_ CHAPTER XIX
But all this was as nothing compared to the intensity, the ups and down, in her relations with Joe himself. He often looked tired and harassed. "What's the matter with me?" he seemed to ask. And she felt his two sides combatting each other. On the one hand were the influences of Nourse and Dwight and the men at the club, to which he went nearly every day. He took part in discussions there, long rambling talks and arguments. And his old ideals were rising hungrily within him. But meanwhile the business man in Joe kept savagely putting the dreamer down, and for days he would plunge into his work and the fever of the money game. Joe had been so successful of late; and she knew that in his office that odious press agent was for ever at him. From Nourse she learned that her husband was even still considering the scheme for a row of buildings named after the presidents. And Ethel had a sinking of heart.
"If he does that, I'm lost," she decided. But she would shake off such fears, as she felt again the old Joe emerge, the Joe of dreams and startling plans. And she grew excited as she thought:
"Oh, if he'll only let himself go! I don't want him just nice and tame and refined! I don't want only friends like that! I want--I want--"
What she wanted was still exceedingly vague, and Ethel could not put it in words. It had something to do with the teachings of the little history "prof" at home. She wanted the artist in him to rise, the creative soul of him! Cautiously she probed his thoughts--now tender and maternal toward him in his tired moods, now alive and interested as she got him talking. Bits came out. Joe was so plainly tortured by the struggle going on inside. She felt at once pity and admiration, and was deeper in love with him than she had ever been before. She felt the excitement of a fight with hope of victory close ahead. She took care in her dress and manner to give him little surprises at night, and by her cheery comradeship and her warm beauty of body and soul, Ethel drew him on and on. At such times she would often lose all memory of her scheming and would give up to her love, which had become a passion now.
But always she came back to her plan. Not openly, for she had to be careful; she worked at him in little ways. She stirred his youth and his cast-off dreams by her own youth and zest for it all. She got him to tell her of Nourse and Dwight, the old friends she herself had put on his trail, and of new friends he had met in his club--"the club I elected you to," she exulted. But the next instant she would add, "Oh, Ethel, you're so ignorant! If you only knew about his work!" And knitting her brows she would listen hard while he talked of steel construction. As with her encouragement he talked on rapidly, absorbed, Ethel would clutch at this and that. She learned of books and magazines on architecture here and abroad. Stealthily she noted them down, and those she could not purchase she hunted up in libraries. Nourse was a great help to her here. He came to see her now and then; and though he still had his discouraging moods, at other times he was friendly and kind. Enjoying this conspiracy with the charming young Mrs. Lanier, he expressed his gallantry by bringing her books of appalling size. But some had beautiful illustrations that set her to imagining. Eagerly she groped her way deep into the history of the building of cathedrals and palaces in times gone by. And the long majestic story of man's building on the earth thrilled her to the very soul. Joe must make his place in it all!
When on coming home at night he dumped a pile of work on the table, she would unobtrusively slip some book beside it. She grew to know which ones tempted him most. He had been surprised and amused at first at her interest in architecture--and secretly a little disturbed, suspecting what lay behind it. But as autumn drew on he read more and more of the books she kept putting in his way. While he read she would sit with a novel or sew. She would glance up with some remark, and they would talk and then read on. Subtly she made the atmosphere. She often brought Paris into their talks. She spoke longingly of the shops and plays, and all she wanted to see over there. And she almost succeeded in making him promise to take her over the following spring.
Joe was happy at such times, when she could make him leave business alone. And although he had many relapses, when night after night he would sit by the table planning more horrible "junk for the Bronx," with an inner smile she saw how often her husband scowled at such labour now. She heard of changes in the office.
"We 're still building junk," Nourse confided one day, "but it isn't quite as bad as before. Joe wants the money just as hard, but he's plainly jarred by some of the jobs. He even fought his press agent last week!"
One night Joe suggested awkwardly:
"Suppose we try Bill Nourse again. Let me bring him home to dinner, I mean. He isn't especially cheery, God knows--but he seems so damnably lonely this fall."
"Very well, dear--if you want to," she sighed. She had told Nourse to hint he was lonely.
When Nourse came to dinner that Saturday night, Joe was surprised and delighted at the way his partner seemed to get on now with his wife. The visit indeed was such a success that it was not long before Joe proposed bringing home "an old pal of mine--fellow named Dwight." To this, too, Ethel assented, and when Dwight arrived one night she greeted him very graciously.
"I feel as though I knew you," she said. "I've heard Joe talk of you so much."
To Joe's delight they got on like old friends. And when Dwight spied the piano there and learned of her interest in music, he insisted on trying her voice, and was loud in his praise of its promise. Before he left, it was arranged that she should come to his studio and take lessons twice a week. Openly his pupil now, she could speak of him to Joe, and he came to dine with them often.
How smoothly things were working out. If there were any cloud upon the horizon it was the occasional presence of Amy's old friend, Fanny Carr. Fanny had been abroad through the summer, but in October she had returned. She had come to see Ethel several times, in the same determinedly friendly way; and Nourse reported that she was going frequently to see Joe at his office about her eternal money affairs. And the fact that Joe never spoke of it only made the matter worse. For Joe still had his money side, and Fanny knew how to flatter him so. He still had his loyalty to his first wife, and Fanny so cleverly played to that. "And he likes her, too--clothes, voice, perfumery and all!" Ethel would declare to herself in anger and vexation. Oh, these women who used sex every minute! how could men be so easily fooled?
"You can't change a man in a minute," she thought. "Remember Amy had him five years." Amy had planted so deep in him the feeling that money is everything; she had got the fever into his blood. And Fanny was there to keep it alive by her flattery of his money success. And for Ethel, even still, it was decidedly unsafe to criticize Joe in some of his moods. As autumn changed to winter, these moods grew much more frequent. What was worrying him? She couldn't find out. She sent for Nourse and asked him, "What's going on in the office?"
"The press agent is pushing him hard," was Nourse's gloomy answer, "for that row of patriotic atrocities up on Riverside Drive." Ethel squirmed.
"But he won't!" she cried. "He couldn't!"
"Oh, yes he could," Joe's partner growled. "There's so much money in it!"
"If he puts that through I'm done for!" Ethel told herself that night. "His name will be a perfect joke--among all the people I want to know! And they'll all keep away from us as though he were running a yellow journal! And then her friends will crowd about--because we'll be so rich, you see! Oh, damn money! Damn! Damn!"
She was lying sleepless on her bed, and Joe was sleeping by her side. She sat up now and looked at his face in the dim light from the window.
"If you get very rich," she thought, "and middle-aged and very fat in body and soul, get to care only for building 'junk' and for going about with Amy's friends--I wonder what would I do then." Again the words of young Mrs. Grewe came up in her mind: "You can get out whenever you choose." She frowned. "But there are the children. And besides, I love you, Joe--yes, more than ever, and in a queer way! I'm fighting for what I love in you, but at the same time I love you all--every bit of you!" Breathing quickly now, she sank back on her pillow, and there she soon grew quiet again. "So we'll fight it out once and for all. You've got to drop this plan of yours." One evening that same week when Nourse had come to dinner, she led the talk by slow degrees to that other plan of Joe's--the one with terrace gardens. Soon she had Nourse talking about it, and seeing her husband grow morose she grew cheerily interested.
"Oh, I'm very dull, I suppose," she said at the end with a quizzical smile, "but I'm afraid I can't get it clear. Couldn't you draw it?" Nourse smiled at this, for he saw what she was driving at.
"No, I'm poor at that," he said.
"Then, Joe, you sketch it out for me."
Joe put down his paper and began in surly fashion. But as he sketched more and more rapidly, she saw the thing take hold of him. With little exclamations and questions Ethel drove him on. She thought it a fascinating plan but the details puzzled her still, she said, and the rough sketch he had drawn was very unsatisfactory. She begged him to draw it on a large scale, and he set out to do so. But his hand was inexpert. Although once the most brilliant designer in town, for years Joe had stuck to the business side, and his hand had grown clumsy, his memory cold. Ethel had known of this from Nourse. And now probing by her questions as to details here and there, with Nourse helping at her side, she revealed Joe's weakness to himself. A scared angry look came into his eyes. Stubbornly he worked on and on, but the thing would not come as it used to!
And this revealing process continued until Nourse with masculine pity dropped out of the torturing and went home. But Ethel gently encouraged Joe, and in his dogged persistency he kept at it half the night. The more tired he grew, the worse was his work. And again and again, as she glanced at his face, she saw that frightened look in his eyes. It almost brought the tears in her own, but steadily she kept thinking:
"I'm scaring him badly, and that's what he needs. For years he has been telling himself that first he would make money and then he would work out his ideals. But he's frightened now. He's wondering if he has put it off too long?"
Pitilessly she goaded him on. Then at last she relented and began to persuade him to go to bed. How white and haggard and queer he looked. Again a lump rose in her throat. Soon she was saying quietly:
"I should think that some day, dear, you'd want to go back to Paris and work."
He made no answer.
But in the weeks that followed, she dropped this thought again and again into his mind. Paris, study, work, old dreams--she played these against his business, against Amy and her friends and the flattery of Fanny Carr, against that odious press agent and the plan for Riverside Drive.
"Has he turned it down?" she inquired of his partner.
"Not yet," was the answer. "It's still in the air.
"I wish this were over," Ethel thought. Joe's face had grown so queer and drawn that sometimes as she looked at him a sickening dread stole into her mind. "Is he really too old?" she asked herself.
One Saturday night when he came home, with a sudden leap of compassion she saw what a day he had been through. "But he is through! Something has happened!" she thought. And she treated him very tenderly--both because of the state he was in, and more perhaps because she knew how bad it would be for both of them if he had decided against her.
"How has the work been going?" she asked. He looked at her almost with dislike.
"For a month," he said, "you've been trying to make me give up that Riverside scheme." He paused, and her heart was in her mouth.
"I haven't said so, have I?"
"No--you haven't said so," he growled.
"Well?"
"It's off. I've dropped it."
She started to embrace him, but saw at once it would be a mistake.
"Thank you, Joe," she said softly, and went into the nursery. It was so dark and quiet there. She had a cry. _