Five nights at the Five Pines

AFTER I had been back in New York for a month I had about decided that Mrs. Dove was right.

Jasper had greeted my idea about buying the house with enthusiasm, but, when it came to details, with a stubborn refusal to face the facts and sign a check. To my entreaties that he go down and look at it, or write to Judge Bell about it, or arrange to move there soon, I was constantly met with, “Wait till after the play.”

We lived in four rooms in the old arcade near Columbus Circle which we had originally chosen because artists lived there, and at that time I had thought of myself as an artist. I did, in truth, have some flair for it, and a little education, which had been laboriously acquired at the School of Design associated with the Carnegie Technical Schools. Two years of marriage had seen the dwindling away of my aspirations by attrition. The one room that we had which possessed a window facing north, which by any stretch of good-will might have been called a studio, had been given up for our common sleeping-room, and Jasper, because of the constant necessity of his profession to keep late hours, was never out of bed until long after the sun had slid around to the court. I bore fate no grudge because of this. It was quite true, as he often pointed out to me, that I could paint out-of-doors or in some one else’s studio, but the day that I felt free to do this never came. When, after two years of married life, our finances still necessitated the curtailment of every extravagance, paints and canvas seemed one of the most plausible things to do without. It was only when prompted by the exhibition of some woman painter, who had evidently managed these things better, my husband would ask me why I did not paint any more, that I suffered momentarily. For the rest of the time his own work seemed to me much more important.

This was the night at last that my husband’s play was to go on, the plot of which he had developed from a mystery that I had suggested one morning a year ago, when I used to wake up so happily, full of ideas. I did not rise as exuberantly now. I hated to get up at all. Our studio was crowded with things and with people that we did not want from morning until night, and from night until morning again. It had become my chief duty to sort out all the component parts of our ménage, producing just the influences that would further the work of my husband and suppressing all others. To-day I had been answering questions constantly on the telephone, from complaints about the box-office, with which I had nothing at all to do, to reproaches from the ingénue because she could not find the author. It seemed to me, thinking it over while pressing out the dress I was going to wear, that Myrtle was spending altogether too much time looking for my husband. Just because he wrote the play and she was acting in it was no reason that I could see why she should lunch with him every day. I sometimes wished that all of these young girls who thought it was part of their education to flirt with him could have the pleasure of getting him his breakfast every day, as I did, and of waiting up for him for a thousand and one nights.

I did not reproach Jasper; I loved him too much for that. When one is jealous it is the contortions of a member of his own sex, of whom he is suspicious, not the dear one upon whom he is dependent for happiness. A woman will drop her best friend to save her husband, without letting him know she has done so.

I blamed the city in which we worked for most of the confusion. Had we lived in some other place, it would have been in a saner way. And Jasper could have lived anywhere he chose; he carried his earning capacity in his imagination. Nowhere are conditions so mad as in New York, so enticingly witless. In this arcade building, cut up in its old age into so-called living apartments, with rickety bridges connecting passages that had no architectural relation to each other, whispers followed one in bleak corridors and intrigue loafed on the stairs. We had outgrown unconventional (which is the same as inconvenient) housekeeping. Jasper was getting bored and I was becoming querulous before our married life had been given any opportunity to expand. Dogs were not allowed in our arcade; children would have been a scandal.

Thinking of the big rooms in that cool, quiet house on the cape during the hot month of September, I could not help longing to be there, and I had written several times to the judge. Thus I knew that Mattie “Charles T. Smith” had once more refused to vacate, and unless we were coming up there immediately, the judge would not evict her before spring.

“We ought to decide something,” I was saying to myself, when I heard my husband coming down the hall, and my heart forgot forebodings. I hurried to hide the ironing-board, there still being a pretense between us that it was not necessary to do these things, and put on the tea-kettle.

Jasper was tall and angular, with wispy light hair always in disorder above a high forehead and gray eyes wide open in happy excitement. He looked straight into life, eager to understand it, and never seemed to know when it came back at him, hitting him in the face. He had that fortunate quality of making people take him seriously, even his jokes. In a world eager to give him what he wanted, I was proud that he still chose me, and prayed that he might continue.

He was pathetically glad to get some hot tea, assuring me that the play was rotten, that the manager was a pig, and that none of the actors knew their business. He had been with them all day.

“Jasper,” I said, after I had given him all the telephone messages, to which he paid no heed at all, “have you any idea of taking that house on Cape Cod this fall?”

Jasper went on looking through his papers as if he had not heard me.

“Where is that correction I made last night for Myrtle?” he asked.

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

“Well, what—” he began impatiently, and then, turning on me, he read in my face, I suppose, how much the House of the Five Pines had come to mean to me.

“Now, see here,” he finished more kindly, “I can’t think about houses to-day; you know I can’t. Ask me to-morrow.”

“All right, dear; I’ll ask you to-morrow. Have you got my seat for to-night?”

“Seat?”

“Yes, a ticket to get in with. I suppose I’ll have to have a pass of some sort, won’t I? I don’t want to stand up behind the stage.”

“Why, I’m sorry; I never thought of it. I’ll run up to the theater before I come back and get you something.”

“You won’t have time; you’re going out for dinner, aren’t you?”

“I was.”

“Well, go ahead. I’ll see about the ticket somehow. Don’t bother.”

I smiled a little ruefully after he had gone. Why did I think I had to have any more child than just him? I had always supposed that when a man’s play was produced his wife had a box and all her friends gathered around her with congratulations, and that the wives of the actors were all arrayed, family style, to see them come on. But it did not develop that way among the members of “the profession” as I knew them. The wives were mostly staying at home with the children, or lived outside the city and couldn’t afford to come in, or frankly had another engagement. They were “not expected.”

It was raining when I crowded my way into the foyer and begged a seat for “The Shoals of Yesterday” from the man at the window. He gave me the best he had, without any comment, and I took off my rubbers and laid down my umbrella in the balcony. From this point I was as interested as if I did not know every line that was to be said—almost every gesture. After the first act I relaxed and enjoyed it.

The play went of its own volition, developing an amazing independent vitality which withstood the surprising shocks administered to it by the actors. I smiled benignly when the audience sat tense, and wept when I saw them burst into laughter.

Jasper’s hurried hand-pressure, when he found me, and his whispered “Is everything all right out here, dear?” made me feel that I, too, had some part in it, outside of its original conception, which of course every one had forgotten. As a watcher of the first performance, alert to catch any criticism that might be useful, I sat up all night with the play that I had tended from infancy. When the curtain went up upon “The Shoals of Yesterday,” it was a manuscript from our apartment; when the asbestos went down, it was upon a Broadway success.

I found my way back to the dressing-rooms and met Jasper coming along with a crowd of actors, Myrtle crowding close. She wore an orange-feathered toque, which set off her light hair like a flame, and a sealskin wrap, drawn tight around her slim, lightly clothed body. She was one of those competent blond girls who know not only how to make their own clothes but how to get some one to buy them, so that they will not have to, and how to wear them after they get them. It is vanity which forces them into bizarre conquests. I could not tell whether her absorption of Jasper’s time had in it elements that would ever come to hurt me, or whether she was simply using him to further her own advancement. Probably she did not know herself.

“Isn’t he a bright little boy?” She petted him and hung upon his neck. “We’re going to take him out and buy him a supper, so we are; him’s hungry.”

I knew perfectly well that it would be Jasper who would pay for the supper, but at that moment I could not bear any one ill-will. I even recognized that, for Myrtle, this was generosity. It would have been more like her to have spoken of the play in terms of herself.

“It went awfully well,” I said to him over their heads. I thought he would be waiting for some word from me.

But he did not reply. He was laughing and talking with the whole group. In that intimate moment he was not aware of me in the way that I was of him. Something inside me withdrew, so that I saw myself standing there, waiting. I became embarrassed.

“Shall I go on home?” I asked.

Jasper looked relieved.

“I’ll be right along,” he assured me.

I went out with my umbrella and tried to call a taxi. But there were not enough; there never are when it rains, and a single woman has no chance at all. Men were running up the street a block and jumping into them and driving down to the awning with the door half-open looking for their girls or their wives along the sidewalk. I wished that some one was looking for me. A hand closed over mine where I held the handle of the umbrella and a pleasant voice said:

“Can I take you home?”

I looked up into the eyes of a bald-headed man I had never seen before, who was smiling at me as if he had known me something more than all my life. I jerked away and hurried down the street. After that I somehow did not dare even to take a car; I walked home; in fact, I ran. And all the way I kept thinking: “Why doesn’t Jasper take any better care of me? Why doesn’t he care what happens to me? That’s it; he doesn’t care.”

It is a dangerous thing to pity oneself when one’s husband is out with another woman.

“All I can have to eat is what is left over in the ice-box,” I said, raising the lid and holding the lettuce in one hand while I felt around in the dark for the bottle of milk. But there was no milk. And I had to laugh at myself then or cry, and so I laughed, a very little, and went to bed.

When Jasper came in it was so late that I pretended that I did not hear him.