The Brute. Kummer Frederic Arnold
Rogers stopped in his pacing up and down the room. It was clear that his wife’s remarks had touched a sensitive spot.
“Edith,” he exclaimed, “you cannot mean what you say. Everything I have done has been for you and for him. Bobbie seems to me to be well enough. Think of the hundreds of thousands of children that have to spend the summer in the city. God knows I’d give my life for him, or for you, too, if you needed it; it’s what I am doing. I can’t do any more.”
“I know it,” said Edith, with a sigh. “I suppose I’m very unreasonable, but somehow my life has seemed so empty, all these years.”
“Haven’t you everything you need?”
“Everything I need? Do you think three meals a day and a place to sleep is everything a woman needs?”
“Many women have less.”
“And many have more. A woman’s needs depend upon her desires, her temperament. What may be a necessity to one, another would have no use for. Some women, down in Tenth Avenue, might think this Paradise.” She looked about the room scornfully. “And a lot more, up in Fifth Avenue, would think it – well – the other place. That’s the difference.”
Donald looked at her curiously, and noted her flushed face, her heaving breast. These things evidently were very near her heart. “What are your needs, Edith?” he asked kindly.
“How can you ask me such a question?” Edith failed to appreciate his kind intention. She was fairly launched upon her argument, and the tumult of discontent which had been gathering in her breast burst forth with bitter intensity. “Did you ever suppose for a moment that I was a woman who could be satisfied with the merest commonplaces of existence? Don’t you see that I need life – real, broadening, joyous, human life, with all its hopes, its fears, its longings, its successes, its failures? Do you think I find those things here?” She swept the room with an all-embracing gesture, and stood confronting him with flushed cheeks, her eyes flashing rebelliously.
Her evidence of feeling both startled and hurt him. He had supposed that all her years of patient waiting had covered a mind serenely satisfied with the present through a belief in the future. He looked at her for a few moments in surprise. “I am very sorry, Edith,” he began haltingly. “I, too, feel the need of those things, but I do not allow the lack of them to spoil my life. I have borne my trials and done my duty as best I could, and I expect you to do the same. If we have not money, and all the pleasures and luxuries it brings, we at least have health and our daily bread, and above all, our little boy. We ought to be very thankful.”
“Do you suppose for a moment that I do not appreciate Bobbie? He is the only thing that keeps me here.”
The troubled look on Donald’s face grew deeper as he answered her, and with it came an expression of alarm. He had never doubted Edith’s love for him, and her words were a great shock.
“The only thing that keeps you here!” he cried. “Is your love for me of no importance to you?”
Edith surveyed the plain, poorly furnished little room with ill-concealed dislike. “This sort of thing,” she said bitterly, “doesn’t offer much for love to feed upon.”
“Edith! You surely do not realize what you are saying. To hear you talk, anyone might suppose we were on the point of going to the poorhouse.”
“It couldn’t be worse. I’m tired of it, and I can’t help saying so. I suppose you will think me very ungrateful, but I can’t help it. We never have any pleasures, any happiness, any real enjoyment. It’s nothing but mere existence.”
“I don’t agree with you. I am not doing so badly. We are both of us young. In a few years I hope to be comparatively well off, and then things will be very different. I am working and striving for you every hour of the day. Do you think I would do it, if I did not feel that you love me – that you believed in me?”
He went over to her, and took her hand in his. “What has upset you so, to-night, dear? Is there anything you particularly want – anything that I could do for you? Tell me – if there is, you know I will do everything in my power to gratify you.”
“No – nothing that you could do.” She seemed unconscious of the pain she was giving him.
“I thought perhaps it was about this summer. You told me that your mother and sister were anxious to take a cottage at the seashore, and that they wanted you to go with them – is that it?”
“No,” she replied. “It isn’t important. You said you couldn’t afford it.”
Donald left her abruptly and, walking over to the desk, began to fumble nervously with the papers on it. It hurt him to the depths of his nature to be obliged to refuse Edith this request; indeed, what she had asked he had already himself thought of, and been forced to conclude that, much as he wanted to give her and Bobbie this pleasure, he could not do it. He turned to her with a nervous twitching of the mouth, which had of late become characteristic.
“Every year, Edith,” he said, “we have this discussion. Your mother and sister have no responsibilities. They can give up their rooms at the boarding house and go to the country without adding a dollar to their expenses. You cannot do that. It will cost a hundred dollars a month, at least, for your expenses and Bobbie’s, to say nothing of the extra expense of my taking my meals at restaurants. I can’t afford it this year, Edith. I wish I could, but I can’t.”
“Why can’t you?” Her tone was aggrieved – almost defiant. “Is business so bad? I thought things had been so much better this month.”
“It’s the glass plant, Edith. We are having a lot of trouble. It takes every cent I can scrape together to meet expenses. We are a new concern. Our goods are not known. Competition is severe.
“We are trying to build up a new business. I can’t weaken on it now. Surely you can stand one more summer in the city – if I can. Perhaps, next year – ”
“Next year!” she cried. “It’s always next year. It’s been that way now for eight years, and about the only outing I’ve had has been a trip to Coney Island on the boat. I’m sick of it. It’s drudgery. A hired girl has more freedom that I have – and more money, too, for that matter.”
“Edith!”
“Oh, I know what you are going to say. I made my bed, and I ought to be willing to lie in it. I knew you were a poor man when I married you. Well, suppose I did. I didn’t mind poverty then – the enthusiasm of youth made it all seem a pleasure, like camping out, and living on canned beans and corn bread. It’s fine, for a time, but after a while, when the novelty has worn off, you get sort of tired of it. There comes a time in every married woman’s life when she sits down and looks at things from both sides, and wonders whether, after all, it’s really worth while.”
“I don’t see why you should complain, if I don’t,” said Donald wearily. “I’m sorry we haven’t more money, on your account and on my own, as well. There are many things I should like to do.”
“Oh, you’re a man.” Edith flung herself across the room and began turning over the sheets of music upon the piano. “If you have a couple of new suits of clothes a year and can smoke the kind of cigars you like, you don’t bother your head if some other man has a dozen suits and keeps a valet. It’s different with a woman. Home-made dresses, dollar corsets, riding in surface cars, seem mighty hard, when you see other women in their autos, their Russian sables, their Paris gowns – women who spend more money on their dogs every month than I have to spend on Bobbie. It’s a thousand times harder for a woman to be poor than it is for a man. Most men don’t know it, but that doesn’t alter the fact – it’s true, just the same.”
She suddenly sat down at the piano, and after striking a few discords, began to play the “Jewel Song” from “Faust” in a rapid tempo.
Donald followed her with his eyes. “It seems to me,” he said gravely, “that when a man wants to do so much for his wife and realizes that he can’t it’s the hardest of all – much harder than doing without things yourself.”
Edith