II
“I get awfully fed up with it,” said Cicily.
“With what?” asked Jane.
“With this,” said Cicily.
Jane’s eyes followed her daughter’s around the drawing-room of the little French farmhouse. It was a charming room. It was in perfect order. The May sunshine was streaming in over the yellow jonquils and white narcissus of the window-boxes. Streaming in over the pale, plain rug, lighting the ivory walls, glinting here and there on the gold frame of an antique mirror, the rim of a clear glass bowl, the smooth, polished surfaces of the few old pieces of French furniture with which the room was sparsely furnished. The abrupt dark eyes of a Marie Laurencin over the fireplace met Jane’s enigmatically. That opal-tinted canvas was Cicily’s most cherished possession. Jane, herself, thought it very queer. The enigma of those chocolate eyes set in that pale blank face always made her feel a trifle uncomfortable. The lips were cruel, she thought. Nevertheless, the room was charming.
“I don’t know why you should,” she said slowly. “It’s all so nice.”
“It’s nice enough,” said Cicily vaguely. Then added honestly, after a brief pause, “It’s just the way I like it, really. Only—”
“Only what?” said Jane gently.
“Only nothing ever happens in it,” said Cicily with sudden emphasis. “Do you know what I mean, Mumsy? Nothing ever happens to me. I sometimes feel as if these walls were just waiting to see something happen. Something ought to happen in a room as charming as this. I feel just that way about everything, Mumsy—about my clothes and the way I look and all the trouble I take about the maids and the meals and the children. I’m everlastingly setting the stage, but the drama never transpires. I’d like a little bit of drama, Mumsy. Something nice and unexpected and exciting. Something different. Before I’m too old to enjoy it.”
The last sentence dispelled Jane’s sense of rising uneasiness with its touch of comic relief.
“You’re twenty-eight, Cicily,” she said, smiling.
“I know,” said Cicily, “but I’ve been married for nine years. I may be married for forty more. Am I just going to keep house in Lakewood for forty years? Keep house and play bridge and go in town to dinner and have people out for Sunday luncheon—the same people, Mumsy—until I grow old and grey-headed—too old even to want anything different—” She broke off abruptly.
Jane considered her rather solemnly for a moment in silence. Then, “Life’s like that, Cicily,” she said.
“Not all lives,” said Cicily. “There’s Jenny—Jenny’s only three years younger than I am. She isn’t really happy, I think, Mumsy, but at least she’s free. She could light out if she wanted to—she will some day, if she doesn’t marry—and do almost anything. Make the world her oyster. But my life’s set. I signed on the dotted line before I was old enough to know what I was doing. I don’t mean that I really regret it, Mumsy—Jack’s always been sweet to me and I love my children—I want to have more children—but just the same—” Cicily rose uneasily from her little French armchair and stood staring out into the afternoon sunshine over the white and yellow heads of the jonquils and narcissus. “Oh, I don’t know what I want! Just girlhood over again, I guess. Just something else than this little front yard with the road to the station going by beyond the privet hedge, and Jack coming home from the five-fifty with a quart of gin in his pocket for a dinner-party full of people I wouldn’t care if I never saw again—” She broke off once more and continued to stare moodily out into the pleasant May sunshine.
Jane watched the aureole of her dandelion hair a moment in silence. Then, “Well, Jack brings home the gin—that’s something,” she ventured. She felt her attempt at the light touch was a trifle strained, however.
Cicily turned to face her.
“Yes,” she said. “He brings home the gin and he brings home the bacon, and he brings home a toy for the children he bought in the Northwestern Station. He adores the children and he loves me, but honestly, Mumsy, it’s years since he got any kick out of marriage. He takes it as a matter of course. He takes me as a matter of course. He never complains, but he hates Dad’s bank, and he’s just as bored with suburban gin as I am. I tell you, Mumsy, the excitement has gone out of things for Jack, too. But he signed on the dotted line and he sticks by his bargain. And he’s only thirty-one—with forty years ahead of him! That’s rather grim, isn’t it? I don’t know, of course, if he’s ever realized just how grim it is—”
Again Cicily lapsed into silence. She threw herself despondently back in her armchair. “Don’t you think it’s funny, Mumsy, the things you never discuss with your own husband?” Then, as Jane did not reply, “Perhaps you did, though. I can’t imagine anyone having any inhibitions with Dad.”
Jane met her daughter’s eyes for a moment in silence. She hoped her own were as enigmatic as those of the Marie Laurencin over the fireplace. She could not bring herself to discuss Stephen, even with Cicily.
“Don’t worry about those inhibitions,” she said presently. “For love creates them. Love and fear, which always go hand in hand. When you love people, you are always really afraid—afraid of hurting them, afraid of disillusioning them, afraid of the spoken word which may upset the apple cart. Respect for the spoken word, Cicily, is the greatest safeguard in life against catastrophe.”
Cicily’s wide blue eyes were rather uncomprehending.
“Just the same I’d like to break down the barriers. I’d like to be with Jack the way I used to be—happy and free and wild. Not thinking, not considering. But I guess you can never feel that way twice—about the same person that is—”
The sound of the front door closing broke in on Cicily’s last perilous words. They were still trembling on the circumambient air when Jack, hat in hand, stood on the threshold.
“Hello, Aunt Jane!” he said. His friendly, pale blue eyes were twinkling cheerfully. “I stopped at the garage in the village, Cicily, to see what was wrong with the Chrysler. They say you stripped those gears again. I wish—”
A faint frown of irritation deepened on Cicily’s white brow.
“Did you call up Field’s about that bill?” she said. Then to Jane, “Aunt Isabel always gets her account mixed up with ours.”
“I did,” said Jack. “But it wasn’t Mother this time. It was your return credits. On the last day of every month, Aunt Jane, Cicily has half the merchandise in the store waiting in our front hall to be called for.”
He advanced to the armchair as he spoke and kissed Cicily’s pink cheek, a trifle absentmindedly.
“Where are the kids?”
“Eating supper,” said Cicily. “We’re dining out.”
Jane rose. She felt incredibly depressed by this little conjugal colloquy. As she walked slowly home over the suburban sidewalks, past rows and rows of little brick and wood and stucco houses, temples of domesticity enshrined, this loveliest, leafy season of the year, in flowering lilacs and apple trees in bloom, she reflected stoically that marriage was, of course, like that. The first fine careless rapture was bound to go. Something else came—something else took its place—something you held as your most priceless possession by the time you were fifty. Nevertheless, it was disconcerting to have seen it so clearly happening to the next generation. It was disconcerting to know, without peradventure of a doubt, that, to cheerfully smiling, subconsciously philosophic Jack, Cicily had come to look only like Cicily.