CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The porter dimmed the lights for the night. In the berth above a man snored, and across the aisle an old woman breathed in gasping squeaks. Jean pulled up the blind, and, propped on her pillow, stared into the night and tried not to hear. But the breathing of the crowded car was persistent and grouped itself into strange rhythms and chords that stripped away spiritual differences and leveled the sleepers to a common physical need.
Jean remembered how she had lain so, her first night in a sleeper, ten years before, and how the hot, dark intimacy had excited her. How near she had felt to some mystery, as if she were just about to penetrate some exciting secret. Even the blackness of the prairie had quivered with it. The red and green semaphores, uncannily obedient to a hidden power, had winked their inclusion in the great adventure. The lonely little stations, specks of light in the night, had been so friendly and knowing. Now they hurt, so bravely and uselessly battling against the engulfing darkness, the thick, limitless blackness of the prairie.
Late in the evening of the fourth day, Jean stepped from the train, and Mary put her arms around her. As they crossed the Bay, they sat very near together in the bow and watched the city lights, diffused in the high fog, glow a red mist over the hills. But it was not until they stood in the small room opening from the Doctor's, that the armor Jean had raised for her own protection loosened, and then she dared not speak for fear of crying.
A gong sounded.
"We meet every night in the Assembly Hall for half an hour or so," Mary said huskily and Jean nodded. "This is going to be your room. Don't wait up for me."
When Mary was gone, Jean switched out the lights and went to the window where she had stood so often in the old days, relieved at Herrick's going, wondering at her own lack of wonder; and a year later, tingling with excitement at the offer from New York. Almost ten crowded years. And now she was back.
When the gong of dismissal sounded, Jean went into her own room and closed the door. She heard Mary come and light the light but she made no sound. After a while the light went out, but from time to time Jean heard a match strike, and she knew that the little doctor was lying there smoking. It was strange to have Mary smoking and thinking about her, as if she were "a case," but there was comfort in it too, as if she had come home and some one was watching over her. At last Jean slept.
In a few days, Mary spoke tentatively of China. But the hour of rekindled interest did not return and they did not mention it again. Jean took on a few cases and attended to them mechanically in the mornings. But no misfortune or sorrow penetrated below the surface of the mind trained to handle them. The real hours of the day were the afternoons, when Jean walked for miles alone against the clean sea wind, or through the gray fog, that now seemed to be filled with the souls of the dead; helpless things that had not been able to get through this grayness into the joy in which they had believed; or lingering souls, loath to leave the only world they had ever known.
In the evenings, Jean took some classes, and tried to mix cheerfully with the other workers, women like those whom it had once so stimulated her to feel working at the tangle with their thin, white fingers. But now they depressed her, sheltered from personal emotion behind their diffused pity for the world. Often, she left them to walk in the Latin Quarter until night emptied the streets of the dark men, forever arguing and gesticulating, and the frowsy women, terrible in their fecundity, nursing their babies from big, brown breasts. The tremendous vitality of these people rested Jean, so that watching, she herself seemed to be accomplishing.
But the days slipped into weeks and the weeks to months and she still stood aside watching. She wrote no letters to New York and received none. Sometimes she felt that she ought to write to Jerome Stuart but when she tried to think of what she would say, she could find nothing.
It was a week before Christmas, a blue, clear day between rains, that Jean sat by the sea and tried to face the coming year. What was she going to do? The waves lapped the sand, fishing smacks scudded by, and white gulls circled overhead. Jean's thoughts went round and round in an ever narrowing circle, and when she tried to slip through this closing space and grasp the coming year, Gregory, on the sand beside her, stirred. Her fingers touched his crisp, dry hair. The beach was crowded with people, but they were alone. The sand was littered with papers, and broken piers jutted into the water and the air was heavy with summer heat. But she was alive with every nerve in her.
Jean got up and began to walk back across the dunes. On and on over the shifting sand, past the straggling cottages of workmen, on through the well-kept streets of wealthy homes, dwindling again to middle-class flats, until finally, at dusk, Jean stood on the last hill looking down into Chinatown. She was tired at last, so that the weariness in her muscles corresponded to the weariness in her soul, and she had the temporary peace that comes of physical and mental accord. The odor of sandalwood and opium and strange eastern things rose to meet her as she went forward down the hill.
Stolid women pattered along, making their ridiculous purchases, haggling over a leek, a single pork chop, a wing of chicken. Calm men sat smoking long pipes in their dim shops. She might have left it the day before. The vast stability of it mocked her. It was like the ever moving, never resting sea—this human necessity to eat, to buy and sell, to move about. Hundreds of people had died since she had walked these streets with Herrick. Death had touched her own life. Thousands of walking, talking units had been taken, thousands of the little empty spaces had lasted for a second and then the moving mass had closed in again.
A woman came from a dark doorway, a rainbow bundle strapped to her back. From the bundle a small brown face with almond eyes looked calmly on the confusion of living. The mother stopped to bargain for a fried fish and Jean touched the smooth, brown cheek.
"A silly mess, isn't it, baby?"
The mother turned instantly and moved farther into the familiar safety of her own people. At the corner Jean stopped again, looking toward Portsmouth Square, the benches filled with men and boys, the familiar refuse of Babary Coast. She was still looking when a man, hurrying round the corner, brought up so suddenly that he seemed to have been thrown back upon his heels.
"I beg your pardon."
She turned quickly and looked at Franklin Herrick.
Jean spoke first. "I don't know why it is so surprising. I suppose it would have been stranger if we hadn't met."
"But I didn't know you were here."
"No, of course you didn't."
They stood looking at each other. Herrick had grown heavier, his features had coarsened. He looked untidy.
"I—I am really glad."
Jean smiled. The implication of possible regret onherpart was so Herricky.
"Why, no, why should I?" She answered his unspoken thought, but Herrick did not notice. The interest of the thing claimed him as nothing had done for months. He had once been married to this large, prosperous-looking person, the one woman whom he had never been able to influence, to swerve a hair from her own path. And here she was after eleven years, looking at him with the same straight look, throwing aside all sentiment, going violently to the bottom of every little question, as if it were a matter of importance.
"Could we go and have tea somewhere? Unless you are in a hurry."
"It was you who seemed to be in a hurry."
"Well, I'm not, now. Tea, then?"
They turned, and Jean knew that Herrick would go straight to the tea house where they had had their first tea, but when he ordered the same little almond cakes and preserved ginger, Jean laughed.
"What is it?"
"I knew you would do that."
"Did you? But you always did know what I would do. I think that was the trouble, I could never feel masculine and superior. I always felt like a window with you, as if you were looking straight through me."
Jean's eyes sobered. She must have hurt deeply, more often than she had known.
"That would have pleased me terribly once on a time. I should have adored making people feel like windows."
Herrick waited until the waiter had shuffled away for more hot water.
"Doesn't it make you feel that way now?" This was going to be really interesting.
"No. It wouldn't. But then one changes a lot in eleven years."
"Less two months," he added softly.
Was he actually going to set a stage? But he looked so seedy and heavy and bored, that Jean's annoyance melted in pity again.
"When you think of it as more than a tenth of a century, there seems plenty of time, doesn't there?"
A tenth of a century! It was horrible put that way; an eternity. And so like Jean. A flush crept up to Herrick's eyes and he looked away.
"Youhave made good. Your tenth of a century has not been wasted."
And Jean saw, as if he had told her, the sordid sequence of the years to him. The knowledge of that dreary waste saddened her.
"I have worked. The East is full of opportunity."
Work, opportunity. The old worship of effort for its own sake. Herrick forced back the words that rose to his lips.
"Yes. I saw that you had done some big thing about tubercular tenements. The papers here had quite a bit about it. I think some one tried to start a movement like it."
Jean shrank. She could not talk of that to him.
"Yes," she said shortly. "I had something to do with it, but so had a lot of other people."
But she would lead. It was her way to lead and then to share the credit. It was the old, maddeningly generous way. No, she had not changed, not really, no matter what she said. Her life had gone as she had planned it. Nothing had swerved her from her ideal of work and success. Hard and cold and intrinsically selfish, she had forced life to her will. And he: a cloying affair with The Kitten, more and shorter affairs, always seeking, never finding, wasted through his own capacity to feel, dragged down by the biggest thing in him, the weakness that might have been a strength.
If Jean had cared! It would have taken such a little from her store of patience and faith in herself. She had been niggardly, hoarded it for herself.
"You have had a lot," he said at last, "everything you ever wanted."
From the tragic emptiness of his eyes Jean turned her own. Before his, the emptiness of her days stood clean and filled with happy memories.
"Ihavehad a lot."
The grotesquely carved balcony vanished into the tea-room of the upper thirties. Instead of Herrick, heavy and soft with regret, Gregory sat, strong and happy in his success, and she had wished for a moment that he had not won, and had been proud and miserable and weak with love. Tears rushed to Jean's eyes and she bit her lip to keep them back.
Herrick started. Not even to Jean could work alone bring that look. Slowly the color left his face.
"You—have found out what love is, too."
Jean nodded. Herrick covered his face hastily with his hand. He had been right then, right in his first analysis, so long ago, by the camp fires in the sandy coves. It had been in Jean always. In those silly, idealistic first weeks of their marriage, when he had been content with so little. It had been there the night he had seized and kissed her and she had pushed him away. It had been there, hidden so deep from his touch, that he had ceased to believe in its existence.
And some one else had touched it to life. He sat with his shoulders bowed, his face hidden. After a long time he said:
"You are married, then?"
His hand still hid his face. The hand, too, had coarsened and grown thick. There was black hair along the joints and the nails were ill-kept. And once Jean had liked Herrick's hands. They had held hers so surely, racing along the sands.
"No," she said quietly. "Not legally. He was married and had a child." After all, it was not much to give in atonement, this little confidence, but it was the best she had.
For a moment Herrick did not move. Then his hand came slowly down. He stared, puzzled. Amazement and finally understanding flashed across his face. Herrick leaned back in his chair and laughed aloud.
"Good Lord, Jean.You—an affair!"
Jean rose. Her knees were shaking and she was cold.
"Don't," she commanded in a whisper, and Herrick, half risen from his chair, sank back. Seeing nothing, Jean crossed the balcony, walked swiftly through the great banquet hall and down the stairs to the street.
Herrick sat where he was until the waiter came and asked him to move his table to make room for a group of long-coated merchants in gowns of silk. Then he paid the bill and went. It was night.
In her room at the settlement, Jean walked up and down, her hands gripped behind her in the old habit. Twice Mary came to the door and listened to the even stride, and went back to her book and tried to read. It was close on one o'clock when the door opened and Jean came in. Instinctively, Mary rose as if to meet a crisis. At the movement, Jean laid her hands on the doctor's shoulders and forced her gently down. Then, just as she had done on the night she had left The Kitten standing by the greasy table, and on the night when she had told Mary of her desire for a child of Gregory's, Jean dropped to her knees, and, sitting back on her heels, said quietly:
"Mary, I'm going back to New York just as fast as a train will take me. I'm a weak, cowardly idiot."
"Really? I don't know that I would put it quite so strongly myself."
Jean smiled. "That's not strong enough, Mary, not by half."
"Maybe not. But why this sudden realization?"
"I had tea with Franklin this afternoon."
"Well?"
"Poor Boy Blue! Poor, weak, vain, longing Begee!"
"Jean!" Mary gripped her shoulders. "What fool thing are you contemplating now? You're not going to tow That back East, are you?"
"Good Lord, no!" Jean laughed as Mary had not heard her laugh since her arrival. There was a silence so long that the doctor drifted down a dozen false paths of conjecture before Jean said:
"Mary, do you remember that vacation I took suddenly, after telling you that night—just before you left? You knew, didn't you?"
"Yes. I knew. I would have stayed, Jean, only it wouldn't have done any good."
"No. I was glad you weren't there. It made it easier, in a way. And I was glad when Pat went, too, and the children. I had only to deceive mummy, then—and keep going." Jean stopped and Mary smoked two cigarettes before she began again.
"And then mummy died and there was no need to pretend any more, no need for anything. Mary, it wasn't true that I came West for a vacation. I didn't come to see you. I came to leave it all. I let go."
There was another long pause, before Jean went on.
"I had loved a man so that his going took all the meaning out of life. And I went on for a while through a kind of inertia and because, from a baby, mummy had beaten a sense of duty into me. It was no force of my own. I had jumped into a stream, and when the current was too strong for my strength I went down, just as Franklin and Flop and The Kitten, and all those whom I used to despise, went down when their particular current was too strong for them. Why, on the night I got Gregory's letter, if I could have gone to him I would have. I would have had it all back, under any conditions, at any price. Nothing mattered, nothing in the whole world, but to feel his arms about me, to know that it had not finished. I would have gone to her, just as The Kitten came, and asked her to give him to me."
"But you didn't, Jean."
"No. Because something in me, that I hated for its clearness, saw that if it had been to him what it had been to me, he would never have written that letter. I had had nothing, Mary, or such a little part of what I had believed I had."
Jean shivered. Mary's hand moved to comfort, but did not.
"And then, this afternoon, when Franklin said I had had everything, and I saw him sitting there heavier and coarsened and so empty—Mary, he's so tragically empty—it came to me suddenly that I had had a lot. I have always had friendship, Pat and you, and unshakeable love like mummy's, and I had those wonderful months with Gregory, and not even the ending of it can really take them away, and I wanted to give Franklin something, so I told him that I had loved a married man and that we had never been legally married."
A little smile twitched the corners of Jean's lips.
"And he leaned back in his chair and laughed and said: 'Good Lord, Jean—you—an affair!' and I have been listening to that laugh and hearing that 'you—an affair?' ever since. And in a way, he is right."
"Jean!"
"Yes, he is. You see, I had never thought of it like that, stripped of all the personal element, just bare and stark as it would sound in a court of law. It wasme, and so it was different. What is an affair, technically? It's a love, without legal bonds, that breaks up or dies of its own accord. Never mind what it is to the parties concerned, that's what it is to the world. That's what my love for Gregory is to the world, to Franklin; what his and The Kitten's and Flop's and The Tiger's was to me."
"Jean, you're crazy. Isn't the spirit anything?"
"Everything. But I am trying to make it clear what it was to Franklin——"
"Of course it would be that to him."
"And what he made me see. How do I know the measure of the force that drove him to The Kitten? We have no measure but our own needs. Fifteen years ago, would I have thought it possible, when the days wouldn't pass fast enough to get me into life and work, that a day would come when success, achievement, the chosen work of years, would all shrivel to nothing because one certain man had gone out of them? Three years ago, would I have believed that Gregory could fill his days without me, could have gone on without my sympathy and love and understanding? That he could have nothing deeper in his life than that chattering doll? Mary, there's only one thing that I am sure of, and that is that we don't know a single thing about any one else, or ourselves, either."
Jean rose and stood looking down at Mary.
"And so you are going back?"
"Yes. I am going back. I am not going to drift, here, beside the sea and hills, which are my Kitten, my succession of sordid loves, my easiest way. I am going back. It won't be easy. I know that. There will be times—Mary, you don't know what it means to die inside, to see and never to feel, not even anger, to have nothing sharper than memory."
"And you don't know, Jean," Mary spoke slowly and rose from her chair as if she had grown very tired, "what it means to have been emotionally comfortable all your life. Never to have gone down nor up. Never to have died nor been alive. To have grown old in comfort. A kind of paradox, isn't it, to have been always so comfortable that sometimes it hurts."