CHAPTER VIII
Shelay there motionless on the terrace into the still twilight. The little mountain villages across the heated valley robed themselves in blue mist. Beneath the wall the road up the hill from the Porta Fredano cut the olive trees with its snaky coils. The silence was like the emptiness of worlds.
Suddenly she rose, impulsively striking out for an escape. Erard would come in a few days, hours, minutes. He might be in Florence now. She must do something before she met him, find some resolution. Unconsciously she began to follow the road, hastening along its curves in an impetuous desire to flee. Gradually she became conscious that she was seeking for Jennings. She might find him below in the city, and hemustsave her,—he would know how. So she ran on feverishly, dragging her weak limbs over the great paving-stones, which were heated like an oven. Some instinct led her to the Ponte Vecchio, where she happened on Jennings, sauntering idly with the throng that had come out to breathe in the evening air. Then she had nothing to say, but stood panting, her white face flushing to the dark hair.
“What has happened?” he asked her gently, and taking her arm he led her out of the sharp bustle on the bridge into a side street and then to the entrance of the Boboli gardens. The great cypresses threw an inviting shade,towards which they walked. Jennings waited for her explanation.
“It has come, at last,” she stammered awkwardly. “I am free now.”
Jennings did not seem to understand her full meaning.
“But you have been ‘free’ for nearly a year. Have you at last found peace in that potent word?”
“No,” she replied impatiently. “I did not mean that. Walter brought me the news that—since the fifteenth—I have not been Mrs. Wilbur. I am legally free—to make a mess of it.”
“Well?” He implied that this news was not unexpected, or of sufficient importance to explain her tremor.
“It is dreadful,” she murmured incoherently. “What am I to do?”
“It hasn’t succeeded, has it?” His blunt words were spoken softly. “There isn’t any real difference between these people, Erard’s Art Endeavour Circle and Protestants in general, and the good people of Chicago. They aren’t a great deal more interesting, Salters and Vivian and the southern poet and the Jew critic and the chorus of aspirants, than the Chicago lot with their simpler ambitions and manners and cruder expression. On the whole they aren’t so good; they are nearer dead: the others have a race to run, and these have only their graves to dig. And if I were going merely to rot,” his voice trembled, “I should rather rot with the Philistines and be a good human animal than—”
“Well, there are others,” she protested. “You mention only the small fry, like me.”
Jennings looked at her abstractedly. He was answering his own heart rather than considering her.
“They are all much alike, these sighers after art and beauty. A poor lot, take them as a whole, who decide to eat honey all their lives! I have seen more of them than anything else in Europe,—dilettantes, connoisseurs, little artists, lazy scholars. Chiefly Americans, who, finding America too incomplete, come here and accomplish nothing. In every centre in Europe you can find two or three of them in the various stages of decay. The environment they run after atrophies their faculties; the very habits of life which are best for these people hurtthem; they sink into laziness. Erard is the leader of the tribe,—the grand high-priest of the mysteries of the higher senses!”
He ended his declamation with a laugh. His cold contempt shut her heart and drove her back to defence.
“But he has made it worth while; you are not fair to him. He has lived in the only wayhecould and reach his ends. And he has done something; he knows.”
“Perhaps,” Jennings agreed dubiously, thinking his own thoughts aloud with brutal disregard for her inferences. “What a bloodless, toady existence, sucking in the joys of his paradise! And for what? A few books to be replaced by a new set in another generation, a few epigrams, and a little quivering of his ‘sensorium.’ Better a day in an Indiana town, than a year ofthat!”
Mrs. Wilbur turned her face away. Even he was so pitiless! She had come to him in her distress for comfort, and instead of soothing her, of leading her out ofher tangle, he heaped up this stern indictment against all her past ideals.
“You didn’t know Peter Erard.” He began to tell that story again. “You see, there was the mother. She died, saving her pennies to give Simeon a new suit when he was tutoring Mr. Anthon’s daughter. Then there were the father and Peter. The father was too old to work, and Peter kept him comfortable and I believe sent Erard money, first by a job in Jersey City, then by one in Chicago. Over a year ago Peter met with an accident and lost his job—Miss Parker knows these facts—and, finally a little while ago, died. When he was ill, Erard, Simeon, that is to say, was in Chicago, giving lectures and visiting. Peter saw him once. And the old man might die in the poor-house now, if it weren’t for Miss Parker.”
Mrs. Wilbur listened with compressed lips. She had been fighting off this disagreeable tale for a long time.
“That Peter Erard—hewas a man!” Jennings continued, his face lighting up. “Hehad it in him to do something, and he knew it, and he never talked slush. He took his place in the ranks, like a man. And now he is dumb, as he was in life!”
“Perhaps the other one showed his genius by defying all these claims and making his way in spite of them,” Mrs. Wilbur stammered, remembering the Napoleonic glory of Simeon’s first confessions to her. Jennings looked at her pityingly.
“Do you think so? now that you know the story in all its sordid detail? And can you still think that theresult is worth while? Is it any better than the grab, and the coarse perception about traction stocks, and the rest of the unpleasant side of Chicago which annoys our nostrils? Merely because you work in pictures or books, and not in pork and dry-goods. Ah, Peter was the man, and he was a private!”
“You aren’t fair to Simeon—to me,” she retorted hotly.
“You make nothing of that hunger for something beautiful, that love—I had it, you can believe me. Some people have it and die unless—”
“Did you get what you wanted?” Jennings exclaimed, pacing back and forth across the strip of gravel.
“No!” she exclaimed in something like a sob. “The joy faded so fast! And the more I grow to know, the less I am filled with the old rapture. I have striven so to possess joy, and gone so low in my own sight. It is bitter, bitter—”
“Europe tempts us Americans,” her companion interrupted excusingly. “It holds so many treasures, and the life of the spirit is organized here. I came near giving in, once, those days in Oxford where everything seemed spread for enjoyment. I rather longed to help myself to dainties until I was full. But—”
“But what?”
“It’s against nature, a sin against nature. Life is not fulfilled, we are not quieted, in that way. To accept the world as it comes to our hands, to shape it painfully without regard for self,—that brings the soul to peace.”
He had made his decision, and evidently he had found some solace. She could not take the same road easily;she had gone the other way. She looked up into his face longingly, pleadingly, as if she were wildly hoping that he would take her with him, that he would not leave her in her wanderings.
“I am going back to the niggers,” Jennings continued after a pause in a lighter tone. “Won’t that please Mrs. Stevans! I think my friends expected me to become another kind of Erard.” He laughed good-humouredly. “And likely enough they are right, to thrash about for the sweets and what you call freedom. But it seems to me ridiculous and undignified.”
With these careless words he seemed to close the topic which had agitated her so profoundly. She felt that she ought to have enough pride and self-reliance to accept her difficulties silently, but a certain feminine dependence on leadership—strange to herself—left her feeble before this crisis. She appealed to him audaciously, clinging to his strength. “And I—what shall I do?”
“Is it all over—the joy and the venture?”
“I seem to have died, instead of gaining freedom.”
“That word! How it deceives us! You have chased a shadow.”
“You mean?”
“There is no freedom and every one is free. It is all a matter of feeling. And that feeling you cannot command.”
“Like love.” She glanced up at him, her face thrilling with a strange idea.
“Yes, like love,” he repeated in a low voice. “It takes us unawares when we have given up the search.”
“Then I have never loved.” Her mind revolved in a new orbit “When I married I was seeking, seeking. When I studied, when I tried to act, I was always seeking. And the more I have struggled the farther I have gone—away, astray. Even the first false light that shone those September days when the pictures spoke, went, and I am left alone with my little knowledge, and nothing else, nothing. It is like love,” she repeated at last.
“Yes. It is a state of feeling, of the spirit, not a condition of person.”
“I was as free in Chicago as I am here?”
He nodded.
“And my money has not bought it, nor my body won it.”
“Nor your mind,” Jennings added softly. “Nor your will. Not any of these things.”
“It could come over there in the prairie-town.”
“Or with the niggers,” suggested Jennings with a slight smile.
The new conception gained hold on her, while she sat staring out above the palaces of the city into the evening gloom. At last she uttered in a low moan,—“After all, to be bound, bound with no one to cut the cords; to be bound in spirit and flesh—no escape possible. It is ghastly!”
“You said once that you wished to burn, to feel. You remember that last night at Lake Forest?”
“And you replied—‘to dust and ashes,’” she added fiercely. “Is that all forme?”
She rose from the bench with a sweep, a touch of defiance that brought back her old impressive self. She seemed to say, “You mock me. Impossible that I, who am beautiful and keen in mind, that I who have striven, am to become mere ashes.” And the movement which challenged him, saying, “I am a woman,” said also, “I can love. Teach me, you new master, and you will find me humble. Take me, and make me over to fityourfreedom.” But he made no sign of acceptance, merely looked back at her dark head with its flaming eyes, admiringly, with homage and with pity,—but with nothing more. He knew her to the bottom of her heart and he was compassionate, but he would not save her, could not save her.
“So you are going to take the commonplace,” she said at last, irritably, closing her eyes and turning her face away.
“Yes, the very commonplace.”
“And nothing tempts you?” She shot a glance which searched him, knocking to find a hollow sound in his protestations.
“No.”
She walked away to the farthest shade of the cypresses, thinking with a pang: “He will marry Molly. I am—dust and ashes.” Then she was haughty with herself for having craved relief through him. It was foolish for her to believe that she might yet be taught to accept and to feel again as children feel. What couldhedo for her? What had she to do with love? She had never known the word until to-night.
In an instant she was at his side again. “You think me an impossible creature to be shunned?”
“No. I was not thinking ofyouin particular,” he answered gravely. And she felt doubly ashamed, as they descended the terraces of the garden, silently, mournfully.