The declaration of war found Graham desperately unhappy. Natalie held
him rigidly to his promise, but it is doubtful if Natalie alone could
have kept, him out of the army. Marion was using her influence, too! She
held him by alternating between almost agreeing to runaway marriage and
threats of breaking the engagement if he went to war. She had tacitly
agreed to play Natalie's game, and she was doing it.
Graham did not analyze his own misery. What he said to himself was that
he was making a mess of things. Life, which had seemed to be a simple
thing, compounded of work and play, had become involved, difficult and
wretched.
Some times he watched Clayton almost with envy. He seemed so sure of
himself; he was so poised, so calm, so strong. And he wondered if
there had been a tumultuous youth behind the quiet of his maturity.
He compared the even course of Clayton's days, his work, his club, the
immaculate orderliness of his life, with his own disordered existence.
He was hedged about with women. Wherever he turned, they obtruded
themselves. He made plans and women brushed them aside. He tried to live
his life, and women stepped in and lived it for him. His mother, Marion,
Anna Klein. Even Delight, with her friendship always overclouded with
disapproval. Wherever he turned, a woman stood in the way. Yet he could
not do without them. He needed them even while he resented them.
Then, gradually, into his self-engrossment there penetrated a conviction
that all was not well between his father and his mother. He had always
taken them for granted much as he did the house and the servants. In his
brief vacations during his college days they had agreed or disagreed,
amicably enough. He had considered, in those days, that life was a
very simple thing. People married and lived together. Marriage, he
considered, was rather the end of things.
But he was older now, and he knew that marriage was a beginning and not
an end. It did not change people fundamentally. It only changed their
habits.
His discovery that his father and mother differed about the war was
the first of other discoveries; that they differed about him; that they
differed about many matters; that, indeed, they had no common ground at
all on which to meet; between them, although Graham did not put it that
way, was a No-Man's Land strewn with dead happiness, lost desires, and
the wreckage of years of dissension.
It was incredible to Graham that he should ever reach the forties, but
he wondered some times if all of life was either looking forward or
looking back. And it seemed to him rather tragic that for Clayton, who
still looked like a boy, there should be nothing but his day at the
mill, his silent evening at home, or some stodgy dinner-party where the
women were all middle-aged, and the other men a trifle corpulent.