CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHTEXALTATION
Time drew on, through September, October, November. It was December. It would soon be Christmas....
No disaster in life could be immense enough any more, Stella felt, to move her. She had “supp’d full with horrors.”
Perhaps she knew when he passed over the fatal boundary; perhaps she knew when there could be no more returning. But it seemed to matter so little now. It was all so ancient, so long ago.
She saw her prince dissolve into a moral pauper, and could do nothing. It was almost thrilling, in a way, to realize there was nothing, absolutely nothing she could do. There came a time when she even felt that tears would never flow again.
The physical change in King was really unbelievable. He had so shrunken from his former look of florid strength and poise and elegance that one who had not beheld the slow lapse from day to day would have passed him without recognition. He had played fast and loose all his life, and within was paying the penalty. His splendour had stood upon the sand of an encroaching decay. However, of course there would have been no such precipitous collapse as this without the powerful push of drug. It was as though here on Hagen’s Island he had crowded the impetus of years of indulgence into a few months. The time was brief, in fact; though to him and to the girl he had fanned at the ball it seemed like a taste of sheer eternity.
The nights grew hideous with King’s dreaming. He hadreached the stage at last where dreams usurp the realm of sleep entirely. Sometimes he would sit perfectly passive from dusk to dawn, with eyes that stared and saw nothing but forms of ministering ecstasy. But when he lay down to sleep, it was as though ten thousand demons all at once took possession of his brain. Nightmare would suddenly seize the helm, and he would writhe like some unhappy figure in Dante’s vision of hell.
Pity rose irresistibly in Stella’s heart sometimes, and she would go to him and wake him, and hold his hand—out of sheer human compassion. He had tasted the sweets of opium. These were the dregs.
Sometimes he would impotently weep as she held his hand, and tears would seem to calm him, and he would sleep again. But soon the incubus of dreams would be upon him anew. He would seem to fall over the very edge of the world—on, on through space, eternally. Or he would relive his whole lifetime in an hour, and he often talked of people Stella had never heard of.
One night she started up in terror from a deep sleep, and found King standing over her, a lighted candle in his unsteady hand. The restless flame kept the whole room dancing. Grotesque shadows leapt all about the frightened woman as she sat in bed, one wrist gripped frantically by her husband, who stared at her in a mood of smouldering horror. For a time she heard only his breathing, here in the dead of night. But at length he began muttering to her, his lips moving almost as though with the awful revenue of nightmare still upon them. For a time she could not make out any words, but after a little his tongue attained a thick coherency.
“Clouds!” he mumbled. “Clouds...! I can’t see anything else—horrible, great black ones, and they roll up and fill the whole sky...!” His look was awful.
Stella laid a hand on his in an effort to calm him, though her own heart was on the dizzy edge of chaos.
The candlelight threw up before her a face dead white against a moving background of shadows. Slowly she felt him relax. The grasp on her wrist lessened, until finally his hands were moving about vaguely like moths that cannot find the light. She looked down and saw dimly the dull red marks he had left.
She drooped a little and felt all at once very weary. Her husband sat on the edge of the bed, his back bent and his shoulders sagging heavily toward his knees. All the old lordliness in him seemed burnt to cinders.
After a while he sighed a long sigh and slowly got to his feet. He had put the candle down, and when he reached out for it, his hand was so unsteady that he knocked it over, extinguishing the flame. She heard him sigh again in the thick darkness of the room, and then grope his way out.
Another night he seemed to be trying to fit an endless throng to shoes. He was upon his knees, and they came up before him tirelessly out of a void. Stella wakened and crept, trembling a little, to the door opening into the “parlour.” Here the air was heavy with fumes. He throve best in such an atmosphere.
She listened, enthralled in a way. Stella was coming to feel almost impartial, like an outsider—an outsider even to herself.
Her husband’s voice drifted to her, hollow and touchingly patient; but sometimes it sounded a little eager, too—as when he urged:
“Madam, I think you could wear an A quite as well as a B. Have you ever tried? The foot is really narrower than you think. Let me try on one of the newest lasts in an A, and if it doesn’t feel comfortable, we’ll try a B instead. Ithink you’ll find this suede quite satisfactory, and it goes so well with almost every gown.”
Stella was amazed. She remembered an occasion when he had spoken of her feet with singular intelligence, and felt a tiny stir of interest in her deadened heart—even determined that she would speak to him about it.
The next day she chanced to find him brooding over the book in which he had long ceased recording the progress of opium culture on Hagen’s Island. There was a far-away look in his eyes—a look of great stillness; and she knew he was under the brief delicious spell of recent indulgence.
“Ferd,” she said, sitting down near him and trying dully to occupy her fingers with some mending, “you talked all night about shoes—do you remember?”
At first a vaguely startled expression came into his eyes, and she had a sudden sense of danger—even drew back a little, instinctively. But the expression changed to one of such utter serenity that it grew in time to—almost an ashen radiance.
“Oh, yes,” he murmured, gazing at her musingly as she sat, her needle busy. His body shook all over in a light yet constant way. And he repeated, very dreamily: “Oh, yes. I remember. There were so many—all sorts of people—and they came in a line that seemed to stretch clear off to the end of the world.” He sighed. “Sometimes it seemed as though I never could take care of so many. But I was all alone, and there was nothing else to do.”
“Strange,” she said.
“What did you say, Stella?”
“I was thinking how strange it is you should have had a dream like that....” Her voice sounded flat and monotonous to her. She realized, even as she spoke, how little it mattered.
“Strange?” he repeated, still dreamily.
He had the look of a man who feels eternity rolling all around him. He sat like a Buddhist figure, and the radiance in his face took on a sublime, translucent quality. Exaltationheld his soul poised and untortured in a realm of breathlessness and peace. And he smiled, for suddenly it seemed to him that his whole life hung together like some perfect fabric, and that all that had entered it was somehow essential—even beautiful and almost holy. He laughed, a soft, murmuring laugh, terrible in its uncanny detachment, and rocked gently back and forth. His mind grew immeasurably clear and calm. Then his lips began moving, a flood of words fell about her—a soft, astounding, irresistible flood. And she sat there, amazed, trembling, almost under a spell.