Things by Alice Duer Miller - HTML preview

PLEASE NOTE: This is an HTML preview only and some elements such as links or page numbers may be incorrect.
Download the book in PDF, ePub, Kindle for a complete version.

 

II

HE had arrived on a Friday, and on Sunday at five—things were apt to happen by a schedule in the Royce household—he was to give his report on Celia.

He entered the library—the spot designated by Mrs. Royce—by one door as Churchley, the butler, came in at the other to serve tea.

The dark, shining little table was brought out, noiselessly opened, covered with a cloth—the wrong cloth, Mrs. Royce indicated. Churchley whisked away and returned incredibly quickly with the right one. The tray, weighted with silver and blossoming with the saffron flame of the tea-kettle, was next put before her, and then another little structure of shelves was set at her right hand. Her eye fell on this.

“I said brown-bread toast, Churchley.” The man murmured and again whisked away.

All this time Despard had not sat down, although between orders Mrs. Royce had more than once urged him to do so. He stood, having shut the door behind him, leaning the point of his shoulder against the wall.

Utterly undisturbed by his calm eyes fixed upon her, Mrs. Royce said:

“Poor Churchley, he has been with us for six years, but I’m afraid I can’t keep him. He forgets everything.”

“He’s on the edge of a nervous breakdown,” answered Despard coolly, and he added: “The housemaid is a pronounced neurasthenic. As for your daughter——”

“Ah, Celia, poor, dear child! Must we send her away?” her mother asked, but before the doctor had time to answer, Churchley, by a miracle of celerity, again entered, this time bearing toast of the desired complexion.

After he had finally disappeared, Mrs. Royce busied herself with flame and kettle and tea-caddy before she repeated her question, and her voice had in it a faint sediment of these preoccupations:

“I hope you do not think it necessary to send Celia away, Dr. Despard?”

He drew a chair forward and sat down. “No, Mrs. Royce,” he said; “I think it necessary to send you away.”

“Me?”

He bowed.

“But my health is excellent. Oh, I see,” she smiled. “My husband has been talking to you about my responsibilities. Yes, they are great, but one is given strength to do what is required of one. I shall not have to desert my post. I am strong.”

“I know you are strong, Mrs. Royce,” said he, “but you are the cause of weakness in others. We need not multiply examples: your daughter, the governess, Churchley——”

She broke in—“Of course, I admit their weakness. But don’t you see how I protect and support them? How could you imagine that I was the cause?”

“Isn’t it suggestive that practically every one with whom you come in contact——”

“My husband,” she retorted, quoting an instance against him.

“Your husband has great natural calm, and spends eight hours a day out of the house. You have made this home, this really wonderful home, for those you love. No one admires the achievement more than I do. But you have sacrificed too much of yourself in doing it; and I’m not speaking of your physical strength. In this library, in which you are so fond of sitting, how many books have you ever read?”

“I was a great reader as a girl,” she answered.

“Which of these have you read in the last ten years?”

She murmured that he perhaps hardly understood the demands upon her time.

“You never read. You can’t,” he returned. “Since my first hour here I have been watching you, not your daughter. Her case is simple enough. You don’t read, Mrs. Royce, not because you have no time, but because you have no concentration. This is one of the many sacrifices you have made to your household—a serious one, and we must face the results. I have watched you each day carrying the morning papers about with you until evening, and then, if you read the headlines, it is as much as you can accomplish.”

She had been staring at him as though in a trance, but now she came to, with a laugh.

“My dear Dr. Despard,” she said, “if you were the mother of four children and the head——”

He held up his hand. “You must let me finish,” he said. “You have made this home, and you administer it with consummate ability; and yet no one is really happy in it, least of all yourself. Why? Well, I need not remind you that no one is made happy merely by things. Some continuity of inner life is absolutely necessary, not only to happiness but to health. Remember, I am speaking as a nerve specialist. You, Mrs. Royce, are an enemy to continuity. You dispel concentration as a rock dispels a wave. Even I find no little difficulty, when in your presence, in pursuing a consecutive train of thought, and, as for you yourself, such a thing has long been impossible for you. Even now, on this matter so immensely important to you, you have not been able to give me your undivided attention. Other facts have kept coming up in your consciousness—that a bell rang somewhere; that the hearth has not been swept up. Acutely aware as I am of your point of view, these breaks in your attention have been breaks in mine, too; but I have been able to overcome them, and follow my ideas to the end, because I have been trained to do so, and, besides, I’ve been here only two days. In two days more I would not answer for myself. I should begin to see things, things, things, and to believe that all life was merely a question of arrangements. Even your religion, Mrs. Royce, in which most people find some continuity, is a question of things—of Sunday-schools and altar decoration. That poor little clergyman who lunched here to-day—he came emanating a certain spiritual peace; but he went away crushed by your poor opinion of him as an executive. At this moment he is probably breaking up the current of his life by a conscientious attention to things.”

Deeply protesting as she was in her heart, something in his hard, clear look kept her silent, and he went on:

“Your daughter is—to use a big word—an intellectual. For the time being she is interested only in things of the mind. New ideas, books, poetry are the great adventures of life to her at present. To all this you are an obstructionist——”

“There, at least, you are utterly at fault,” cried the poor lady, with a passion she had not known for years. “I have done everything in my power to help. I am very ambitious in regard to my children’s education. Their schools, their teachers——”

“Ay,” said Despard, “you have set out the counters for them but you have never let them play the game. You were interested in making the arrangements, but you had no interest at all in the state of mind which could take advantage of them. Your daughter knows, not only that you take no thought for such matters yourself, but that every phase of your contact with her demands her attention for other matters—clothes, manners, hours, and dates. You have no respect for her preoccupations. Not once, not twice, but fifty times a day, you interrupt her, with a caress, or an errand, or more often a reproof. Yesterday, when she was obviously absorbed in reading that bit of verse to her father, you sent her up-stairs to change her shoes——”

“They were wet; she would have caught cold.”

“If you had listened you would have seen she had only four more lines to read. You do all this, not only when she is in your domain, at meals and in the drawing-room, but you follow her to her own room and go in without knocking. I venture to say that that child works at night, for the simple reason that to work in this house during the daytime is impossible.”

“Really,” said Mrs. Royce, “with the best will in the world I do not understand you. Celia’s friends sometimes seem to feel that I ought to neglect her manners and pronunciation, ought to allow her to become selfish and self-centred, so that she may—” She broke off as if words failed her. “But I have never heard a grown person suggest that such a course would be right.”

“Ask your clergyman what is right,” answered Despard. “I am here to tell you what is healthy; I am here to prescribe. Now, notice, please, I do not tell you to change. I don’t think you could. The reactions have taken place too many times. I tell you to go away. We can call it a rest cure. You shall have beautiful surroundings, comfort, and, above all that leisure that recent years have failed to give you. In return I shall ask you to concentrate your mind for a certain number of hours each day.”

“You talk,” she cried bitterly, “as if I enjoyed the treadmill of my daily life.”

“You have unusual executive ability, and most of us enjoy the use of our powers.”

“The best refutation of all that you have said is that I am eager to go,” she returned. “Ah, I cannot tell you how inviting such a prospect seems to me—not to order dinner, not to have to decide and arrange for every one, not to be the pivot of the whole structure. Ah, Dr. Despard, I would so gladly go, but——”

“But?”

“But what would happen to my family without me?”

“They must try looking out for themselves,” he answered. He glanced at his watch, for he was to take a train that afternoon; and Mrs. Royce collected herself enough to touch the bell—it always hung within tempting reach of her hand—and gave Churchley orders to send for the motor and have the doctor’s bags brought down.

During this interval Despard walked to the window and stood looking out. It is not always so easy to apply the knife psychologically as physically. He wondered if he could have been more gentle and equally effective. As he stood there Celia came sauntering across the lawn, her head bent, her hands deep in the pockets of an enveloping dun-colored coat. The brow which had first seemed sulky to him appeared now simply thoughtful.