Triumph of the Egg, and Other Stories eBook

“And now you see I am married and everything is all right.  My marriage is to me a very beautiful fact.  If you were to say that my marriage is not a happy one I could call you a liar and be speaking the absolute truth.  I have tried to tell you about this other woman.  There is a kind of relief in speaking of her.  I have never done it before.  I wonder why I was so silly as to be afraid that I would give you the impression I am not in love with my wife.  If I did not instinctively trust your understanding I would not have spoken.  As the matter stands I have a little stirred myself up.  To-night I shall think of the other woman.  That sometimes occurs.  It will happen after I have gone to bed.  My wife sleeps in the next room to mine and the door is always left open.  There will be a moon to-night, and when there is a moon long streaks of light fall on her bed.  I shall awake at midnight to-night.  She will be lying asleep with one arm thrown over her head.

“What is it that I am now talking about?  A man does not speak of his wife lying in bed.  What I am trying to say is that, because of this talk, I shall think of the other woman to-night.  My thoughts will not take the form they did during the week before I was married.  I will wonder what has become of the woman.  For a moment I will again feel myself holding her close.  I will think that for an hour I was closer to her than I have ever been to anyone else.  Then I will think of the time when I will be as close as that to my wife.  She is still, you see, an awakening woman.  For a moment I will close my eyes and the quick, shrewd, determined eyes of that other woman will look into mine.  My head will swim and then I will quickly open my eyes and see again the dear woman with whom I have undertaken to live out my life.  Then I will sleep and when I awake in the morning it will be as it was that evening when I walked out of my dark apartment after having had the most notable experience of my life.  What I mean to say, you understand is that, for me, when I awake, the other woman will be utterly gone.”

THE EGG

My father was, I am sure, intended by nature to be a cheerful, kindly man.  Until he was thirty-four years old he worked as a farm-hand for a man named Thomas Butterworth whose place lay near the town of Bidwell, Ohio.  He had then a horse of his own and on Saturday evenings drove into town to spend a few hours in social intercourse with other farm-hands.  In town he drank several glasses of beer and stood about in Ben Head’s saloon—­crowded on Saturday evenings with visiting farm-hands.  Songs were sung and glasses thumped on the bar.  At ten o’clock father drove home along a lonely country road, made his horse comfortable for the night and himself went to bed, quite happy in his position in life.  He had at that time no notion of trying to rise in the world.

It was in the spring of his thirty-fifth year that father married my mother, then a country school-teacher, and in the following spring I came wriggling and crying into the world.  Something happened to the two people.  They became ambitious.  The American passion for getting up in the world took possession of them.