It was not the prospect of Nelly’s giving him a child that brought Richard nearer to her, it was the effect upon him of America. Like some great wedge of iron this tremendous new world, bored its way through the thick sensuousness of his nature and laid his deeper instincts bare. It was a process of spiritual surgery, painful but liberating. There were no lovely fields or leafy lanes here in Manhattan; as he trod its hot pavements and passed down its echoing canyons of iron and stone he was compelled to fall back upon his own soul for vision and illumination. Nelly’s ways and Nelly’s feelings and Nelly’s little enjoyments became a sort of oasis to him in a stern stark wilderness where he wandered alone, stripped and defenceless.
Things were thus arranging themselves for all these three persons when an event occurred which changed everything.
Richard received word from Paris to the effect that his publisher there had gone bankrupt, leaving him without hope of any further income until arrangements could be made with some other house.
It became necessary that he should at once find work; for he had already spent what he had saved.
While he was looking for work he was compelled to borrow a couple of hundred dollars from Canyot. This loan was the beginning of evil, for by making him his rival’s financial debtor it introduced a new element into their relations full of dangerous possibilities. Insensibly he began to hate the successful painter as he had never hated him before. He threw out malicious and carping observations when Nelly went to see him. He got into the habit of grudging her her uptown visits. He vented his feeling of humiliation by all manner of sarcasms upon ‘successful people who cater to the American taste’.
The money that had passed into his hands became a slow poison, ruining the new understanding between himself and his wife. He brooded gloomily and morosely upon his situation as he went about looking for a job. He felt himself to be a failure. He was tempted to borrow more money and clear off to Paris; but he did not dare to suggest so drastic a move.
The late summer was a bad time in which to look for work. The pitiless sunshine made those vain interviews with journalistic underlings in stuffy offices peculiarly depressing.
Week after week passed; in spite of rigid economy the two hundred dollars ebbed away, and still Richard had found no job. Canyot kept pressing him to accept another loan. Once, to his unspeakable chagrin, he found that Nelly had accepted a cheque for fifty dollars from her friend. This incident led to the first quarrel between them that had occurred since they landed. The fierce manner in which the girl, when teased by his reproaches, cried out, ‘My child shall not be starved while Robert has a penny to give him!’ pierced the skin of his deepest pride. To revenge himself on her he deliberately reduced his own diet to an absurd minimum, refusing meat and milk and eggs and living almost entirely upon bread and tea. The result of this was that he began to suffer from acute dyspepsia which was aggravated by his miserable and hopeless hunt for work.
He found that he had overrated his reputation as a writer. In America he was practically unknown; the French estimation of his critical power amounted to almost nothing with the New York publishers and newspapers.
His great poetic purpose upon the substance of which, both in manner and in matter, that first month in America had produced a profound change, pruning it of accessories and giving it a sterner, more drastic tone, was now completely laid aside. He began to curse the day he had ever entered upon this too ambitious undertaking. He began to regret the light facility and the easily won local fame of his pre-war achievements. He felt himself a charlatan and a fraud; was almost tempted to destroy every word he had written under the stress of his new spiritual purpose. He felt as though he had completely deceived himself as to its quality.
At last he did succeed in finding something. It was not much of an opening, considering his former Paris reputation and his recent poetic schemes; but it was something — a ledge to cling to, a shelf of rock to hold by, in this tidal wave of adversity.
It was in the middle of September when he found it; an engagement with a newly organized magazine called The Mitre for which he had to furnish weekly articles upon the more definitely Catholic writers and poets of Europe. His salary amounted to forty dollars a week; but with the rent they had to pay for their apartment, this meant a very rigid economy. It meant, as a matter of fact, that he continued to underfeed himself so as to give his wife as little excuse as possible to accept any further help from the painter.
He went each day to the office and did his work there — though he might have worked at home — partly because he found it increasingly difficult to concentrate his thoughts in their small apartment, and partly to avoid the irritation of being harassed by his wife on account of his fantastic experiments in diet.
The result of this was that Nelly, being lonely and restless at home, resorted more and more to Canyot’s studio. By gradual degrees the custom arose that she should prepare for the young man and for herself a substantial lunch in his ‘kitchenette’ while he worked at his pictures.
These picnic lunches in the painter’s apartments were some of the happiest hours Nelly knew in those days and she solaced her conscience for accepting them by posing for him in various draperies during the afternoon.
Her evening meals with Richard grew more and more gloomy; for though she forced him to share certain little dishes which she took a pride in making, he never would really eat enough; and his persistency in this aggravating mania became a constant cause of friction between them, which was not lessened by his knowledge that in spite of such economy she still continued to accept Canyot’s help.
Things went on in this unsatisfactory manner till the end of September, the girl drifting further and further away from him and concentrating all the attention that was not bestowed on Canyot upon the care and protection of the new life that was germinating within her.
It was a curious thing that this same new life, which had not drawn Richard as strongly towards her as it should have done, did not draw her either towards him.
It almost seemed, as time went on, as though it estranged her from him. It certainly absorbed her to such a degree that she could not make the effort to overcome his nervous irritability or to put an end to this ruining of his digestion by ill-chosen food.
She was touched and grateful to him for the way he stinted himself in his favourite luxury of cigarettes and she was distressed and worried to see him grow constantly thinner and older-looking. She seemed to live in these days in a self-concentrated dream, so that it was only the outside of her mind, as it were, that stirred at all. The more passionate elements in her were all taken up and exhausted in the slow process of maternity.
She could not have described to anyone what she felt in her inmost heart all this while. What was happening to her mentally was happening in some deep subconscious region out of reach altogether of any intelligible analysis. To her conscious self her attitude to Richard remained unchanged; and she was only dreamily and faintly aware that she regarded his coming and going with an abstracted eye, taking his presence for granted, like a background that varied slightly in colour but was always there.
It seemed as though the tenacious unscrupulous egoism of that new life was asserting its blind formidable unconscious will, careless as to whom it sacrificed, careless as to the spiritual havoc it caused, careless as to the human agencies to which it owed its being; asserting its will, as it rose out of the unfathomable reservoirs and groped forward towards the light, asserting its will, as it drew its nourishment from the body that protected it, isolating that body and treating the consciousness that animated that body as of no account at all save as it answered to its physical needs.