I remember an incident in my boyhood. A little Airedale called Frazzles had become so wild that a conference of the powers had decided on sending her away to a veterinary. The sentence was duly carried out, and Frazzles was deported in the last days of autumn, while we children howled our grief in the nursery. The next we heard of her, she had escaped and taken to the woods some twenty miles away, where she was living like a wild animal. The winter passed and then the spring, and one day Frazzles came, scratching at the door, weary, savage, and caked with mud. The door opened, she flew to her old post under the blue sofa by the fireplace. Six months had passed,—outcast from home and humanity, yet, at the hour when the tea-cakes were brought in, she crept out of her hiding; place and lay at the feet of Aunt Janie, just as though it were yesterday.
At times I feel strangely akin to that little bedraggled outcast. I have fallen back so easily into the familiarroutine that all the other life seems incredible. Have I ever really lived in the wet and slime of the trenches, pillowed on a foul blanket; and is it possible that in a few short weeks the moving finger of fate will return and touch me over again? It is so far off, so obscure, fainter than a dying echo; only the memory of Bernoline is vivid and acute with the power to pain.
Against this memory I struggle day and night. There are times when I combat it fiercely in the instinct of self-preservation, when I try to reach down into my heart and tear out the thing that aches. At others, I yield to a fool’s paradise and delude myself with impossible solutions that deceive me but for an hour.
*****
Yesterday, in my desperation, I went over to the Brinsmades’. I went, deliberately, to see Anne. Why, I do not know. For Anne, I think, loves me, and, despite all my reason, all my will to escape from my destiny, I do not, I cannot love her as she deserves to be loved. Perhaps, if I had not metBernoline—
I went, hesitating and undecided. I came away convinced. Whatever comes, I care this much for my boy-hood’s companion; I shall never come to her with a memory between us.
*****
It was a morning when Bernoline’s presence had been so acutely near me that there was no escape from the blank impossibility of the future. Did I go to seek some strange, healing comfort in the knowledge of another’s suffering,—even as I suffered without possibility of hope? The instinct of love is, I suppose, so fiercely primitive in us that under its tyranny we are subjected to some moral atavism. All the primitive passions that have swayed us from the dawn of time are suddenly let loose and, with the leaping impulse towards possession, comes the instinct to hate violently or todesire fiercely the joy that comes from the feeling of being able to cause pain, to turn against another all that we suffer from the one we love. Girl or courtesan, I have seen women pour out treasures of sacrifice to one man and at the same time show themselves savagely, incomprehensibly pitiless to an unwelcome lover.
*****
Not that all this was in my thought. Far from it. I went, brooding and restless, without impulse but to escape from myself. I drove over after luncheon, after telephoning my coming.
She came down immediately and at my first look I felt a guilty feeling, yet one of some compensating happiness.
“There’s a house party, but I got rid of them,” she said, giving me both her hands. “Do you know, Davy, you have waited a long, long time to come.”
“I have wanted to, many times.”
“Really, and honestly?” she said, looking me in the eyes.
“Of course.”
My heart smote me as I met her glance. One word from me had brought back the comrade of other days. From her hair to the stout walking boots, all artifice had been so evidently offered up on the altar of my criticism that I could not help saying:
“Now I remember an old friend.”
She laughed at this and her eyes sparkled, but there was a retort on her tongue.
“It’s quite hopeless to try and please you,—and I who fondly believed I was going to make such an impression on you with my grand manner!”
“Now, Miss Flattery, you don’t take me in like that. There were others present, and—you didn’t know I was coming.”
“Father told me,” she said abruptly. “Let’s get out of this hothouse atmosphere. How about a ramble into the glen? There’s not enough snow to bother us. Shall we?”
“Agreed.”
Well bundled up, we struck out over the frozen swamps for the solitudes of the hills, and as we went a curious diffidence fell between us.
“David, it’s you who are the stranger,” she said suddenly. “You are changed, much changed.”
“In what way?”
“Your eyes are terribly critical of things you don’t like. You—you rather intimidate me. Please be a little kind in your judgments.”
“I am not aware—”
“Yes, you have changed. Before, I often wondered how you would turn out—you might have gone so many ways. You have been tested and you have found yourself. Only, Davy, in finding yourself, I think you have forgotten a little the way you have gone and are apt to be without much indulgence towards others.”
Now, the directness of this analysis and its point quite startled me.
“Do you think I am like that?” I said, wondering.
She nodded decisively, twice.
“And dreadfully direct. You can’t conceal what you feel.”
A memory returned, and, also, a possible explanation.
“What I said that first night hurt you?”
“Terribly.”
“You attach too much importance to a chance remark.”
“Don’t.”
I stopped short in my lumbering explanation.
“Don’t talk to me like that,” she said, looking at me with a little frown above her eyes. “Davy, in the olddays there was nothing but absolute honesty between us—no nonsense. I have known many men since you went; naturally, some who attracted me,—one or two, very much—”
“Naturally,” I said, but, to my surprise, with a certain instinctive resentment.
“But no one else to whom I could talk, frankly and openly, as I always did with you. Don’t change that, because”—she hesitated—“because, Davy, you can help me to see clearer in many ways, and—and I shall always be to you the one person to whom you can tell anything. Davy, memories, the real memories, I think, are the things to hold on to in this world.”
Her words went through me like a knife, so near were they to my own fate. It was all that I could do to fight back the telltale moodiness I felt rising in my face, for I knew her eyes were on me.
“I really need to talk to you, Davy,” she said, when I did not answer, and there was such a plaintive note in her voice that, to cover my unease, I held out my hand and said with an appearance of bluffness:
“All right: the old alliance is renewed.”
“Absolute honesty?”
“So help me.”
“Then—you were disappointed when you saw me again?”
“Yes.”
“You thought I had become superficial, vacillating?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I am,” she said, to my surprise. “I didn’t know it. You gave me a shock, but you made me realize it. You still think so?”
“My dear Anne,” I said carefully. “How can you be otherwise? Everything is against you. What in life is real to you, except pleasure? You’ve been shown nothingelse in life—granted it isn’t your fault. You have been cheated out of something bigger. Other women will never notice it; thank heaven, you do. Now, to explain what I felt on coming back out of the other world. Before, I don’t suppose it ever would have occurred to me. I took the American man’s point of view—from the best of motives, I grant you—our attitude of chivalry towards you. But, over there, something else has come to us, a bigger conception of you, an ideal of service. That is the difference in point of view.”
“But what am I to do?” she said, shrinking under the directness of the opinion she had invited.
“Heavens, you’re making me talk like a confounded, self-righteous prig,” I exclaimed, with a sudden realization, “and God knows I’m far from that.”
“No, no! Say what you mean. You, you do not quite trust my sincerity, do you?”
“Not quite.”
“Why?”
“Because, well, because I think you are inclined to dramatize your moods,” I said lightly. “I think you are colored by the wish to please whomever you happen to be with. We all are. But I wonder if to-night, when the guests, the dreadful guests who bore you so, return, you will find time so heavy on your hands?”
“For heaven’s sake, don’tlaughat me!” she cried, flaring up with more show of feeling than I had seen.
“Forgive me. I won’t do that again,” I said contritely. “Do you really care what I think?”
“You know I do.”
Her answer left me awkwardly floundering, until suddenly she burst out:
“All you say is true: I do change, I do drift; what I feel is true one moment will be different the next. But, Davy, I realize it! Do you think I want to go on thisway? I do what I do because I am restless, just—just to do something. You think I am superficial: I am, horribly so. You think I crave pleasure—excitement: I do. You think I like to play with emotions: I do. All that’s true, and I know it.”
“I wonder if you know what harm you do?” I said, not quite convinced.
“What do you mean?”
“Anne, I sometimes think good women do more harm in this world than bad. They, poor devils, do so little harm: they are so obvious. A moment’s madness, and we throw ourselves violently back from them. To leave them is to forget them. But you—you others—the pain you inflict is given unconsciously.”
“It doesn’t last,” she said.
“How do you know? Tell me one thing, Anne, because it has always interested me. You didn’t need to tell me there had been many men in your life: have you ever felt any responsibility toward them? I mean this: have you ever stopped to question your right to attract them, to awaken their love, even when you knew there was no interest on your part?”
“Why, no, of course not.”
“Probably not; such things are unconscious—an instinct. And of a dozen men who come to love you, eight or ten forget quickly. But some don’t, do they?”
“No, that’s true.”
“That’s what I mean by the harm good women do, unconsciously. You would not give pain willingly, I am sure, and yet I doubt if even you realize the sorrow that has come from you. You may say it’s all in the game. It is: but I go back to what I said—that often a girl like yourself, like Molly, with everything to charm and attract, leaves wounds behind that it takes years to heal. That’s the strange thing about it; a friendshipthat is precious in the life of both, inevitably, by some hidden spark of impulse, a sudden need of the soul, is transformed into love on the part of one. Then, what happens? Not only is the friendship taken out of the lives of both, but to one that first joy of human contact becomes emptiness and bitterness. It is not only of you I am thinking, but of my own sister. When I saw Molly again, so radiant, so lovely in her unconscious youth, so eager for life to begin, I could not help thinking that wherever she went, so lightly and so joyfully, she would leave behind her many bruises and aches. Then, a few real men will come to love her profoundly, and without hope, and know the daily, hourly slavery to a hopeless longing.”
“It is of yourself you are talking now, Davy?”
I stopped, thunderstruck. In my earnestness I had quite forgotten how much my own personal feelings must have given warmth to my statement.
“Of course, I did not expect that in all this time you wouldn’t have fallen in love,” she said. She stood, looking down. “It’s a queer world.” The next moment she had started up the ravine, swinging from rock to rock, with a challenge to me to follow. I hurried after her, vexed at my own indiscreet revelations and seriously alarmed at her reckless flight.
“Be careful. You’ll slip and turn your ankle. Anne, you’re crazy!”
“Nonsense, never slip!”
She darted up, heedless of my cautions, and when finally I reached the top, quite out of breath, she was watching me with a malicious smile from her seat in the little observatory.
“Come up here and take a peep at the view. A fine soldier, to be out-distanced by a woman!”
“That’s hardly fair,” I said, laughing and relieved topass from the dangerous seriousness of a moment ago. “Give me a few more weeks.”
Instantly she was contrite.
“How thoughtless of me. Forgive me!”
“Very little to forgive. By George, that’s fine.” The valley lay below us, blanketed with a sheen of snow that in great spaces lifted occasionally for a glimpse of green; black-blue shadows in the far hills, and faint, transparent reds in the bared branches against the sky; the whole tremulously still, a winter cameo cut in frozen silences.
“Do you want to go back?” she said at last.
“I shall answer you as I answered your father; honestly, no.”
“But then, why? Surely, after what you’ve been through, in your condition, and it would be so easy to arrange—”
“Exactly; but you, as my friend—would you want me to stay?”
She did not answer.
“Would you?”
“It is not your war.”
“That isn’t the point.”
“Itisthe point,” she said, in sudden rebellion. “No, I don’t want you to go back. It’s absurd, unnecessary, quixotic!”
Poor Anne. She little knew what harm she had done by that one little outburst. I remembered Bernoline, and, when next I looked at Anne, I saw only a child.
“And when we get into it? What then, young lady?” I said, laughing. “Are you going to arrange everything to suit yourself?”
“Davy, if you knew how you hurt me when you take that tone,” she said, shrinking back. “I am not a child.”
“Then, Anne, you must face life as it comes to you.We can’t make it as we want it, but our kind, of all the world, should never dodge a responsibility.”
“I always show you my worst side,” she said, shaking her head, and presently, leading the way down the ravine again, but this time more deliberately, she began to chatter lightly of old memories without an approach to intimacy, until the moment came for my departure.
“David, have you still such a bad opinion of me?” she said, seeking the answer in my eyes.
“I never have had.”
“Funny: I am not at all myself with you. It’s because I’m so used to looking up to you, I suppose.”
“Because I am such an old bear, you mean.”
“No, no, that’s not what I mean. I’m very much of a woman now—more than you can ever imagine—and quite capable of determining my life for myself. And I know what I want. And, David—don’t make one mistake.”
“What?”
“I’m not in love with you.”
Before I could recover myself, she had skipped up the steps. And so ended this strange interview. Not being myself in love with her, I could estimate more deliberately the value of her last words, and yet, knowing in my own experience all the wound to her pride that the fear of my divining her true motives would bring, I think her last defiance brought me into closer sympathy with my old playmate.
*****
When I reached home, Ben and Letty were there,—come for the Christmas holidays.
“David!”
As I was hurrying through the hall, she called me to her, where she was warming herself by the fireplace.
“You here?” I said, feigning surprise.
“B’rrr! You are cordial as an open door. They said you were at the Brinsmades’.”
“Yes.”
“Monsieur fait des conquêtes?”
I shrugged my shoulders and disdained a reply, which always irritated her.
“So you are in love—again, David?” she said, with her provoking smile.
“Does this amuse you?”
“You forget that I remember the signs.”
At this I stared at her in such futile anger that she laughed to herself, well content.
“But I quite approve! An excellent match for you!”
Then she deliberately dropped her muff, and as I stooped to pick it up, she leaned over and pinched my ear.
“Have you forgotten that,mon ami?”
The muff was scented with the perfume I knew. I came up angry and baffled.
“My dear Davy, if you are not going to pay me some attention, you may as well go right to your brother and tell all. The situation is evident.”
I left her in a vindictive, smoldering rage,—in one of those moods of violence into which she had thrown me a hundred times, out of her malicious pleasure. Does she love me or hate me? Which is the explanation? As for myself, the anger she awakened frightened me, for before I was confident of my utter indifference. Is it possible that by some baneful trick of habit there can remain a vestige of the old tyranny over my senses? It is unthinkable! If only I could go to Ben! But no, that is impossible! And for a week, while we three are under the same roof, this hideous comedy must go on!
*****
As I go back over my interview with Anne, I am somewhat puzzled. Why was I so brutally direct? I shouldlike to feel that it was an honest effort to repel her: yet I wonder if I am as honest as all that and if underneath is not the intuitive knowledge that just such an attitude is what would draw her closer to me? How difficult it is to know our real motives!
*****
This morning, in my mail, a note.
David:Don’t take what I say too literally. Of course, I would never do anything to keep you from going back,—don’t think I am that weak, sentimental type of woman. But I might rebel at your going,—and that is very different, so long as you keep it to yourself,—which I didn’t. If you don’t think me quite hopeless, come in to-night for dinner.Anne
David:
Don’t take what I say too literally. Of course, I would never do anything to keep you from going back,—don’t think I am that weak, sentimental type of woman. But I might rebel at your going,—and that is very different, so long as you keep it to yourself,—which I didn’t. If you don’t think me quite hopeless, come in to-night for dinner.
Anne
I went, if for nothing but to escape from the situation here. Mr. Brinsmade was there, and we had a long talk on our prospects of getting into the war, which he feels is certain. Anne sat by, listening, but studiously avoided any opportunity for a tête-à-tête.
I am less sure of my attitude towards her. Last night, with the mental eagerness which Brinsmade always wakes in me, there, by the great fireplace, watching her camped by her father’s knee—young, ardent, desirable—a doubt came into my mind, I again saw my life as it might be and, frankly, I was tempted. Fortunately, Mr. Brinsmade had the tact not to broach the subject again. After all, decisions are futile now. In a few short weeks I shall be returning to France and there, perhaps, will be the decision to all my perplexities. To-night, when I suddenly stop at that realization, I am inclined to break out into laughter. The irony of my plaguing myself with questions now!
And yet it is torture: this memory of a few days’ utterhappiness, of one afternoon’s clear belief in the future! I try to escape from it, but there is no escape, least of all in the direction of Anne. That is not fair to her or what might come. I sit long hours in Aunt Janie’s parlor, pulling at my pipe before the fire and staring into the coals. Of all the family she understands me best, and I talk or remain silent, according to my mood. Yet when I look at her, and realize the shadow of a life to which she has been dedicated—everything denied, repressed, throttled—I spring up in revolt and go tramping over the countryside;—that life is beyond my strength!