And above it all there rose the desire to escape, to be freed from it forever. "If he had never seen me!" she cried, passionately. "If he had never seen me!" Then colorless adumbrations of her own past blocked her horizon—and she confronted the ashes of her aspirations. She saw those illuminated dreams of her girlhood—the ideals which had crumbled at the corroding touch of care. She saw the demand for power which had been thwarted, the ambitions which had been undone, the cry for life more abundant which had been forced back upon her quivering lips. She saw herself walking day after day with empty arms along the way she had carried the child. She saw herself a drag upon her own existence and upon the existence of the man for whom she thought a love she had no power to feel. She saw the stretch of those monotonous and neutral-toned years, saw the sordid fight for bread, saw her sense of joy and beauty blunted, saw the masculine brain that was fitted to grasp universal laws decaying in the atmosphere of vulgar toil. And, woven and interwoven in her thoughts, was the knowledge that the affection to be invigorated by deprivations and to rise triumphant over poverty was not hers—that the love which in happier surroundings might have showninviolable, which the great calamities of life might have left unassailed, had grown gray in the round of unsatisfied desires and victorious commonplaces. In the days to come, would not the jarring notes of their natures be exaggerated, the sympathetic ones suppressed? When old age came, as come it surely would, what would remain to them save a memory of discords and a present of unfulfilment? Was not death itself preferable to death in life?
Down on the sidewalk below a ragged urchin was turning somersaults in the shade. Suddenly, with a howl of delight, he pounced upon a half-rotten peach which a passer-by had thrown into the gutter. Mariana smiled faintly, left the fire-escape, and went in-doors.
A week later they gave up The Gotham and moved into the room on Fourth Street. Algarcife made an attempt to sell the greater part of his library before moving, but the price offered was merely nominal, and at the last moment his heart misgave him. So he hired a dilapidated van, and the books were transported to the new lodgings and stacked along the south wall.
When the hour came for their departure, it was with a feeling of despair that he took Mariana's bag and descended for the last time the steps of The Gotham. A black finality seemed looming beyond their destination.
At the entrance, Mr. Nevins, with tears in his eyes, grasped Anthony's hand, and Miss Ramsey fell upon Mariana's neck.
Mariana laughed a little desperately.
"It reminds me of the time I saw a family move to the poor-house," she said; "only their friends weren't quite so affectionate."
"But you will come back," insisted Mr. Nevins. "Surely you will come back when things look a little brighter."
"Which will be when the flames of spontaneous combustion illuminate this planet," remarked Ardly, cynically, but his eyes were sad as they rested upon Mariana.
"Or when a relation dies," said Mr. Nevins.
"How we shall miss you!" said Miss Ramsey.
Here Mr. Paul, who had sauntered up as if by chance, drew Algarcife aside.
"If you had only told me," he said, dryly. "I have a few thousands in bank, and I—"
Anthony caught his hand, but his voice was choked and he could only shake his head. Then Mariana said good-bye, and they left the house and ascended the steps to the platform of the elevated road.
As Mariana took her seat, she turned to the window and watched the little fire-escape upon the fourth story until The Gotham was lost to sight. Then she raised her veil and wiped a tear-drop from her eyelashes.
When the door was unlocked and she entered the new room, a fit of restlessness seized her. The barrenness of existence struck her with the force of a blow, and, with a swift return of impulse, she cried out in rebellion. The stale odor of cooking, which rose from the apartment below, the dustiness of the floor, the blackened ceiling, the hard and unyielding bed, gave her a convulsive shudder.
"I cannot bear it," she said. "I cannot bear it."
Algarcife left the window, where he had been standing, and came towards her. Between himself and Mariana a constraint had been growing, and he recalled suddenly the fact that their old warmth of intercourse had chilled into an indifferent reserve.
"It is bad," he said. "I am very sorry."
Mariana took off her hat and veil and laid them in one of the bureau drawers. The drawer creaked as she opened it, and the sound jarred upon Anthony'soverwrought sensitiveness. He noticed suddenly that Mariana's expression had grown querulous, and that she had ceased to wear her hair becomingly.
"You can hardly think that I enjoy it," he added. "An existence composed of two-thirds nerves and one-third caffeine is hardly rose-color."
He looked gray and haggard, and the hand which he raised trembled slightly.
"Hardly," returned Mariana, shortly.
Both felt an instinctive desire to vent their wretchedness in words, and yet each felt an almost passionate pity for the other. The very pity emphasized the aggravation from which they suffered, and it was by a process of reflex action that, when goaded by thoughts of each other, they would strike out recklessly.
"No," repeated Mariana; "but it seems to be a case where two, instead of lessening the misery, increase the discomforts."
Immediately after supper she went to bed, tossing restlessly for hours because the mattress was uneven, the sheets coarse, and the lamp, by which Anthony worked, shining in her face.
When she finally fell asleep, it was with a sob of revolt.
Mariana's restlessness did not pass with the passing days. It developed until it gathered the force of a malady, and she lived in persistent movement, as if impelled by an invisible lash. As her aversion to their lodgings became more pronounced, her powers of endurance increased, and through the long, hot days she was rarely in-doors. Algarcife often wondered where she spent the morning and afternoon hours, but the constraint between them had strengthened, and he did not ask her. When breakfast was over, he would see her put on her hat, take her shabby black parasol, and go out into the street. At luncheon she would return, looking flushed and warm, as if from exercise in the summer sun; but when they had risen from the table she would move uneasily about, until, at last, she would turn in desperation and go out again. He seldom sought to detain her. Indeed, her absence was almost a relief, and he found it less difficult to work when the silence was unbroken by impetuous footsteps and the rustle of skirts.
Once he said: "It is too hot for you this afternoon."
And she answered: "No, I will go to a square."
He was silent, and she left in sudden haste.
That she walked miles in that fearful weather, driven on by sheer inability to rest, he realized pityingly. Occasionally he would go to the window as she descended the stairs, and the sight of the fragile, black-robed figure, making its rapid way through the fierce sunshine, would cause him a spasmodic contraction ofpain. And yet the remembrance of her indifference would chill the words with which he greeted her return, and the knowledge that her heart had passed from him and was straining towards the outside world would veil his mental suffering in an assumption of pride. That Mariana's withered desires for the fulness of life had grown green again, he could but know. He had seen the agony inflicted upon her by every trivial detail of their lives—by the poorly cooked food, by the fly-specks upon the dishes, by the absence of a hundred superficial refinements. He had seen her flinch at the odors of stale vegetables, and set her teeth at the grating voices of the other lodgers. He had heard her moans in the night, rising from a wail for the small comforts of life to a wail for the child she had lost. He had marked every added line about her mouth, every bitter word that fell from her lips. And yet he had gone unswervingly on his way, and she had not known, but had thought him as pulseless to her presence as she to his.
"I am late," she said one day in September, coming in with more brightness than usual. "Have you had luncheon?"
"I waited for you," responded Anthony.
As she laid aside a roll of music she carried, he saw that it was the score of a light opera.
"You have been to Signor Morani's?" he asked.
"Yes, I have been taking lessons again."
Anthony glanced dubiously round.
"And you have no piano," he said. "You will miss it."
Mariana shook her head, and pushed away her tea with a gesture of disgust. "But I practise at Signor Morani's. He lets me use one of his rooms."
He noticed that she spoke cheerfully, and that a wave of her lost freshness had returned to her face. The instantaneous effect of her moods upon her appearancewas an ever-recurring surprise to him. It was as if, by the play of her features, she unconsciously translated feeling into expression.
In a moment she spoke again.
"It is a part that I have been studying," she continued, "and I must commit the words to memory."
He picked it up. It was a serio-comic opera, entitled, "La Sorcière."
"Morani says that my voice has developed during the long rest. He was surprised when I sang."
"Was he?" asked Anthony, absently. He was wondering dully what would be the end of Mariana's ambitions—if there was any end for ambitions other than obliteration. Had fate anything to offer more durable than dust and ashes?
Mariana glanced about her and her face clouded. "It is that horrible cabbage again," she complained. "I believe those people down-stairs do nothing but fry cabbage. It makes me ill."
Anthony was recalled from his abstraction with a sense of annoyance.
"It seems to me," he retorted, sharply, "that, in our condition, to worry over a grievance of that order would be refreshing—when one's heels are hanging over the verge of starvation, it is a relief to be allowed to smell some one else's dinner."
"That depends upon what the dinner consists of," Mariana rejoined. "I may be reduced to living on dry bread, but I hope you will spare me the fried cabbage."
"You speak as if I had reduced you to this state for my own gratification." His temper was getting the better of him, and, with a snap, he set his teeth and was silent.
The mental distress, the stimulants he had used to spur a jaded brain into action, and his failing health had left him a prey to anger. An unexpected interruption, a jarring sound, a trivial mishap, were sufficientto cause him an outburst from which he often saved himself by flight.
Mariana replied tartly.
"I am sure I don't see how my objection to living upon fried cabbage could reflect upon you. I did not know you cared for it."
"You know I do not. But I don't see why you should make a fuss about a wholesome article of food."
"It is not wholesome. It is exceedingly indigestible."
"At any rate, it belongs to your neighbors. You aren't forced to eat it."
"No, but you implied that the time would come when I'd be glad to. I merely said it never would."
"Then let the cabbage be damned," said Algarcife.
"Gladly," responded Mariana, and they said no more.
Algarcife selected a manuscript from his desk and went out. He felt as if his nerves had quickened into ramifying wires through which a current of electricity was passing. He was not angry with Mariana. He was angry with no one, but he was racked by the agony of diseased sensibilities, and, though rationally he endeavored to be sympathetic in his bearing to his wife, his rational nature seemed ploughed by the press of his nerves, and for the first time in his life he found self-restraint beyond his grasp.
As he ascended the steps of the newspaper office where he was to leave the manuscript, he ran against a man whom he knew and who stared at him in astonishment.
"My God, Algarcife, you are a ghost! What have you been doing?"
"Wrestling with Providence," returned Algarcife, shortly. "Hardly a becoming job."
"Well, take my advice and leave off at the first round. If you don't mind the comparison, you beara close resemblance to that Egyptian mummy in the museum."
"No doubt. But that Egyptian has a damned sight the best of it. He lived three thousand years ago."
And he passed on.
It was several nights after this that he started from a heavy sleep to find that Mariana had left his side. Rising upon his elbow, he glanced about the room, and saw her white-robed form revealed in nebulous indistinctness against the open window. Her head was resting upon her clasped hands and she was looking out into the night.
"Mariana," he said.
Her voice came with a muffled sound from the obscurity.
"Yes."
"What are you doing?"
The white figure stirred slightly.
"Thinking," she answered.
"Don't think. It is a confounded mistake. Go to sleep."
"I can't sleep. It is so hot."
"Lie down and I will fan you."
"No."
Algarcife turned over wearily, and for a time there was silence.
Suddenly Mariana spoke, her voice wavering a little.
"Anthony—are you asleep?"
"No."
Again she was silent, and again her voice wavered as it rose.
"I have been thinking about—about how poor we are. Will it ever be better?"
"I cannot say. Don't think of it?"
"But I must think of it. I am trying to find a way out of it. Is there any way?"
"None that I know of."
Mariana half rose and sat down again.
"There is one," she said, "and I—"
"What do you mean?" Algarcife demanded, starting up.
Her voice came slowly.
"I mean that I am—that it is better—that I am—going away."
For a moment the stillness seemed tangible in its oppressiveness. Mariana's head had fallen upon her hands, and as she stared at the electric light on the opposite corner she heard Anthony's heavy breathing. A moth circled about the ball of light, showing to her fixed gaze like some black spirit of evil hovering above a planet.
Algarcife's tones fell cold and constrained.
"To leave me, you mean?"
"It is the only way."
"Where will you go?"
Something that was not grief and yet akin to it choked Mariana as she answered.
"I have an offer. The one that—that I told you of. It is an excellent opening—so Morani says. The company goes abroad—next week. And I know the part."
"And you wish to go?" His voice hurt her with its absence of color.
She lifted her hands and let them fall in her lap. Her gaze left the electric light, where the moth was still revolving in its little orbit.
"It is not choice," she replied; "it is necessity. What else is there to do—except starve? Can we go on living like this day after day, you killing yourself with work, I a drag? It is better that I should go—better for us both."
He hesitated a moment as if in thought, and when he spoke it was with judicial calm.
"And would you have gone—a year ago?"
She was silent so long that he would have repeated the question, but at his first word the answer came with a wave of self-abasement.
"I—I suppose not."
And that was all.
During the next few days the subject of Mariana's decision was not mentioned. Both felt a constraint in alluding to it, and yet both felt the inevitableness of the final hour. Anthony's pride had long since sealed his lips over the expressions of an unwished-for affection, and Mariana had grown chary of words.
But both went quietly along their daily lives, Anthony working at his desk while Mariana gathered together her shabby garments and made ready for the moment which by word and look they both ignored.
Then at last, when the night before her going came, Mariana spoke. They had just risen from the supper-table and the slipshod maid of work had carried off the unemptied tray. Mariana had eaten nothing. Her face was flushed, and she was moving excitedly about the room.
"I go to-morrow," she began, feverishly.
Algarcife looked up from a book through which he was searching for a date.
"So you have decided?" His lips twitched slightly and the veins upon his forehead contracted.
Mariana shook out a night-gown which she had taken from a drawer, folded it carefully, and laid it in the trunk.
"There is nothing else to do," she replied, mechanically, as if she were fencing with fate from a corner into which she had been driven.
Algarcife closed the book and rose to his feet. He pressed his hand upon his eyes to screen them from the glare of light. Then he moistened his lips before speaking.
"Do you realize what it means?" he asked.
Mariana lowered her head into the trunk and her voice sounded from among the clothes.
"There is nothing else to do," she repeated, as mechanically as before.
"I hope that it will be for your happiness," said Algarcife, and turned away. Then he went towards her in sudden determination.
"Is there anything that I can help you about?"
Mariana stood up and shook her head. "I think not," she answered. "Signor Morani calls for me to-morrow at six."
Algarcife sat down, but the old sensation of dizziness came upon him and he closed his eyes.
"Have you a headache?" asked Mariana. "The tea was very bad. Shall I make you a cup?"
He shook his head and opened a book, but she crossed to his side and laid her hand upon his shoulder.
"It may not be for long," she said. "If I am successful—"
He flinched from her touch and shook her hand off almost fiercely. His eyes were bloodshot and his lips white.
"The room is so warm," he said, "it makes me dizzy. I'll go out."
And he went down-stairs.
Mariana stood where he had left her and looked down upon the pile of unpacked garments. A tear glistened upon her lashes, but it was a tear of impersonal sorrow and regret. For herself she was conscious only of a dulness of sensation, as if her usually vital emotions had been blunted and rendered ineffectual. In a mute way, as she stood there, she realized an almost tragic pity, but it was purely mental, and she recalled calmly the fact that a separation, which six months ago would have seared her soul with agony,she was now accepting with a feeling that was one of relief. The stress of accumulated griefs and anxieties had crushed her impressionable nature past all resemblance to its former responsiveness. Yet it is possible that even then, had Anthony returned to overpower her with his appeal, she would have wavered in her decision, but the wavering would have been the result of a fight between the instincts which were virile and the memory of the instincts which were buried with her buried passions, and it is doubtful where the victory would have rested. Her impulse for flight was as keen as the impulse which causes a bird to beat its breast against the bars that hold it. She wanted to flee from the sorrow she had known and all its associations; she wanted to flee from poverty and ugliness to beauty and bright colors. The artistic genius of her nature was calling, calling, and she thrilled into an answering echo.
But, for all that, a tear glistened upon her lashes as she looked down upon the unpacked clothes.
"O God! if you would only make a miracle!" she said—"if you only would!"
Her glance fell upon the desk where Anthony's work was lying. She saw the freshly written page upon which the ink was not dry. She lifted the pen in her fingers and felt the thick cork handle which was stained and indented by constant use. She sighed and turned slowly away.
The next afternoon, in hat and veil, with a small black satchel in her hand, she stood waiting for Signor Morani. Her trunk had already been carried down, and the carriage was turning the corner. She spoke lightly, dreading silence and dreading an accent of seriousness. "It is cooler," she said. "I hope a change is coming."
Then, as the carriage stopped beside the pavement below, she held out her hands. They shook slightly.
"Good-bye," she said.
"I hope you will be happy."
"And you. It will be easier for you."
"Good-bye."
She raised her veil, her eyes shining.
"Kiss me."
He kissed her, but his lips were cold, and there was no pressure upon hers.
She lowered her veil and went out. Algarcife stood at the window and heard her footsteps as she descended the stairs. He saw her leave the house, pause for an instant to greet Signor Morani, give the black bag into his hands, and enter the carriage. As she sat down, she leaned out for an instant and glanced up to where he stood. Then the carriage started, turned the corner, and was gone.
Still he did not leave the window. He stood motionless, his head bent, looking down into the heated streets, across which were stretching the slanting shadows from the west. A splash of scarlet, like the impress of a bloody hand, projected above the jagged line of tenement roofs, while a film of rising smoke obscured its lurid distinctness. He felt that complete sense of isolation, that loss of connection with the chain of humanity which follows a separation from one who has shared with us, night and day, the commonplaces of existence. The past and future seemed to have clashed together and shattered into the present.
In the street below men and women were going homeward from the day's work. He noticed that they wore, one and all, an aspect of despair, as if passing automatically along the endless round of a treadmill. He felt a vague wonder at the old, indomitable instinct of the preservation of self which seemed so alien to his mood. Situated as he was above it all, humanity assumed to his indifferent eyes a comic effect, and he found himself laughing cynically at the moving figuresthat blocked the sidewalk below. A physical disgust for the naked facts of life attacked him like nausea. The struggle for existence, the propagation of the species, the interminable circle of birth, marriage, and death, appeared to him in revolting bestiality. In his bodily and mental wreckage, all action became repellent and hideous, and the slanting sun-rays bespattering the human atoms in the street produced a giddiness in his brain. At that moment he was in the throes of a mental revolution, and his old philosophic sanity was ingulfed.
He remembered suddenly that he had eaten nothing all day, and, turning from the window, drank a cup of tea which had been left upon the table. The continual use of stimulants, in exciting his nervous system, had made sleep impossible, and he felt as if a furnace blazed behind his eyeballs. He sat down, staring blankly at the opposite wall. In the corner, upon a heap of books, the skull and cross-bones had been thrown, and they caught his glance and held it with a curious fascination. They seemed to typify his own life, those remnants of dry bones that had once supported flesh and blood. He regarded himself impersonally, as he might once have regarded a body for dissection. He saw that he had passed the zenith of his physical and mental power, and that from this day forth it would mean to him retrogression or stagnation. He saw that the press of untoward circumstances had forced his intellect from its natural orbit into a common rut from which there was no side-track of escape. He weighed his labors, his knowledge, his impassioned aims for truth, and, in the balance with a handful of dust, he found them wanting. He stirred the ashes heaped where once had been a vital passion, and he found a wasted skeleton and dry bones. He looked at his thin and pallid hand, and it seemed to him as incapable of work as the hand of one palsied.
Before his tragic eyes, the years of his past stood marshalled, and, one and all, they bore the badge of failure.
As he rose from his chair in sudden desperation, the recurring faintness seized him and he steadied himself against the open drawer of the bureau. Looking into it as he turned away, he saw some loose articles which Mariana had forgotten—a bit of veiling, a single stocking, and a tiny, half-worn sock of pink worsted. He closed the drawer and turned hastily away.
Then he sat down beside his desk and bowed his head into his hands.
For a week after Mariana's departure Algarcife worked on ploddingly. He closed his eyes to actualities and allowed his overwrought mind no cessation from labor. It was as if all molecular motion in his brain had been suspended save that relating to the subject in hand, and he wrote with mechanical readiness journalistic essays upon the "Advantages of a Vegetable Diet" and "The Muscular Development of the Body." Then, upon trying to rise one morning, he found that his shattered system was turning in revolt, and that no artificial spur could sting his exhausted brain into action.
Through the long, hot day he lay relaxed and nerveless, conscious of the glare of the sunshine, but dreading to draw the shades, conscious of the closeness of the atmosphere, and conscious of a beating, like the strokes of an anvil, in his temples. When his dinner was brought he drank a cup of tea and sat up. Then he reached for a phial of morphia pellets which he kept in his desk, and, dissolving one in water, swallowed it. For a moment the temptation to take the contents of the phial at a dose assailed him, but, more from inability to venture a decisive step than from any mental determination, he laid the bottle aside. Action of any kind appeared intolerably irksome, and he waived with disgust the solution of the simple problem of his life.
As he fell back upon the bed, his glance passed over the pillow beside him, and he pictured to himselfthe circle which Mariana's head had drawn upon the cotton. He remembered that she always slept lying upon her right side, her left knee bent, one hand under the pillow and one lying upon her breast, her profile shadowed by dreams. He remembered the nervous fear she felt of resting upon her heart, and that, having once turned upon her left side, she awoke with palpitating breaths and a smothered cry. He saw her calmer slumber, he felt her rhythmic breathing, and he recalled his sensation when one of her loosened braids had brushed his cheek. Again he saw her as she leaned over to soothe the child, and, raising it in her arms, hushed it upon her breast. He recalled it dully, as one recalls the incidents of long-past years over which the colorless mantle of time has been cast to deaden the flickering embers amid the ashes. In his mind there was no virility of passion nor intensity of bitterness—there was only an almighty melancholy. Life in its sufficiency of satisfied desires showed stale and unprofitable, and in its barrenness it was but a blank.
The sunshine, blazing through the open window, accelerated the throbbing in his temples. In the morbid acuteness of his senses, the cries of the vegetable venders in the street below harassed his ears. Along his whole body there ran a quivering flame of fever, and his thoughts spun like a revolving globe. The morphia had not stilled the beating in his head. It had produced a sensation of sickness, which seemed but the physical accompaniment of his mental syncope.
He surveyed the books stacked against the opposite wall and wondered vaguely at the energy with which he had attacked those volumes upon whose covers the dust was now lying like a veil. He tried to arouse a memory of the old intellectual exhilaration with which he had grappled with and vanquished an unexploreddepartment of thought. He remembered that at such moments the printed lines before him had assumed an unusual degree of clearness, and that he had been readingThe Wealth of Nationswhen a point in comparative morphology occurred to him. But the sensation itself he could not recover. The association of ideas was still unbroken, but the mental state was lost.
As he lay there, tossing restlessly upon the heated pillows, he reviewed unsympathetically his old pursuit of knowledge. What did it all mean? For what had he given his heritage of youth and manhood? For Truth. Granted, but what was Truth that he should follow it unswervingly until he passed from flesh and blood to a parcel of dry bones? How could he find it, and, finding, know it? That gray and ancient scepticism which had never appealed to him in health preyed now upon his wasting vitals. Since through the senses alone one could perceive, and the senses were but faulty instruments, what was perception worth? What were ideas but the figments produced by faculties which were at best deceptive? And in the infinite complexity of the self-sustaining reality, of what account were the abstractions of the finite intellect? In Truth itself, that all-pervading immateriality, were not the myriads of man's little truths ingulfed and lost? Were not true and false but symbols to express the differing relations of a great whole, as evolution and dissolution were symbols to express the recurring waves of a great force. As one man with his single hand barring the march of the seasons, was the man who by his single brain sought to hasten the advance of the Law which is Truth. And though he crumbled to dust, not one needful fact but would find its way into the moving world.
Stunned by despondency, he closed his eyes and groaned. In the absolute grasp of the futility of endeavor, he realized the lowest depths of human hopelessness.It was as if he had reached the ultimate nothing, the end to which his pathway led. Though he dashed his brains into the void, not one breath of the universal progress would swerve from its course.
And happiness? What was it but another symbol to signify the wistful yearning of the world? Where was it found? Not in love, which is the thirsting for a woman's spirit; not in passion, which is the burning for a woman's flesh. Did not bitterness follow upon the one, and upon the other satiety? His nature was deadened to the verge of obliviousness, and in his waning vitality the impulse of self-gratification had gone first. Physical desires shrank into decay, and mental ones passed with them. He wondered that he had ever sought in love other than calm reasonableness and a cooling presence. The emotion that sent scarlet thrills to his brain he analyzed with callousness. He remembered his mother as she lay upon the invalid's sofa, her Bible and a novel of Victor Hugo's upon the table beside her. He saw the placid beauty of her face, the slender, blue-veined hand which she laid upon his forehead when he went to her a wailing child; and it seemed to him that such a touch was the only touch of love with the power to console. Then he remembered Mariana's hand as she laid it upon her child and his, and he knew that the touch was the same. He thought of her as she sat beside the crib when the child lay dying. The passionate self-control about the mouth, the agony in her eyes, the tragic droop of her figure—these returned to soften him. He saw the black shadow of the palm-leaf fan, passing to and fro above the little bluish face, and he heard the labored breathing.
In sudden bitterness he opened his arms and cried aloud, "Mariana!"
Then the tears of weakness and despair stained the pillow where her head had lain.
When the twilight fell he rose, dressed himself with an effort, and descended the stairs. His limbs trembled as he moved, and, upon reaching the open air, he staggered and leaned for support against the red brick wall. Then he straightened himself, and wandered aimlessly from street to street. As he passed among men and women he was aware of a strange aloofness, as if the links connecting him with his kind had snapped asunder; and he felt that he might have been the being of another planet to whom earthly passions and fulfilments bore no palpable relation, but were to be considered with cosmic composure. The thought jarred upon him insistently that these moving men and women, whom he brushed in passing, were each stirred by an entity akin to that which in himself lay drugged. He realized that the condition of a mind without the attraction of physical desires is as chaotic as the condition of a world suddenly freed from the attraction of gravitation.
He looked at his fellow human beings with forced intentness. It struck him with an almost hysterical shock that they were of ludicrous shapes, and he laughed. Then he glanced at a carriage rolling along the street, and it appeared absurd that one mortal should sit upon four wheels while a fellow-mortal of a nobler build should draw him. He laughed again. As he did so he had a quick perception that delirium was approaching, and he stopped to swallow another pellet. He reeled slightly, and a boot-black upon the corner surveyed him with interest.
"Air yer drunk, mister?"
He laughed aloud. "Damned drunk," he responded, and walked on. Some hours later he found himself in Whitehall Street, passing the lighted windows of the Eastern Hotel. Beneath the station of the elevated road he came upon a stand, with the words "Cider and Root-Beer" flaming in red letters on a whitebackground, and for the first time he was conscious of a sensation of thirst. He stopped, felt in his pocket, and then, checking himself, passed onward to the Battery. A sharp wind struck him, blowing the damp hair from his forehead and chilling the drops of perspiration upon his face. With a feeling of relief he leaned against one of the stone pillars and bared his head to the incoming breeze. Far out the islands shone in iridescent lights, flashing through variations of green and amber, and over the water the ferry-boats skimmed like gigantic insects studded with parti-colored eyes.
Down below the water lay black and cold, the slow breakers flecked with light foam. He saw a glimmer as of phosphorescence rise suddenly upon the waves, and, looking deeper, he saw the eternal stillness. Between the throbs of fever the passion for death seized him in a paroxysm, and mentally he felt the quiet waters stir beneath him and the quietness close over him. His hand fastened upon the iron chain between the pillars; then he drew back.
He remembered the row of acids upon a shelf in his room, and his assurance returned. With a sensation of luxuriousness he recalled the labels with the large "Poison!" above, and the inscription "Hydrocyanic Acid" stared him in the eyes. When he had made that collection for experimental purposes how little had he foreseen the experiment in which it would play a part. He sat down upon a bench and stared idly at the stream of passers-by, some lovers who went arm-in-arm, some husbands and wives who walked apart, some fathers and mothers who carried sickly children—all bound and burdened with the flesh. The fretful wail of a baby came to him and mingled mechanically with his train of thought. It seemed the frail treble in the great symphony of human woe.
Beyond the men and women he saw the black waterand the dancing lights, and, farther still, the misty islands.
Gradually the fever starts grew less, and calmness came back to him. With a wave of regret he looked back upon his lost serenity, and lamented that it had failed him. He knew that in his mental upheaval the opposing elements in his nature had waged a combat. The scientific tenor of his mind had for the past few weeks been crushed out by the virulence of his nerves. That physical force which he had so long held enthralled had at last asserted its supremacy, and for the time his mind was under the sway of bodily weakness.
This duality of being occurred to him in perplexing inconsistency. Had he been a pure mentality, his life would have been one steep and victorious ascent towards knowledge. Were he but a physical organism, carnality would have satisfied his cravings. Then the remembrance that stronger than will or flesh is necessity arose and smote him into silence.
Many of the people had gone, but he still sat plunged in thought. A hatless woman, fresh from a midnight carousal, with a bleeding cut upon her lip, took the seat beside him, and he found a forlorn comfort in the contact with alien wretchedness. When she laid her head upon the back of the bench and fell asleep, he listened to her drunken snores calmly and without aversion. He became aware that his old kinship to humanity was at the moment restored, that, losing it with the loss of desire, it was regained in despair. Suddenly the head of the woman beside him rolled forward and rested against his shoulder. She stirred slightly, heaved a sigh of satisfaction, and returned to her ribald dreams, while he, in numbness and pain, found consolation in this forced sacrifice of comfort.
He did not move, and through the long night the drunken woman slept with her head upon his shoulder.
For the next few days he dragged out a methodicalexistence. In the mornings he would force himself to rise, swallow his food, and take his accustomed seat before his desk. With a failing hand he would take up his pen and endeavor to bend his fever-stricken brain to its task, but before a dozen lines were penned his strength would falter and the effort be abandoned. Then he would rise and finger the phials on the shelf, until, turning from them, he would say, "I will fight—fight until the last gasp—and then—"
At the beginning of the week, when his lodging bill was due, he carried by the armful a number of his books and pawned them for a nominal sum. Then he remembered his watch, and left that also. It was a heavy hunting-case of his father's, which he had always used from the nearness of the association, and as he laid it down something came into his throat. He opened the watch and took out the picture of his mother which was inside—a sketch in color, showing the lustrous Creole beauty in her first youth. Then he snapped the case and saw the initials "A. K. A." pass into the hands behind the counter.
Leaving the pawn-shop, he walked rapidly through the oppressive September sun until his limbs failed. Then turning with the throng of men that flowed into City Hall Square, he came to a sudden halt before the fountain. He was dazed and weakened, like a man who has recovered from a lapse into unconsciousness. The constant passing of the crowd bewildered him, and the sound of falling water in the fountain irritated him with the suggestion of thirst. He turned away and threw himself upon a bench beneath the shade of a tree. For an instant he closed his eyes, and when he opened them he found the scene before him to have intensified. The falling water sounded more distinctly, the sky was of a glaring blueness, and the dome of theWorldbuilding glittered like a cloud of fire.
To his straining eyes the statue of Horace Greeleyseemed to grin at him from across the traffic in the street, and as he staggered to his feet he felt an impulse to shake his fist at it and say:
"Damn you! It is a chance that I want," but his muscles faltered, and he fell back.
Then his glance wandered to the man beside him, a filthy vagrant with the smell of grease about his clothes. Did not he want his chance as well? And a few feet away a boy with a scowl on his lips and a bruise above his eye—why not a chance for him? Then a gray haze obscured his vision and the noise of the street was dulled into a monotone.
The throbbing in his temples grew faster, and as he sat there he knew that he had fought to the final gasp and that the end had come. In his physical downfall there was room for neither alarm nor regret. He was lost to all vaguer impressions than the trembling of his frame, the icy starts through his limbs, the burning of his eyes, and the inevitable beating in his temples. Beyond these things he neither knew nor cared.
With the instinct for solitude, he started and rose to move onward, when he saw that the earth was undulating beneath his feet and that the atmosphere was filled with fog. The dome of theWorldbuilding reeled suddenly and clashed into the flaming sky. He heard the sound of brazen-tongued bells ringing higher and higher above the falling of the water, above the tread of passing feet, and above the dull, insistent din of the traffic in the streets.
Then his name was called and he felt a hand upon his arm.
"Why, Anthony!"
He looked up bewildered, but straightened himself and stood erect, straining at the consciousness that was escaping him.
"How are you, Mr. Speares?" he asked. His voice was without inflection.
Father Speares spoke with impassioned pity. "What are you doing? You are ill—a ghost—"
Algarcife steadied himself against the bench and said nothing.
"What does it mean? Your wife—where is she?"
Anthony's voice came slowly and without emotion. "I am alone," he answered.
A quick moisture sprang to the older man's eyes. He held out his hand. "Come with me," he said, fervently. "I am alone also. Come to my house."
Algarcife left the bench and took a step from him.
"No," he replied. "I—I am all right."
Then he staggered and would have fallen but for the other's sustaining arm.
Two men passed the Church of the Immaculate Conception, wheeled suddenly round, and came back.
"By Jove, Driscoll, you have been outside of civilization!" said one, who was fair and florid, with a general suggestion of potential apoplexy polished by the oil of indulgence. "What! you haven't heard the Reverend Algarcife? Why, he rivals in popularity the Brockenhurst scandal, and his power is only equalled by that of—of Tammany."
John Driscoll laughed cynically.
"Let's have the scandal, by all means," he returned. "Spare me the puling priests."
"Bless my soul, man, don't tell me the Brockenhurst affair hasn't reached the Pacific slope! What a hell of a place! Well, Darbey was named corespondent, you know. You remember Darbey, the fellow who owned that dandy racer, La Bella, and lost her to Owens at cards? But the papers are full of it. Next thing you'll tell me you don't see theSun."
"A fact. I don't read newspapers, I write them—or used to. But what about this priest? I knew an Algarcife in my green and ambitious youth, but he wasn't a priest; he was a pagan, and a deuced solemn one at that."
They stood upon the gray stone steps, and the belated worshippers trooped past them to vespers. A woman with a virginal calm face and a camellia in her hymnal brushed them lightly, leaving a trail of luxurious sweetness on the air; a portly vestryman, withinflated cheeks and short-sighted eyes, mounted the steps pantingly, his lean and flat-chested wife hanging upon his arm; a gray-browed gentlewoman, her eyes inscrutable with chastity unsurprised, held her black silk skirt primly as she ascended, carrying her prayer-book as if it were a bayonet.
In the street a carriage was standing, the driver yawning above his robes. From the quivering flanks of the horses a white steam rose like mist. Near the horses' hoofs a man born blind sat with a tray of matches upon his knee.
"Why, that's the jolliest part!" responded the first man, with a tolerant smile. "This one was an atheist once—or something of the sort, but the old man—Father Speares, I mean—got hold of him, and a conversion followed. And, by Jove, he has driven all the women into a religious mania! I believe he could found a new faith to-morrow if he'd be content with female apostles."
Driscoll shrugged his shoulders. "Religion might be called the feminine element of modern society," he observed. "It owes its persistence to the attraction of sex, and St. Paul was shrewd enough to foresee it. He knew when he forbade women to speak in public that he was insuring congregations of feminine posterity. Oh, it is sex—sex that moves the world!"
"And mars it."
"The same thing. Listen!"
As the heavy doors swung back, the voices of the choir swelled out into the faint sunshine, the notes of a high soprano skimming bird-like over the deeper voices of the males and the profundo of the organ.
When next Driscoll spoke it was with sudden interest. "I say, Ryder, if this is Algarcife, why on earth did he turn theologian? Any evidences of brain softening?"
"Hardly. It is a second Tractarian excitement,with Algarcife for the leader. The High-Church party owes him canonization, as I said to the bishop yesterday. He is the best advertising medium of the century. After Father Speares died, he took things in hand, you know, and raised a thunder-cloud. The old man's mantle fell upon him, along with whatever worldly possessions he possessed. Then some physiologist named Clynn got him into a controversy, and it was like applying an electric-battery to the sluggish limbs of the Church."
Driscoll gave a low whistle.
"Well, as I'm alive!" he said. "What is it all for, anyway?"
"Let's go inside," said Ryder, drawing his collar about his throat. "Beastly chill for October. Wind's due east."
For an instant they paused in the vestibule; then Ryder laid his hand upon the door; it swung open, and they entered the church.
At first the change of light dazzled Driscoll, and he raised his hand to his eyes; then, lowering it, he leaned against a pillar and looked over the heads of the congregation. A mellow obscurity flooded the nave, lightening in opalescent values where the stained-glass windows cast faint glints of green and gold. The atmosphere was so highly charged with color that it seemed to possess the tangible qualities of fine gauze, drawn in transparent tissue from the vaulted ceiling to the gray dusk of the aisles. A single oblique ray of sunshine, filtering through a western pane, crept slowly along the walls to the first station of the cross, where it lay warm and still. Through the heavy luminousness the voices of the choir swelled in triumphant acclamation:
Beyond the rood-screen in the chancel the candles on the altar flickered in yellow flames beneath a slight draught. Above them, from the window, a Christ in red and purple fainted beneath his crown of thorns. At the foot of the crucifix a heap of white chrysanthemums lay like snow.
Before the candles and the cross the priest stood in his heavy vestments, his face turned towards the altar, the sanctuary-lamp shining above his head. Around him incense rose in clouds of fragrant smoke, and through the vapor his dark head and white profile were drawn against the foot of the cross. The yellow candle-light, beside which the gas-light grew pallid, caught the embroideries on the hood of the cope, and they glistened like jewels.
He stood motionless when the censing was over, stray wreaths of mist encircling his head. Then, when the Magnificat was finished, he turned from the altar, the light rippling in the gold of his vestments. His glance fell for a moment upon his congregation, then upon the mute faces of his choristers seated and within the chancel.
Through the reading of the lesson he sat silently. There was no suggestion of emotion in his closed lips, and the composure in his eyes did not lessen when he rose and came forward, meeting the hush in the church. From the stillness of the altar his voice rose suddenly, sustaining the chant of the choir in a deep undertone of unwavering richness: