"I lie so composedlyNow in my bed—"
"I lie so composedlyNow in my bed—"
I knew at last, as I gazed, that all her life, and all mine, as well, had been to his profit. That out of this, too, he had wrought some of his greatness.
The interior of the vault was of red marble, and, such of chiselling as there was done, seemed wonderful to me even in my frame of mind. I took it all in, through unwilling, though fascinated eyes.
I have never seen it since. I can never forget it.
Yet art is, and always has been, so much to me, that I could not help, even in my strangely wrought-up mental condition, comprehending and admiring his scheme and the masterly manner in which he had worked it out.
At my feet, as I stood on the threshold, was an elaborate scroll engraved on the stone and surrounded with a wreath of leaves, that vied with the tombs of the oldworld. As I gazed at it, and read the gothic letters in which it was set forth that this monument was erected in adoration of this woman, how well I remembered the day when we had crouched together over those stones in the crypt at Certosa, to admire the chiselling of Donatello which had inspired this.
There was a space left for the signature of the artist, which would, I knew, some day be written there boldly enough!
In the centre stood the sarcophagus.
I felt its presence, though my eyes avoided it.
Above, on the wall, were the words borne along by carved angels:
"My love she sleeps: Oh, may her sleepAs it was lasting, so be deep."
"My love she sleeps: Oh, may her sleepAs it was lasting, so be deep."
And I seemed to hear her voice intone the words as I had heard them from her lips so many times.
And then my eyes fell—on her! Aye! On her, stretched at full length in her warm and glorious tomb. For above her mortal remains slept her effigy wrought with all the skill of a great art.
I had feared to look upon it, but having looked, I felt that I could never tearmyself away from its peace and loveliness.
The long folds of the drapery fell straight from the small, round throat to the tiny unshod feet, and so wonderfully was it wrought, that it seemed as if the living beautiful flesh of the slender body was still quick beneath it. The exquisite hands that I knew so well—so delicate, and yet so strong—were gently crossed upon her breast, and her arms held a long stemmed lily, emblem of purity, and it looked to me there like a martyr's palm.
Perhaps it was the pale reflection from the red walls, but the figure seemed too real to be mere stone!
I forgot the irony of the fact that I was merely seeing her through his eyes—the eyes of the man who had robbed me. I felt only her presence. I fell on my knees. I flung my arms across the beautiful form—no colder to my embrace than had been the living woman! As I recoiled from the death-like touch, my eyes fell on the words carved on the face of the sarcophagus, and once more, it was like the voice that was hushed in my ears.
"I pray to God that she may lieForever with unopened eyeWhile the dim sheeted ghosts go by."
"I pray to God that she may lieForever with unopened eyeWhile the dim sheeted ghosts go by."
"Amen," I said, with all my heart, to the words he had carved above her, for what, after the fever of such a life, could be so welcome to her as dreamless, eternal silence, in which there would be no more passion, no more struggling, no more love?
And, if I wished with all my soul, that the great surprise of death might, for her, have been peace and silence, did I not bar myself as well as him from the hope of Heaven?
How long I stood there, with hungry eyes devouring the marble effigy of her I so loved—now tortured by its fidelity, now punished by its coldness—I never knew.
Sometimes I noticed the changing of the light, the shifting of the shadows, as the sun swung steadily upward, but it was a subconscious observation which did not recall me to myself and the present.
Back, back turned my thoughts to the past.
Here, where she now lay in her gorgeous tomb, had then stood an arbor, and below had roared the rushing river.
It was the night of our wedding.
Then, as now, on this very spot, I had looked down on that fair pale face, andthen it had given me back a gaze as lifeless as this.
I had missed my bride from the little throng in the quaint house beyond. I had stolen out to seek her. Instinctively I had turned to the old arbor above the river, where her hours of meditation had always been passed.
It was there I had found her as a child, when I came to bring her father's dying message. It was there I had asked her to become my wife. It was there we three had first stood together.
For a week before the wedding she had been in a strange mood, tearless, but nervous, and sad! Still, it had not seemed to me an unnatural mood in such a woman, on the eve of her marriage.
Fate is ironical.
I remembered that I was serenely happy as I sped up the hill in search of her, and so sure that I knew where to find her. Light scudding clouds crossed the track of the moon, which, with a broadly smiling face, rolled up the heavens at a spinning pace, now appearing, now disappearing behind the flying clouds.
I was humming gaily as I strode alongthe narrow path. Nothing tugged at my heart strings to warn me of approaching sorrow. There was no signal in all nature to prepare me for the end in a complete shipwreck of all my dreams. The peace about me gave no hint of its cynicism. Nothing, either within or without, hinted that my hours of happiness and content were running out rapidly to the last sand!
I had reached the shallow steps that led up the knoll to the arbor!
At that moment the clouds were swept off from the face of the moon, and the white light fell full on her.
But she was not alone. She rested in the arms of my friend, as, God help me, she had never rested in mine—in an abandon that was only too eloquent.
What was said?
Who but God knows that now?
What do men like us, who have thought themselves one in all things, until one love rends them asunder, say at such a time? As for me, I cannot recall a word!
I did not even see his face.
I think he saw mine no more.
We seemed to see into the soul of each other, through the very heart of that frail woman between us, that slender creature inthe bridal dress, who sank down before us, as if the colliding passions of two strong men had killed her.
It was he who raised her up. His hands placed her in my arms. No need to say that she was blameless. I knew all that.
It was only Fate after all, that I blamed, yet the fatalist is human. He suffers in living like other men—sometimes more, because he refuses to struggle in the clutches of Chance!
As I gazed down into her white face, I heard the steps of my friend, even above the roaring of the river, as he strode down the hillside, out of my life! And I know not even to-day which was the bitterest grief, the loss of my faith in being loved, or the passing from my heart of that man!
Of the pain of the night that followed, only the silence and our own hearts knew.
Love and passion are so twinned in some hours of life that one cannot distinguish in himself the one from the other.
Into my keeping "to have and to hold," the law had given this beautiful woman, "until death should us part." I loved her! But, out of her heart, at oncestronger and weaker than mine, my friend had barred me.
It is not in hours like these, that all men can be sane.
I thought of what might have been, if they had not met that night, and my ignoble side craved ignorance of that Chance, or the brutality to ignore it.
I looked down into that cold face as I laid her from the arms that had borne her down the hill—laid her on what was to have been her nuptial couch—and closed the door between us and all the world.
We were together—alone—at last!
I had dreamed of this hour. Here was its realization. I watched the misery of remembrance dawn slowly on her white face. I pitied her as I gazed at her, yet my whole being cried out in rage at its own pity. On her trembling lips I seemed to see his kisses. In her frightened eyes I saw his image. The shudder that shook her whole body as her eyes held mine, confessed him—and that confession kept me at bay.
All that night I sat beside her.
What mad words I uttered a merciful nature never let me recall.
In the chill dawn I fled from her presence.
The width of the world had lain between us, me—and this woman whom I had worshipped, of whom a consuming jealousy had made ten years of my life a mad fever, which only her death had cured. Saner men have protested against the same situation that ruined me—and yet, even in my reasoning moments, like this, I knew that to have rebelled would have been to have forced a tragic climax before the hour at which Fate had fixed it.
When something—I know not what—recalled me again to the present, I found that I had sat by her a day, as, on our last meeting, I watched out the night. The sun, which had sent its almost level rays in at the east door of the tomb when I entered, was now shining in brilliant almost level rays in at the west.
The day was passing.
A shadow fell from the opposite door. I became suddenly conscious of his presence, and, once more, across her body, I looked into my friend's eyes.
Between us, as on that dreadful night, she was stretched!
But she was at peace.
Our colliding emotions might rend us, they could never again tear at her gentle heart. That was at rest.
Over her we stood once more, as if years had not passed—years of silence.
Above the woman we had both loved, we two, who had stood shoulder to shoulder in battle, been one in thought and ambition until passion rent us asunder, met as we parted, but she was at peace!
We had severed without farewells.
We met without greetings.
We stood in silence until he waved me to a broad seat behind me, and sank into a similar niche opposite.
We sat in the shadow.
She lay between us in the level light of the setting sun, which fell across her from the wide portal, and once more our eyes met on her face, but they would not disturb her calm.
His influence was once more upon me.
In the silence—for it was some time before he spoke, and I was dumb—my accursed eye for detail had taken in the change in him. Yet I fancied I was not looking at him. I noted that he had aged—that this was one of the periods in himwhich I knew so well—when a passion for work was on him, and the fever and fervor of creation trained him down like a race-horse, all spirit and force. I noted that he still wore the velveteens and the broad hat and loose open collar of his student days.
Sitting on either side of the tomb he had built to enshrine her, on carved marble seats such as Tuscan poets sat on, in the old days, to sing to fair women, with our gaze focussed on the long white form between us—ah, between us indeed!—his voice broke the long silence.
He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and the broad brim of his soft hat swept the marble floor with a gentle rhythmic swish, as it swung idly from his loosened grasp. I heard it as an accompaniment to his voice.
His eyes never once strayed from her face.
"You think you are to be pitied," he said. "You are wrong! No one who has not sinned against another needs pity. I meant you no harm. Fate—my temperament, your immobility, the very gifts that have made me what I am were to blame—if blame there were. Every oneof us must live out his life, according to his nature. I, as well as you!
"When, on this very spot where we last parted, you told me that you loved her, I swear to you, if need be, that I rejoiced. I was glad that she would have you to make the future smooth for her. Later I grew to envy you. It was for your safety, as well as mine and hers, that I decided to see neither of you again until she had been some time your wife. No word of love, no confidence of any kind, had ever passed between us. When I wrote you that I should not be here to see you married, and when not even your reproaches could move me, I had already engaged my passage on a sailing ship bound for the Azores. I had planned to put a long uncertain voyage between you and any possibility that I might mar your chances for happiness, for the nearer the day came, the more—in spite of myself—I resented it!
"My good intentions were thwarted by—Fate.
"For some reason, forgotten and unimportant, the Captain deferred lifting anchor for a whole week. I called myself unpretty names for thinking that I couldnot even see her without danger. I despised myself for the judgment that accused me of being such a scamp as to think I would do anything to rob her of the protection and safety you could give her, and I could not, and an egoist for being possessed with the idea that I could if I would.
"Suddenly I felt quite sure of myself.
"Yet I had meant to see her without being seen, when I hurried so unexpectedly down here on your wedding night. I fancied I only longed to see what a lovely bride she would make—she who as a child, a girl, a maiden, had been in your eyes the most exquisite creature you had ever known; she whom I had avoided for years, because I, of all men, could least afford to take a place in her life! I longed to see those eyes, still so pure, under her bridal veil.
"I came in secret! I saw her—and all prudence fled out of me, leaving but one instinct.
"Was it my fault that, alone, she fled from the house? That, with her veil thrown over her arm, she ran directly by me, like a sprite in the moonlight, to this spot?
"The rest you know.
"It is not you who need pity!
"You have the pain of an imperishable loyalty in your soul. It is like a glory in your face, in spite of all you have suffered. As I look at you, it seems but yesterday that all was well between us.
"I lost much in losing you.
"Nor am I sure that you were right to go! But that was for your own nature to decide. In your place I should have fought Fate, I expected you to do it.
"I loved her first, because she satisfied my eyes. I loved her the more that she was denied to me! Yet I knew always that this love was not in me what it was in you. With me it was, like many other emotions of a similar sort—a sentiment that would pass. I tried to think otherwise. But I had awakened her heart, and you, to whom the law had given her, were gone!
"I waited long for your return, or for some sign.
"You neither came nor spoke.
"I argued that something must be done. I owed it to her to offer her my protection.
"I came back here. I met her on this very spot. I said to her, 'Youare alone in the world—your mother has married—she has other children. I have saddened your life with my love. Let me at least help to cheer it again. You need affection. Here it is—in my arms!'
"And, while I waited for her answer, I prayed with all my soul that she might deny me.
"God bless her! She did! I turned away from her with a glad heart, and in that heart I enshrined this woman, who, loving me, had denied me. There I set up her image, pure and inviolate. Two long years I stayed away from her, and as I worked, I worshipped her, and out of that worship I wrought a great thing.
"With time, however, her real image grew faint within me. Other emotions, other experiences seemed to blur and dim it. In spite of myself, I returned here. Once more I stood on this spot, within the gaze of her deep eyes. I began to believe that a love everlasting, all enduring, had been given me! But still it was passion that pleaded for possession, and still it was self-knowledge that looked on in fear.
"Passion bade me plead: 'You love me! You need me! Come to me!' And fear kept my heart still, in dread of her consent.
"But she looked up into my face with eyes that seemed to widen under mine, and simply whispered, 'My mother.' The heart that knew and understood now all that sad history seemed to feel that her act might re-open the mother's old wound; that the verdict 'like mother, like daughter' would turn virtue back to sin again.
"Once more I went out into the world with a light heart! Her virtue, her strength, seemed to be mine. I went back to my work with renewed spirit, back to my life with no new self-reproach.
"But once more I swung round the circle. With a perversity that, dreading success, and conscious of fear, yet longs to strive for what it dreads to win, I returned to her again. The death of her mother was my new excuse.
"She came to me—here, as usual. But this time she came leading by the hand her little sister, and I felt her armored against me even before I spoke.
"You, who used to believe in a merciful God, can you explain to me why he has left in the nature of man, created—so you believe—in His own image—that impulse to destroy that which he loves? I loved her for exactly what she was. Iloved her because she had the courage to resist me. Yet from each denial so ardently desired, so thankfully received, my soul sprang up strengthened in desire. Safe above me I worshipped her. Once in my arms, I knew, only too well, that even that love would pass as all other emotions had done. I knew I should put her aside, gently if I could, urgently, if I must, and pass on. That is my Fate! Everything that enters my life leaves something I need—and departs! For what I have not, I hunger. What I win soon wearies me. It is the price life exacts for what it gives me.
"So, when August of this year came round, I found myself once more standing here.
"Ten years had passed since we stood here with her between us—ten years that had laid their richest gifts on her beauty. This time she was indeed alone. As I looked into her face, I somehow thought of Agamemnon's fair daughter doomed to die a virgin. You can see my 'Iphigenia' in the spring, if you chance to be in Paris.
"This time, self-knowledge deserted me. The past was forgotten. The future was undreaded. The passion in myheart spoke without reserve or caution! I no longer said: 'You need me! You love me!' I cried out: 'I can no longer live without you!' I no longer said, 'Come to me!' I pleaded, 'Take me to your heart. There, where my image is, let me rest at last. I have waited long, be kind to me.'
"I saw her sway toward me as once before she had done. It was too late to look backward or forward. I had conquered. In my weakness I believed it was thus ordained—that I deserved some credit for waiting so long.
"Yet, when she left me here alone, having promised, with downcast eyes that avoided mine, to place her hand in mine, and walk boldly beside me down the forbidden path of the world, I fell down on the spot her feet had pressed, and wept bitterly, as I had never done before in all my life. Wept over the shattered ideal, the faith I had so wilfully torn down, the miserable victory of my meanest self.
"I thought the end was come. Fate was merciful to me, however!
"I had myself fixed the following Thursday as the day for our departure. As I dated a letter to her that night mymind involuntarily reckoned the days, and I was startled to find that Thursday fell on that fatal tenth of August.
"I had not thought I could be so tortured in my mind as I was by the dread that she should notice the dire coincidence.
"She did!
"The hour that should have brought her to me, brought a note instead. It was dated boldly 'August tenth.' It was without beginning or signature. It said—I can repeat every word—'Of the two roads to self-destruction open to me, I have chosen the one that will, in the end, give the least pain to you. I love you. I have always loved you since I was a child. I do not regret anything yet! Thank God for me that I depart without ever having seen a look of weariness in the eyes that gazed so lovingly into mine when we parted, and thank Him for yourself that you will never see a look of reproach in mine. I know no time so fitting to say a long farewell for both of us as this—Farewell, then.'
"I knew what I should find when I went up the hill.
"The doctors said 'heart disease.'She had been troubled with some such weakness. I alone knew the truth! As I had known myself, she had known me!
"You think you suffer—you, who might, but for me, have made her happy, as such women should be, in a world of simple natural joys! My friend, loss without guilt is pain—but it is not without the balm of virtuous compensation. You have at least a right to grieve.
"But I! I am forced to know myself. To feel myself borne along in spite of myself; and to realize that she who should have worn a crown of happy womanhood, lies there a sacrifice, to be bewailed like Jepthah's one fair daughter; and to sit here in full dread of the ebbing of even this great emotion, knowing too well that it will pass out of my life when it shall have achieved its purpose, leaving only as evidencethis—another great work, crystalized into immortality in everlasting stone. I know that I cannot long hold it here in my heart. The day will come—perhaps soon—when I shall stand outside that door, and recognize this as my work, and be proud of it, without the power to grieve, as I do now; when I shall approve my own handiwork, and be unable to mourn forher who was sacrificed to achieve it. What is your pain to mine?"
And I saw the hot tears drop from his eyes. I saw them fall on the marble floor, and they watered the very spot where his name was so soon to spring up in pride to confess his handiwork.
I looked on her calm face. I knew she did not regret her part! I rose, and, without a word, I passed out at the wide door, and, without looking back, I passed down the slope in the dusk, and left them together—the woman I had loved, and the friend I had lost!
As his voice died away, he sat upright quickly, threw a glance about the circle, and, with another fine gesture said: "Et voila!"
The Doctor was the only one to really laugh, though a broad grin ran round the circle.
"Well," remarked the Doctor, who had been leaning against a tree, and indulging in shrugs and an occasional groan, which had not even disconcerted the story teller, "I suppose that is how that very great man, your governor, did the trick. I can see him in every word."
"That is all you know about it," laughed the Sculptor. "That is not a bit how the governor did it. That is how I should have done it, had I been the governor, and had the old man's chances. I call that an ideal thing to happen to a man."
"Not even founded on fact—which might have been some excuse for telling it," groaned the Critic. "I'd love to write a review of that story. I'd polish it off."
"Of course you would," sneered the Sculptor. "That's all a critic is for—to polish off the tales he can't write. I call that a nice romantic, ideal tale for a sculptor to conceive, and as the Doctor said the other night, it is a possible story, since I conceived it, and what the mind of mortal can conceive, can happen."
"The trouble," said the Journalist, "with chaps like you, and the Critic, is that your people are all framework. They're not a bit of flesh and blood."
"I'd like to know," said the Sculptor, throwing himself back in his chair, "who has a right to decide that?"
"What I'd like to know," said the Youngster, "is, what did she do betweentimes? Of course he sculpted, and earned slathers of money. But she—?"
"Oh, ouch—help!" cried the Sculptor. "Do I know?"
"Exactly!" answered the Critic, "and that you don't sticks out in every line of your story."
"Goodness me, you might ask the same thing about Leda, or Helen of Troy."
"Ha! Ha!" laughed the Doctor. "But we know what they did!"
"A lot you do. It is because they are old classics, and you accept them, whereas my story is quite new and original—and you were unprepared for it, and so you can't appreciate it. Anyway, it's my first-born story, and I'll defend it with my life."
Only a laugh replied to the challenge, and the attitude of defense he struck, as he leaped to his feet, though the Journalist said, under his breath, "It takes a carver in stone to think of a tale like that!"
"But think," replied the Doctor, "how much trouble some women would escape if they kept on saying A B C like that—for the A B C is usually lovely—and when it was time to X Y Z—often terrible, they just slipped out through the 'open door.'"
"On the other hand, theyrisklosing heaps of fun," said the Journalist.
"What I like about that story," said the Lawyer, "is that it is so aristocratic. Every one seems to have plenty of money. They all three do just what they like, have no duties but to analyze themselves, and evidently everything goes like clockwork. The husband enjoys being morbid, and has the means to be gloriously so. The sculptor likes to carve Edgar Allan Poe all over the place, and the fair lady is able to gratify the tastes of both men."
"You can laugh as much as you please," sighed the Sculptor, "I wish it had happened to me."
"Well," said the Doctor, "you have the privilege of going to bed and dreaming that it did."
"Thank you," answered the Sculptor. "That is just what I am going to do."
"What did I tell you last night?" said the Doctor, under his breath, as he watched the Sculptor going slowly toward the house. "Bet he has been telling that tale to himself under many skies for years!"
"I suppose," laughed the Journalist, "that the only reason he has never builtthe tomb is that he has never had the money."
"Oh, be fair!" said the Violinist. "He has not built the tomb because he is not his father. The old man would have done it in a minute, only he lacked imagination. You bet he never day-dreamed, and yet what skill he had, and what adventures! He never saw anything but the facts of life, yet how magnificently he recorded them."
"It is a pity," sighed the Violinist, "that the son did not seek a different career."
"What difference does it make after all?" remarked the Doctor. "One never knows when the next generation will step up or down, and, after all, what does it matter?"
"It is all very well for you to talk," said the Critic.
"I assure you that the great pageant would have been just as interesting from any other point of view. It has been a great spectacle,—this living. I'm glad I've seen it."
"Amen to that," said the Divorcée. "I only hope I am going to see it again—even though it hurts."
As I look back, I remember that the next night was one of the most trying of the week.
As we came down to dinner we all had visions of the destruction of Louvain, and the burning of the famous library. It is hard enough to think of lives going out; still, as the Doctor was so fond of saying, "man is born to die, and woman, too," but that the great works of men, his bequest to the coming generations, should be wantonly destroyed, seemed even more horrible, especially to those who love beauty, and the idea of the charred leaves of the library flying in the air above the historic city of catholic culture, made us all feel as if we were sitting down to a funeral service rather than a very good dinner.
Matters were not made any gayer because Angéle, who was waiting on table, had rings round her eyes, which told of sleepless nights. And why? We were mere spectators. We had been interested to dispute and look on. But she knew that somewhere out there in the northeast her man was carrying a gun.
Yet all about us the country was so lovely and so tranquil, horses were walking the fields, and, even as we sat at dinner, we could hear the voices and the heavy feet of the peasant women as they went home from their work. The garden had never been more beautiful than it was that evening, with the silver light of the moon through the trees, and the smell of the freshly watered earth and flowers.
We had no doubt who was to contribute the story. The Divorcée was dressed with unusual care for the rôle, and carried a big lace bag on her arm, and, as she leaned back in her chair, she pulled one of the big old fashioned candles in its deep glass toward her, and said with a nervous laugh:
"I shall have to ask you to let me read my story. You know I am not accustomed to this sort of thing. It is really my very 'first appearance,' and I could not possiblytell it as the rest of you more experienced people can do," and she took the manuscript out of her lace bag, and, settling herself gracefully, unrolled it. The Youngster put a stool under her pretty feet, and the Doctor set a cushion behind her back, while the Journalist, with a laugh, poured her a glass of water, and the Violinist ceremoniously leaned over, and asked, "Shall I turn for you?"
She could not help laughing, but it did not make her any the less nervous, or her voice any the less shaky as she began:
It was after dinner on one of those rare occasions when they dined alone together.
They were taking coffee in Mrs. Shattuck's especial corner of the drawing-room, and she had just asked her husband to smoke.
She was leaning back comfortably in a nest of cushions, in her very latest gown, with a most becoming light falling on her from the tall, yellow-shaded lamp.
He was facing her—astride his chair, in a position man has loved since creation.
He was just thinking that his wife had never looked handsomer, finer, in fact, in all her life—quite the satisfactory, all-round, desirable sort of a woman a man's wife ought to be.
She was wondering if he would ever be any less attractive to all women than he was now at forty-two—or any better able to resist his own power.
As she put her coffee cup back on the tiny table at her elbow, he leaned forward, and picked up a book which lay open on a chair near him, and carelessly glanced at it.
"Schopenhauer," and he wrinkled his brows and glanced half whimsically down the page. "I never can get used to a woman reading that stuff—and in French, at that. If you took it up to perfect your German there would be some sense in it."
Mrs. Shattuck did not reply. When a moment later, she did speak it was to ignore his remark utterly, and ask:
"TheKaiser Wilhelmgot off in good season this morning—speaking of German things?"
"Oh, yes," was the indifferent reply, "at ten o'clock, quite promptly."
"I suppose she was comfortable, and that you explained why I could not come?"
"Certainly. One of your beastly head-aches. She understood."
"Thank you."
Shattuck yawned lazily, and changed the subject, which did not seem to interest him.
"Do you mean to say," he asked, still turning the leaves of the book he held, "that this pleases you?"
"Not exactly."
"Well, amuses you? Instructs you, if you like that better?"
"No, I mean to say simply—since you insist—that he speaks the truth, and there are some—even among women—who must know the truth and abide by it."
"Well, thank Heaven," said the man, pulling at his cigar, "that most women are more emotional than intelligent—as Nature meant them to be."
Mrs. Shattuck examined her daintily polished nails, rubbed them carefully on the palm of her hand, as women have a trick of doing, and then polished them on her lace handkerchief, before she said, "Yes, it is a pity that we are not all like that,—a very great pity—for our own sakes. Yet, unluckily, some of uswillthink."
"But the thinking woman is so rarely logical, so unable to take life impersonally, that Schopenhauer does her no good. Heonly fills her mind with errors, mistrust, unhappiness."
"You men always argue that way with women—as if life were not the same for us as for you. Pass me the book. I wager that I can open it at random, and that you cannot deny the truth of the first sentence I read."
He passed her the book.
She took it, laid it open carelessly on her knees, bending the covers far back that it might stay open, and she gave her finger tips a final rub with her handkerchief before she looked at the page. She paused a bit after she glanced at it, then picked up the book and read: "'L'homme est par Nature porté à l'inconstance dans l'amour, la femme à la fidelité. L'amour de l'homme baisse d'une façon sensible à partir de l'instant où il a obtenu satisfaction: il semble que toute autre femme ait plus d'attrait que celle qu'il possède.'"
She laid the book down, but she did not look at him.
"Rubbish," was his remark.
"Yes, I know. You men always find it so easy to say 'rubbish' to all natural truths which you prefer not to discuss."
"Well, my dear Naomi, it seems to methat if you are to advocate Schopenhauer, you must go the whole length with him. The fault is in Nature, and you must accept it as inevitable, and not kick against it."
"I don't kick against Nature—as you put it—I kick against civilization, which makes laws regardless of Nature, which deliberately shuts its eyes to all natural truths in regard to the relations of men to women,—and is therefore forced to continually wink to avoid confessing its folly."
"Civilization seems to me to have done the best it could with a very difficult problem. It has not actually allowed different codes of morals to men and women, and it may have had to wink on that account. Right there, in your Schopenhauer, you have a primal reason, that is, if you chose to follow your philosopher to the extent of actually believing that Nature has deliberately, from the beginning, protected women against that sin of which so much is made, and to which she has, as deliberately, for economic reasons of her own, tempted men."
"I do believe it, truly."
"You are no more charitable towardmy sex than most women are. Yet neither your teacher nor you may be right. A theoretic arguer like Schopenhauer makes good enough reading for calm minds, but he is bad for an emotional temperament, and, by Jove, Naomi, he was a bad example of his own philosophy."
"My dear Dick, I am afraid I read Schopenhauer because I thought what he writes long before I ever heard of him. I read him because did I not find a clear logical mind going the same way my mind will go, I might be troubled with doubts, and afraid that I was going quite wrong."
"Well, the deuce and all with a woman when she begins to read stuff like that is her inability to generalize. You women take everything home to yourselves. You try to deduct conclusions from your own lives which men like Schopenhauer have scanned the centuries for. The natural course of your life could hardly have provided you with the pessimism with which—I hope you will pardon my remark, my dear—you have treated me several times in the past few months. Chamfort and Schopenhauer did that. But these are not subjects a man discusses easily with his wife."
"Indeed? Then that is surely an error of civilization. If a man can discuss such matters more easily with a woman who is not his wife, it is because there is no frankness in marriage. Dick, did it ever occur to you that a man and woman, strongly attracted toward one another, might live together many years without understanding each other?"
"God forbid!"
"How easily you say that!"
"I have heard that most women think they are not understood, but I never reflected on the matter."
"You and I have not troubled one another much with our doubts and perplexities."
"You and I have been very happy together—I hope." There was a little pause before the last two words, as if he had expected her to anticipate them with something, and there was a half interrogative note in his voice. She made no response, so he went on, "I've surely not been a hard master—and I hope I've not been selfish. I know I've not been unloving."
"And I hope you've not suffered many discomforts on my account. I think, aswomen go, I am fairly reasonable—or I have been."
For some reason Shattuck seemed to find the cigar he was smoking most unsatisfactory. Either it had been broken, or he had unconsciously chewed the end—a thing which he detested—and there was a pause while he discarded the weed, and selected a fresh one. He appeared to be reflecting as he lighted it, and if his mind could have been read, it would have probably been discovered that he was wondering how it had happened that the conversation had taken this turn, and mentally cursing his own stupidity in making any remarks on the Schopenhauer. He was conscious all the time that his wife was looking rather steadily at him, and he knew that at least a conventional reply was expected of him.
"My dear girl," he said, "I look back on ten very satisfactory years of married life. You have been a model wife, a charming companion—and if occasionally it has occurred to me—just lately—that my wife has developed rather singular, to say the least, unflattering ideas of life, why, you have such a brilliant way of putting it, that I am more than half proud that you'vethe brains to hold such ideas, though they are a bit disconcerting to me as a husband. I suppose the development is logical enough. You were always, even as a girl, inclined to making footnotes. I suppose their present daring is simply the result of our being just a little older than we used to be. I suppose if we did not outgrow our illusions, the road to death would be too tragic."
For a moment she made no reply. Then, as if for the first time owning to the idea which had long been uppermost in her mind, she said suddenly: "The truth of the matter is, that I really believe marriage is foolish. I do believe that no man ever approached it without regretting that civilization had made it necessary, and that many men would escape, at the very last moment, if women did not so rigidly hold them to their promises, and if, between two ridiculous positions, marriage having been pushed nearest, had not become desperately inevitable."
"How absurd, Naomi, when you see the whole procession of men walking,—according to their dispositions—calmly or eagerly to their fate every day."
"Nevertheless, I think the pre-nuptialconfessions of a majority of men of our class, would prove that what I say is true."
"Are you hinting that it was true in your case?"
"Perhaps."
Shattuck gave an amused laugh. "Do you mean to say that you kept me to the point?"
"Not exactly. At that time I had an able bodied father who would have had to be dealt with. Besides, a man does not own up even to himself—not always—when he finds himself face to face with the inevitable. I am not speaking of what men talk about in such cases, or of what they do, but of what they feel,—of the fact that, in too many instances, Nature not having meant men for bondage, after they have passed the Rubicon to that spot from which the code of civilized honor does not permit them to turn back, they usually have a period of regret, and are forced to make a real effort to face the Future,—to go on, in fact."
The smile had died out of Shattuck's face and he said quite seriously: "As far as we are concerned, Naomi, I have very different recollections of the whole affair."
"Have you? And yet, months beforewe were married, I knew that it would not have broken your heart if the wedding had not come off at all."
"My dear, the modern heart does not break easily in this age. We are schooled to meet the accidents of life with some philosophy."
"And yet to have lost you then, would have killed me."
Shattuck looked at her sharply, with, one might almost have said, a new interest, but she was no longer looking at him. She went on, hurriedly: "You loved me, of course. I was of your world. I was a woman that other men liked, and therefore a desirable woman. I was of good family—altogether your social equal, in fact, quite the sort of woman it became you to marry. I pleased you—and I loved you."
"Thank you, my dear," he said. "In ten years, I doubt if you have ever made so frank a declaration as that—in words." He was wondering, if, after all, she were going to develop into an emotional woman, and his heart gave a quick leap at the very thought—for there are hours when a woman who runs too much to head has a man at a cruel disadvantage.
"Things are so much harder, so much more complex for a woman," she went on.
"For the protection of the community?"
"Perhaps. Still, it is not always pleasant to be a woman,—and yet think; a woman whose reason has been mistakenly developed at the expense of her capacity to enjoy being a woman, and who is forced at the same time to encounter the laws of Nature, and pay at the same time, the penalty of being a woman, and the penalty of knowledge. For, just so surely as we live, we must encounter love.—"
"You might take it out," interrupted the husband, "in feeling flattered that it takes so much to conquer such as you."
"So we might, but that, once conquered, neither man nor Nature has any further use for us, and regret, like art, is long. Not even you can deny," she exclaimed, sitting up in some excitement, and letting her cushions fall in a mess all about her, "that life is very unfair to women."
"Well, I don't see that. Physically it is a little rough on you, but there are compensations."
"I have never been able to discover them. Love itself is hard on a woman.It seems to stir a man's faculties healthily. They seem the stronger and more fit for it. It does not seem to uproot a man's whole being. Does it serve women in that way?"
"I bear witness that it makes some of you deucedly handsome. And I have heard that it makes some of you—good."
"Yes, as chastisement does. No, Life seems to have adjusted matters between men and women very badly, very unjustly."
"And yet, as this life is the only one we know we must adjust ourselves to it as we find it."
"No, no. We had better have accepted the thing as Nature gave it to us. We came into this world like beasts—why aren't we content to live like beasts, and make no pretenses? Women would have nothing to expect then, and there'd be no such thing as broken hearts. In spite of all the polish of civilization, man is simply bent on conquest. Woman is only one phase of the chase to him—a chase in which every active virile man is occupied from his cradle to his grave. You are the conquerors. We are simply the conquered."
Shattuck tried to make his voice light,as he said: "Not always unhappy ones, I fancy."
"I suppose all men flatter themselves that way, and argue that probably the Sabine women preferred their fate to no fate at all."
"Don't be bitter on so old and impersonal a topic, Naomi. It is the law of life that one must give, and one must take. That the emotions differ does not prove that one is better than the other."
Shattuck took a turn up and down the long room, not quite at ease with himself.
Mrs. Shattuck seemed to be thinking. As he passed her, he stopped, picked up her cushions, and re-arranged them about her, with an idle caress by the way, a kiss gently dropped on the inside of her white wrist.
She followed his every movement with a strange speculative look in her eyes, almost as if he were some new and strange animal that she was studying for the first time.
When she spoke again, it was to go on as if she had not been interrupted, "It seems to me that man comes out of a great passion just as good as new, while awoman is shattered—in a moral sense—and never fully recovers herself."
Shattuck's back was toward her when he replied. "Sorry to spoil any more illusions, dear child, but how about the long list of men who are annually ruined by it? The men in the prisons, the men who kill themselves, the men who hang for it?"
"Those are crimes. I am not talking of the criminal classes, but of the world in which normal people live."
"Our set," he laughed, "but that is not the whole world, alas!"
"I know that men—well bred, cultivated, refined, even honorable men,—seem to be able to repeat every emotion of life. A woman scales the heights but once. Hence it must depend, in the case of women capable of deep love—on the men whether the relation into which marriage betrays them be decent or indecent. What I should like to be able to discover is—what provision does either man or civilization propose to make for the woman whom Fate, in wanton irony, reduces, even in marriage, to the self-considered level of the girl in the street?"
There was amazement—even a foreboding—on Shattuck's face as he pausedin his walk, and, for the first time speaking anxiously ejaculated, "I swear I don't follow you!"
She went on as if she had not been interrupted, as if she had something to say which had to be said, as if she were reasoning it out for herself: "Take my case. I don't claim that it is uncommon. I do claim that I was not the woman for the situation. I was an only child. My father's marriage had not been happy. I was brought up by a disappointed man on philosophy and pessimism."
"Old sceptics, and modern scoffers. I remember it well."
"Before I was out of my teens, I had imbibed a mistrust for all emotions. Perhaps you did not know that? You may have thought, because they were not all on the outside, that I had none. My poor father had hoped, with his teachings, to save me from future misery. He had probably thought to spare me the commonplace sorrows of love. But he could not."
"There is one thing, my child, that the passing generation cannot do for its heirs—live for them—luckily. Why, you might as well forbid a rose to blossom byword of mouth, as try to thwart nature in a beautiful healthy woman."
"It seems to me that to bring up a woman as I was brought up only prepares her to take the distemper the quicker."
"I do not remember that of you. But I do know that no woman was ever wooed as hotly as you were—or ever—I swear it—more ardently desired. No woman ever led a man the chase you led me. If ever in those days you were as anxious for my love as you have said you were this evening, no one would have guessed it, least of all I."
"My reason had already taught me that mine was but the common fate of all women: that life was demanding of me the usual tribute to posterity: that the sweetness of the emotion was Nature's trick to make it endurable. But according to Nature's eternal plan, my heart could not listen to my head—it beat so loud when you were by, it could not hear, perhaps. But there was something of my father's philosophy left in me, and when I was alone it would speak, and be heard, too. Even when I believed in you—because I wanted to—and half hoped that all my teaching was wrong, I made a bargain withmyself. I told myself, quite calmly, that I knew perfectly well all the possibilities of the future. That if I went forward with you, I went forward deliberately with open eyes, knowing what, logically, I might expect to find in the future. Ignorance—that blissful comfort of so many women,—was denied me. Still, the spell of Nature was upon me, and for a time I dreamed that a depth of passionate love like mine, a life of loyal devotion might wrap one man round, and keep him safe—might in fact, work a miracle—and make one polygamous man monogamous. But, even while that hope was in my heart, reason rose up and mocked it, bidding me advance into the Future at my peril. I did it, but I made a bargain with myself, I agreed to abide the consequences—and to abide them calmly."
"And during all those days when I supposed we were so near together—you showed me nothing of this that was in your heart."
"Men and women know very rarely anything of the great struggles that go on in the hearts of one another. Besides, I knew how easily you would reply—naturally. We are all on the defensive inthis life. It was with things deeper than words that I was dealing—the things onedoes—not says. Even in the early days of our engagement I knew that I was not as essential to you as you were to me. Life held other interests for you. Even the flattery of other women still had its charm for you. Young as I was, I said to myself: 'If you marry this man—with your eyes open—blame yourself, not him, if you suffer.' I do believe that I have been able to do that."
Shattuck was astride his chair again, his elbows on the back, his chin in his hands. He no longer responded. Words were dangerous. His lips were pressed close together, and there was a long deep line between his eyes.
"My love for you absorbed every other emotion of my life. But I seemed to lack some of the qualities that aid to reconcile other wives to life. I seemed to be without mother-love. My children were dear to me only because they were yours. The maternal passion, which in so many women is the absorbing emotion of life, was denied me. My children were to me merely the tribute to posterity which Life had demanded of me as the penalty ofyour love—nothing more. I must be singularly unfitted for marriage, because, when the hour came in which I felt that I was no longer your wife, your children seemed no longer mine. They merely represented the next generation—born of me. I know that this is very shocking. I have become used to it,—and, it is the truth. I have not blamed you, I could not—and be reasonable. No man can be other than Nature plans or permits, but how I have pitied myself! I have been through the tempest alone. In spite of reason,—in spite of philosophy—I have suffered from jealousy, from shame, from rage, from self contempt. But that is all past now."
She had not raised her voice, which seemed as without feeling as it was without emphasis. She carefully examined her handkerchief corner by corner, and he noticed for the first time how thin her hands had become.
"Naturally," she went on in that colorless voice, "my first impulse was to be done with life. But I could not bring myself to that, much as I desired it. It would have left you such a wretched memory of me. You could never have pardoned me the scandal—and I felt that I had at least the right to leave you a decent recollection of me."
Shattuck's head fell forward on his arms.—The idea of denial or protest did not occur to him.
The steady voice went monotonously on. "I could not bear to humble you in the eyes of others even by forcing you to face a scandal. I could not bear to humble you in your own eyes by letting you suspect that I knew the truth. I could not bring myself to disturb the outward respectability of your life by interrupting its outward calm. To be absolutely honest—though I had lost you, I could not bring myself to give you up,—as I felt I must, if I let any one discover—most of all you—what I knew. So, like a coward, I lived on, becoming gradually accustomed to the idea that my day was past, but knowing that the moment I was forced to speak, I would be forced to move on out of your life. Singularly enough, as I grew calm, I grew to respect this other woman. I could not blame her for loving you. I ended by admiring her. I had known her so well—she was such a proud woman! I looked back at my marriage and saw theaffair as it really was. I had notsoldmyself to you exactly—I had loved you too much to bargain in that way; nevertheless, the marriage had been a bargain. In exchange for your promise to protect and provide for me,—to feed me, clothe me, share your fortune with me, and give me your name, I had given you myself,—openly sanctioned by the law, of course—I was too great a coward to have done it otherwise, in spite of the fact that the law gives that same permission to almost any one who asks for it."
"Naomi," he groaned from his covered mouth, "what ghastly philosophy."
"Isn't that the marriage law? How much better am I after all than the poor girl in the street, who is forced to it by misery? To be sure, I believe there is some farcical phrase in the bargain about promising to love none other,—a bare-faced attempt to outwit Nature,—at which Nature laughs. Yet this other woman, proud, high-minded, unselfish, hitherto above reproach, had given herself for love alone—with everything to lose and nothing to gain. I have come to doubt myself. I have had my day. For years it was an enviable one. No woman can hope formore. What right have I to stand in the way of another woman's happiness? A happiness no one can value better than I, who so long wore it in security. I bore my children in peace, with the divine consolation of your devotion about me. What right have I to deny another woman the same joy?"
Shattuck sprang to his feet.
"It's not true!" he gasped. "It's not true!"
The woman never even raised her eyes. She went on carefully inspecting the filmy bit of lace in her hands.
"Itistrue," she replied. "Never mind how I discovered it. I know it. That is why she has gone abroad alone. I did not speak until I had to. I am a coward, but not enough of one to bear the thought of her alone in a foreign country with mind and emotions clouded. I may be cowardly enough to wish that I had never found it out,—I am not coward enough to keep silent any longer."
A torrent of words rushed to the man's lips, but he was too wise to make excuses. Yet there were excuses. Any fair-minded judge would have said so. But he knew better than to think that for one momentthey would be excuses in the mind of this woman. Besides, the first man's excuse for the first sin has never been viewed with much respect under the modern civilization.
He felt her slowly rise to her feet, and when he raised his head to look at her—not yet fully realizing what had happened to him—all emotion seemed to have become so foreign to her face, that he felt as if she were already a stranger to him.
She took a last look round the room. Her eyes seemed to devour every detail.
"I shall find means to give you your freedom at once."
"You will actually leave me—go away?"
"Can we two remain together now?"
"But your children?"
"Your children, Dick—I have forgotten that I have any. I have had my life. You have still yours to live."
She swept by him down the long room, everything in which was so closely associated with her. Before she reached the door, he was there—and his back against it. She stopped, but she did not look at him. If she could have read the truth in his face, it would have told her that shehad never been loved as she was at that moment. All that she had been in her loyalty, her nobility, was so much a part of this man's life. What, compared to that, were petty sins, or big ones? He saw the past as a drowning man sees the panorama of his existence. Yet he knew that everything he could say would be powerless to move her.
It was useless to remind her of their happy years together. They could never be happy again with this between them. It would be equally useless to tell her that this other woman had known, but too well, that he would never desert his wife for her. Had he not betrayed her?
Of what use to tell her how he had repented his folly, that he could never understand it himself? There were the facts, and Nature, and his wife's philosophy against him.
And he had dared be gay the moment the steamer slid into the channel! Was that only this morning? It seemed to be in the last century.
She approached, and stretched her hand toward the door.
He did not move.
"Don't stop me," she pleaded."Don't make it any harder than it is. Let me take with me the consolation of a decent life together—a decent life decently severed."
He made one last appeal—he opened his arms wide to her.
She shrank back with a shudder, crying out that he should spare her her own contempt—that he should leave her the power to seek peace—and her voice had such a tone of terror, as she recoiled from him, that he felt how powerless any protest would be.
He stepped aside.
Without looking at him she quickly opened the door and passed out.
The Divorcée nervously rolled up her manuscript.
The usual laugh was not forthcoming. No one dared. Men can't rough-house that kind of a woman.
After a moment's silence the Critic spoke up. "You were right toreadthat story. It is not the sort of thing that lends itself to narrating. Of course you might have acted it out, but you were wise not to."
"I can't help it—got to say it," saidthe Journalist: "What a horrid woman!"
The Divorcée looked at him in amazement. "How can you say that?" she exclaimed. "I thought I had made her so reasonable. Just what all women ought to be, and what none of us are."
"Thank God for that," said the Journalist. "I'd as lief live in a world created and run by George Bernard Shaw as in one where women were like that."
"Come, come," interrupted the Doctor, who had been eyeing her profile with a curious half amused expression, all through the reading: "Don't let us get on that subject to-night. A story is a story. You have asked, and you have received. None of you seem to really like any story but your own, and I must confess that among us, we are putting forth a strange baggage."
"On the contrary," said the Critic, "I think we are doing pretty well for a crowd of amateurs."
"You are not an amateur," laughed the Journalist, "and yours was the worst yet."
"I deny it," said the Critic. "Mine had real literary quality, and a very dramatic climax."
"Oh, well, if death is dramatic—perhaps. You are the only one up to date who has killed his heroine."
"No story is finished until the heroine is dead," said the Journalist. "This woman,—I'll bet she had another romance."
"Did she?" asked the Critic of the Divorcée, who was still nervously rolling her manuscript in both hands.
"I don't know. How should I? And if I did I shouldn't tell you. It isn't a true story, of course." And she rose from her chair and walked away into the moonlight.
"Do you mean to say," ejaculated the Violinist, who admired her tremendously, "that she made that up in the imagination she carries around under that pretty fluffy hair? I'd rather that it were true—that she had picked it up somewhere."
As we began to prepare to go in, the Doctor looked down the path to where the Divorcée was still standing. After a moment's hesitation he took her lace scarf from the back of her chair, and strolled after her. The Sculptor shrugged his shoulders with such a droll expression that we all had to smile. Then we went indoors.
"Well," said the Doctor, as he joinedher—she told me about it afterwards—"was that the way it happened?"
"No, no," replied the Divorcée, petulantly. "That is not a bit the way it happened. That is the way I wish it had happened. Oh, no. I was brought up to believe in the proprietary rights in marriage, and I did what I thought became a womanly woman. I asserted my rights, and made a common or garden row."
The Doctor laughed, as she stamped her foot at him.
"Pardon—pardon," said he. "I was only going to say 'Thank God.' You know I like it best that way."
"I wish I had not told the old story," she said pettishly. "It serves me quite right. Now I suppose they've got all sorts of queer notions in their heads."
"Nonsense," said the Doctor. "All authors, you know, run the risk of getting mixed up in their romances—think of Charlotte Brontë."
"I'm not an author, and I am going to bed,—to repent of my folly," and she sailed into the house, leaving the Doctor gazing quizzically after her. Before she was out of hearing, he called to her: "I say, you haven't changed a bit since '92."
She heard but she did not answer.