Alexanders Bridge | Page 6

a man much. You work like the
devil and think you're getting on, and suddenly you discover that
you've only been getting yourself tied up. A million details drink you
dry. Your life keeps going for things you don't want, and all the while
you are being built alive into a social structure you don't care a rap
about. I sometimes wonder what sort of chap I'd have been if I hadn't
been this sort; I want to go and live out his potentialities, too. I haven't
forgotten that there are birds in the bushes."
Bartley stopped and sat frowning into the fire, his shoulders thrust
forward as if he were about to spring at something. Wilson watched
him, wondering. His old pupil always stimulated him at first, and then
vastly wearied him. The machinery was always pounding away in this
man, and Wilson preferred companions of a more reflective habit of

mind. He could not help feeling that there were unreasoning and
unreasonable activities going on in Alexander all the while; that even
after dinner, when most men achieve a decent impersonality, Bartley
had merely closed the door of the engine-room and come up for an
airing. The machinery itself was still pounding on. Bartley's abstraction
and Wilson's reflections were cut short by a rustle at the door, and
almost before they could rise Mrs. Alexander was standing by the
hearth. Alexander brought a chair for her, but she shook her head.
"No, dear, thank you. I only came in to see whether you and Professor
Wilson were quite comfortable. I am going down to the music-room."
"Why not practice here? Wilson and I are growing very dull. We are
tired of talk."
"Yes, I beg you, Mrs. Alexander," Wilson began, but he got no further.
"Why, certainly, if you won't find me too noisy. I am working on the
Schumann `Carnival,' and, though I don't practice a great many hours, I
am very methodical," Mrs. Alexander explained, as she crossed to an
upright piano that stood at the back of the room, near the windows.
Wilson followed, and, having seen her seated, dropped into a chair
behind her. She played brilliantly and with great musical feeling.
Wilson could not imagine her permitting herself to do anything badly,
but he was surprised at the cleanness of her execution. He wondered
how a woman with so many duties had managed to keep herself up to a
standard really professional. It must take a great deal of time, certainly,
and Bartley must take a great deal of time. Wilson reflected that he had
never before known a woman who had been able, for any considerable
while, to support both a personal and an intellectual passion. Sitting
behind her, he watched her with perplexed admiration, shading his eyes
with his hand. In her dinner dress she looked even younger than in
street clothes, and, for all her composure and self-sufficiency, she
seemed to him strangely alert and vibrating, as if in her, too, there were
something never altogether at rest. He felt that he knew pretty much
what she demanded in people and what she demanded from life, and he
wondered how she squared Bartley. After ten years she must know him;

and however one took him, however much one admired him, one had to
admit that he simply wouldn't square. He was a natural force, certainly,
but beyond that, Wilson felt, he was not anything very really or for
very long at a time.
Wilson glanced toward the fire, where Bartley's profile was still
wreathed in cigar smoke that curled up more and more slowly. His
shoulders were sunk deep in the cushions and one hand hung large and
passive over the arm of his chair. He had slipped on a purple velvet
smoking-coat. His wife, Wilson surmised, had chosen it. She was
clearly very proud of his good looks and his fine color. But, with the
glow of an immediate interest gone out of it, the engineer's face looked
tired, even a little haggard. The three lines in his forehead, directly
above the nose, deepened as he sat thinking, and his powerful head
drooped forward heavily. Although Alexander was only forty-three,
Wilson thought that beneath his vigorous color he detected the dulling
weariness of on-coming middle age.
The next afternoon, at the hour when the river was beginning to redden
under the declining sun, Wilson again found himself facing Mrs.
Alexander at the tea-table in the library.
"Well," he remarked, when he was bidden to give an account of himself,
"there was a long morning with the psychologists, luncheon with
Bartley at his club, more psychologists, and here I am. I've looked
forward to this hour all day."
Mrs. Alexander smiled at him across the vapor from the kettle. "And do
you