He had always thought he would like to be able to sit right down quietly to think out a thing or two. Now he certainly had all the sitting down quietly that anybody could want. Well, he liked it as much as he had thought he would. And more! He brought under his consideration one after another of the new elements of his new life, holding them firmly under the lens of his intelligence, focusing on them all his attention, and to his astonished relief saw them one by one yield to his analysis, give up their tortured, baffling aspect of mystery and tragedy, and lie open to his view, open to his hand, open to his forward-looking planning. He had never lived with his family before, he had never seen more of their lives than the inexplicable and tangled loose ends over which they all stumbled wretchedly. Now that for months he had had the opportunity for continuous observation, he perceived that there was nothing so darkly inexplicable, after all, nothing that resisted a patient, resourceful attempt to follow up those loose ends and straighten out some of the knots.
Even in the tragic tangle of Stephen’s strange little nature, Lester felt he had begun to find his way. He had found out this much: Stephen had more vitality than all the rest of them put together (except Eva, of course). And when it did not find free outlet it strangled and poisoned him, made him temporarily insane, in the literal sense of the word, like a strong masterful man shut up by an accident deep in a coal-mine, who might fall insanely to work with his bare hands to claw away the obstructing masses of dead, brute matter that kept him from the light of day! That was what Stephen made him think of; that was, so Lester divined, the meaning of the wild, fierce flame in Stephen’s eyes which had always so shocked and grieved them. They were of another breed, the kind who would sit down patiently and resignedly to die, not fight till the last minute with bleeding hands.
All but Eva—oh, poor darling Eva! How much better Lester understood his wife after those few months of observing her in a life that suited her than after fourteen years of seeing her grimly and heroically enduring a life that did not. Was this Eva the same as the old one? This Eva who came in every evening tired, physically tired as he had never seen her, but appeased, satisfied, fulfilled, having poured out in work she loved the furious splendor of her vigor.
His heart ached with remorse as he thought of the life to which he had condemned her. Why, like Stephen, she had been buried alive in a shaft deep under the earth, and she had not even had Stephen’s poor passionate outlet of misdirected fury. What she thought was her duty had held her bound fast in a deathlike silence and passivity. He remembered the somber, taciturn, self-contained woman who had sat opposite him, year after year, at the supper-table. Could that be the same Eva who now, evening after evening, made them all gay with her accounts of the humors of her profession; who could take off a fussy customer so to the life that even Stephen laughed; who could talk with such inspired animation of the variations of fashion that even he listened, deadly as was his hatred for fashion and all that it stood for! He had never even suspected that Eva had this jolly sense of humor! Could it be the same Eva who so briskly dealt the cards around every evening and took up her hand with such interest?
Those evenings of whist had been an inspiration of his, in answer to two questions he had set himself: What could he invent that would keep Eva’s mind off the housekeeping in the evenings? And what could he and Eva and the children do together, which they would all really and truly enjoy—what was some natural manner in which to make a civilized contact between the two generations and the widely differing temperaments? It was delightful to him to see how Eva enjoyed it, how she liked to win (just think of her caring to win! How young in nature she remained! She made him feel like Methuselah!). How cheerily and heartily she coached Henry along, how the children admired her skill and luck, and how she enjoyed their admiration.
Heavens! How unhappy she must have been before, like a Titan forced to tend a miniature garden; forced to turn the great flood of that inherited, specialized ability of hers into the tiny shallow channels of the infinitely minute detail of childcare; forced, day after day, hour by hour, minute by minute, with no respite, into a life-and-death closeness of contact with the raw, unfinished personalities of the children, from which her own ripe maturity recoiled in an ever-renewed impatience. Eva always hated anything unfinished! And nothing around her ever stayed unfinished very long. How she put through any job she undertook! She had sat up all one night to finish that sofa she had so wonderfully refurbished.
But you couldn’t put through the job of bringing up children. No amount of energy on your part, no, not if you sat up all night every night of your life, could hurry by a single instant the slow unfolding from within of a child’s nature. …
Eva dropped out of Lester’s mind whenever he thought of this, and he was all flooded with the sweet, early-morning light that shone from his daughter’s childhood. He always felt like taking off his hat when he thought of Helen.
Sometimes when they were working together and Helen was moved to lift the curtain shyly and let him look at her heart, he held his breath before the revelation of the strange, transparent whiteness of her thoughts. That was the vision before which the greatest of the poets had prostrated themselves.
