietta, regretfully, explained that she couldn't go to the station. A case. Bill would walk over.

"I shall miss you, Cathy." They stood at the entrance of the hotel. "And the children. Bill gone, too. I'll have to work like fury."

"You must come out to Buxton when we're settled. Take a week off." Charles glanced at his watch, edged toward the street.

"I may." Henrietta's lips, firm and cool, touched Catherine's. "Good-by."

"We'd better walk fast," said Charles. "I have to get the bags out of the parcel room."

"Want a taxi?" Bill lifted his hand, but Catherine refused.

"It's only three blocks. Let's walk."

At the corner entrance of Grand Central, Charles darted ahead, with a hasty, "Meet you at the clock. You find Mother Spencer and the kids."

Catherine drew a long breath and looked up at Bill.

"South America," she said. "Mountains. And you are really keen about it?"

"It sounds good, don't you think?" He pushed open the heavy door for her. "Too bad we can't have dinner on some mountain peak." He smiled down at her. "What would they give us? Hot tamales, or are those Mexican?"

"South America—and Buxton," said Catherine.

"There is Spencer." Bill took her arm and swung her out of the path of a laden porter. "And the others."

"I hope it will be wonderful, Bill. And I'm not done for, not yet." Catherine could see the children, Letty with round eyes and her doll hugged under one arm, Marian jiggling on her toes with delight.

"I hope that you——" What he would have said, Catherine did not know, for Marian had seen them and hurled herself upon her mother with a burst of staccato excitement. But Catherine had met, for a clear instant, in a lifting of Bill's somber impersonality, a kind of dogged, sympathetic challenge.

"Oh, Mother!" Spencer had his fingers around her arm. "I began to think you weren't coming!"

"Margaret's here somewhere." Mrs. Spencer clung to Letty's hand. "Buying you magazines, I think. Where is Charles?"

"Here's the King." Margaret came up with him. "Hello, Mr. Bill."

"The guard will have to let me through the gate," announced Charles severely, "to settle these bags for you."

"Oh, Cathy!" Margaret whisked to Catherine's side. "We're coming up to see you in Maine, Amy and I. In our own car! Want us?"

"I shall probably stop in Buxton on my way back from George's," said Mrs. Spencer, as she pushed Letty and Marian toward the gate. "I wish you weren't going so far"—she sighed—"but as I've said, I think it's just the place for you all."

Charles was impressing the guard, successfully, so that he did step through, Spencer beside him tugging at a handbag. A flurry of good-bys, and Catherine, with Letty and Marian clinging to her hands, followed him upon the platform. She turned for a last glimpse. Margaret, her bright hair flying, was waving at them; Mrs. Spencer dabbed softly at her cheeks with her handkerchief; Bill—no, Bill had turned away. There, he was waving, too. Marian waggled her handkerchief. Charles called behind her, "Come along, Cathy, your coach is halfway down the track."