The investigations of Messrs. Hodshon & Hindley in the life of Zada and Cheever prospered exceedingly. In blissless ignorance of it, Zada had been inspired to set a firm of sleuths on Charity's trail. She wanted to be able to convince Cheever that Charity was intrigued with Dyckman. The operators who kept Mrs. Charity Coe Cheever under espionage had the most stupid things to report to Zada.
To Zada's disgust, Mrs. Cheever never called upon Jim Dyckman, and he never called on her. Zada accused the bureau of cheating her, and finally put another agency to shadowing Jim Dyckman. According to the reports she had, his neglect of Mrs. Cheever was perfectly explained. He was a mere satellite of a moving-picture actress, a new-comer named Anita Adair.
The detectives reported that such gossip as they could pick up about the studio indicated that Dyckman was putting money into the firm on her account.
“A movie angel!” sneered Zada. She had wasted a hundred dollars on him to find this out, and two hundred and fifty on Mrs. Cheever to find out that she was intensely respectable. That was bitter news to Zada. She canceled her business with her detective agency. And they called in the shadows that haunted Charity's life.
The detectives on Zada's trail, however, had more rewarding material to work with—although they found unexpected difficulties, they said, in getting the dictagraph installed in her apartment. They did not wish to ruin the whole enterprise by too great haste—especially as they were receiving eight dollars a day and liberal expenses per man.
At last, however, Hodshon sent word to Mrs. Cheever that the dictagraph was installed and working to a T, and she could listen-in whenever she was ready.
Charity was terrified utterly now. New scales were to be shaken from her eyes at the new tree of knowledge. She was to hear her man talking to his leman.
She had almost an epilepsy of terror, but she could not resist the importunate opportunity.
She selected from her veils a heavy crêpe that she had worn during a period of mourning for one of her husband's relatives. It seemed appropriate now, for she was going into mourning for her own husband, living, yet about to die to her.
She left the house alone after dark and walked along Fifth Avenue till she found a taxicab. She gave the street number Hodshon had given her and stepped in. She kept an eye on the lighted clock and in the dark sorted out the exact change and a tip, adding dimes as they were recorded on the meter. She did not want to have to pause for change, and she did not wish to make herself conspicuous by an extravagant tip.
As the taxicab slid along the Avenue Charity wondered if any of the passengers in other cabs could have an errand so gruesome as hers. She was tortured by fantastic imaginings of what she might hear. She wondered how a man would talk to such a person as Zada, and how she would answer. She imagined the most dreadful things she could.
The taxicab surprised her by stopping suddenly before a brown-fronted residence adjoining an apartment-house of (more or less literally) meretricious ornateness. She stepped out, paid her fare, and turned, to find Mr. Hodshon at her elbow. He had been waiting for her. He recognized her by her melodramatic veil. He gave her needed help up a high stoop and opened the door with a key.
She found herself in a shabby, smelly hall where no one else was.
He motioned her up the stairway, and she climbed with timidity. At each level there were name-plates over the electric buttons. The very labels seemed illicit. Hodshon motioned her up and up for four flights.
Then he opened a door and stepped back to let her enter a room unfurnished except for a few chairs and a table. Two men were in the room, and they were laughing with uproar. One of them had a telephone-receiver clamped to his ear, and he was making shorthand notes, explaining to his companion what he heard.
They turned in surprise at Hodshon's entrance and rose to greet Charity with the homage due so great a client.
Charity could hardly bespeak them civilly. They took her curtness for snobbery, but it was not. It swept over her that these people were laughing over her most sacred tragedy.
She advanced on the operator and put out her hand for the headpiece he wore. He took it off and rubbed it with his handkerchief, and told her that she must remove her hat and veil.
She came out startlingly white and brilliant from the black. She put the elastic clamp over her head and set the receiver to her ear. Instantly she was assailed by dreadful noises, a jangle of inarticulate sounds like the barking of two dogs.
“I can't hear a word,” she protested.
“They're talkin' too loud,” said the operator. “The only way to beat the dictagraph is to cut the wire or yell.”
“Are they quarreling, then?” Charity asked, almost with pleasure.
“Yes, ma'am. But it's the lady and her maid. They been havin' a terrible scrap about marketin'. He—Mr. Cheever—ain't there yet. They're expectin' him, though.”
Charity felt that she had plumbed the depths of degradation in listening to a quarrel between such a creature and her maid. What must it be to be the maid of such a creature! She was about to snatch away the earpiece when she heard the noise of a door opening. She looked toward the entrance of the room she was in, but the door that opened was in the other room in the other building.
The voices of Zada and her maid stopped jangling, and she heard the most familiar of all voices asking:
“What's the row to-day?”
There was an extra metal in the timbre and it had the effect of an old phonographic record, but there was no questioning whose voice it was.
Zada's voice became audibly low in answer.
“She is such a fool she drives me crazy.”
A sullen, servile voice answered: “It ain't me's the fool, and as for crazy—her wantin' me to bring home what they ain't in no market. How'm I goin' to git what ain't to be got, I asts you. This here war is stoppin' ev'y kind of food.”
Cheever's answer was characteristic. He didn't believe in servants' rights.
“Get out. If you're impudent again I'll throw you out, and your baggage after you.”
“Yassar,” was the soft answer.
There was the sound of shuffling feet and a softly closed door. Then Zada's voice, very mellow:
“I thought you'd never come, dearie.”
“Awfully busy to-day, honey.”
“You took dinner with her, of course.”
“No. It was a big day on the Street, and there was so much to do at the office that I dined down-town at the Bankers' Club with several men and then went back to the office. I ought to be there all night, but I couldn't keep away from you any longer.”
There were mysterious quirks of sound that meant kisses and sighs and tender inarticulations. There were cooing tones which the dictagraph repeated with hideous fidelity.
Zada asked, “Did he have hard daydie old office-ums?”
And he answered, with infatuated imbecility, “Yes, he diddums, but worst was lonelying for his Zadalums.”
“Did Peterkin miss his Zadalums truly—truly?”
The inveterate idioms of wooers took on in Charity's ear a grotesque obscenity, a sacrilegious burlesque of words as holy to her as prayer or the sacred dialect of priests. When Zada murmured, “Kissings! kissings!” Charity screamed: “Stop it, you beasts! You beasts!”
Then she clapped her hand over her lips, expecting to hear their panic at her outcry. But they were as oblivious of her pain or her rage as if an interplanetary space divided them. They went on with the murmur and susurrus of their communion, while Charity looked askance at the three men. They could not hear, but could imagine, and they stared at her doltishly.
“Leave the room! Go away!” she groaned.
They slipped out through the door and left her to her shame.
In the porches of her ear the hateful courtship purled on with its tender third-personal terms and its amorous diminutives, suffixed ridiculously.
“Zada was afaid her booful Peterkin had forgotten her and gone to the big old house.”
“Without coming home first?”
“Home! that's the wordie I want. This is his homie, isn't it, Peterkin?”
“Yessy.”
“He doesn't love old villain who keeps us apart?”
“Nonie, nonie.”
“Never did, did he?”
“Never.”
“Only married her, didn't he?”
“That's allie.”
“Zada is only really wifie?”
“Only onlykins.”
Charity listened with a greed of self-torment like a fanatic penitent. The chatter of the two had none of the indecency she had expected, and that made it the more intolerably indecent.
She saw that Cheever's affair with Zada had settled down to a state of comfort, of halcyon delight.
It had taken on domestication. He was at home with her and an alien in Charity's home. He told the woman his business affairs and little office jokes. He laughed with a purity of cheer that he had long lost in his legal establishment. He used many of the love-words that he had once used to Charity, and her heart was wrung with the mockery of it.
Charity listened helplessly. She was as one manacled or paralyzed and submitted to such a torture as she had never endured. She harkened in vain for some hopeful note of uncongeniality, some reassurance for her love or at least her vanity, some certainty that her husband, her first possessor, had given her some emotion that he could never give another. But he was repeating to Zada the very phrases of his honeymoon, repeating them with all the fervor of a good actor playing Romeo for the hundredth time with his new leading lady. Indeed, he seemed to find in Zada a response and a unity that he had never found in Charity's society. Her intelligence was cruelly goaded to the realization that she had never been quite the woman for Cheever.
She had known that he had not been the full complement of her own soul. They had disagreed fiercely on hundreds of topics. He had been chilled by many of her ardors, as many of his interests had bored her. She had supposed it to be an inevitable inability of a man and a woman to regard the world through the same eyes. She had let him go his way and had gone her own. And now it seemed that he had in his wanderings found some one who mated him exactly. The butterfly had liked the rose, but had fluttered away; when it found the orchid it closed its wings and rested content.
It was a frightful revelation to Charity, for it meant that Cheever had been merely flirting with her. She had caught his eye as a girl in a strange port captivates a sailor. He had haunted her window with serenades. Finding her to be what we call “a good girl,” he had called upon her father and mother that he might talk to her longer. And then he had gone to church with her and married her that he might get rid of her father and mother and her own scruples. And so he had made her his utterly, and after a few days and nights had sailed away. He had come back to her now and then as a sailor does.
Meanwhile in another port he had found what we call “a bad woman.” There had been no need to serenade her out into the streets. They were her shop. No parents had guarded her hours; no priest was intermediary to her possession. But once within her lair he had found himself where he had always wanted to be, and she had found herself with the man she had been hunting. She closed her window, drove her frequenters, old and new, from the door; and he regretted that he had given pledges to that other woman.
It was a pitiful state of affairs, no less pitiful for being old and ugly and innumerously commonplace. It meant that Cheever under the white cloak of matrimony had despoiled Charity of her innocence, and under the red domino of intrigue had restored to Zada hers.
If Charity, sitting like a recording angel, invisible but hearing everything, had found in the communion of Zada and Cheever only the fervor of an amour, she could have felt that Cheever was merely a libertine who loved his wife and his home but loved to rove as well. She had, however, ghastly evidence that Cheever was only now the rake reformed; his marriage had been merely one of his escapades; he had settled down now to monogamy with Zada, and she was his wife in all but style and title.
There was more of Darby and Joan than of Elvira and Don Juan in their conversation. He told Zada with pride that he had not had a drink all day, though he had needed alco-help and the other men had ridiculed him. She told him that she had not had a drink for a week and only one cigarette since her lonely dinner. They were in a state of mutual reformation!
Where, then, was the sacrament of marriage? Which of the women held the chalice now?
It was enforced on Charity that it was she and not Zada who had been the inspirer and the victim of Cheever's flitting appetite. It was Zada and not she who had won him to the calm, the dignity, the sincerity, the purity that make marriage marriage. It was a hard lesson for Charity, and she did not know what she ought to do with her costly knowledge. She could only listen.
When Zada complained that she had had a dreadful day of blues Cheever made jokes for her as for a child, and she laughed like the child she was. For her amusement he even went to a piano and played, with blundering three-chord accompaniment, a song or two. He played jokes on the keyboard. He revealed none of the self-consciousness that he manifested before Charity when he exploited his little bag of parlor tricks.
Charity's mood had changed from horror to eager curiosity, and thence to cold despair, to cold resentment. It went on to cold intelligence and a belief that her life with Cheever was over. Their marriage was a proved failure, and any further experiments with its intimacies would be unspeakably vile. Or so she thought.
She had consented to this dictagraphic inspection of her husband's intrigue merely to confirm or refute gossip. She had had more than evidence enough to satisfy her. Her first reaction to it was a primitive lust for revenge.
Once or twice she blazed with such anger that she rose to tear the wire loose from the wall and end the torment. But her curiosity restrained her. She set the earpiece to her ear again.
At length she formed her resolution to act. She called out, “Mr. Hodshon, come here!”
He came in and found her a pillar of rage.
“I've heard enough. I'll do what I refused before. I'll go with you and break in.”
Hodshon was dazed. He was not ready to act. She had refused his plan to break in according to the classic standards. He had let the plan lapse and accepted Mrs. Cheever as a poor rich wretch whom he had contracted to provide with a certain form of morbid entertainment. He could do nothing now but stammer:
“Well—well—is that so? Do you really? You know you didn't—O' course—Well, let's see now. You know we ain't prepared. I told you we had to have a c'rob'rating witness. It wouldn't be legal if we were to—Still, they probably would accept you as witness and us as corroboration, but you wouldn't want to go on the stand and tell what you found—not a nice refined lady like you are. The witness-stand is no place for a lady, anyway.
“The thing is if you could get some gentleman friend to go with you and you two break in. Then you'd both be amateurs, kind of. You see? Do you know any gentleman who might be willing to do that for you? The best of friends get very shy when you suggest such a job. But if you know anybody who would be interested and wanted to help you—Do you?”
Only two names came to Charity's searching mind—Jim Dyckman's impossible name and one that was so sublimely unfit that she laughed as she uttered it.
“There's the Reverend Doctor Mosely.”
Hodshon tried to laugh.
“I was reading head-lines of a sermon of his. He's down on divorce.”
“That's why he'd be the ideal witness,” said Charity.
“But would he come?”
“Of course not,” she laughed. “There's no use of carrying this further. I've had all I can stand to-night. Let me go.”
As usual with people who have had all they can stand, Charity wanted some more. She glanced at the receiver, curious as to what winged words had flown unattended during her parley with Hodshon.
She put the receiver to her ear and fell back. Again she was greeted with clamor. They were quarreling ferociously.
That might mean either of two things: there are the quarrels that enemies maintain, and those that devoted lovers wage. The latter sort are perhaps the bitterer, the less polite. Charity could not learn what had started the wrangle between those two.
Slowly it died away. Zada's cries turned to sobs, and her tirade to sobs.
“You don't love me. Go back to her. You love her still.”
“No, I don't, honey. I just don't want her name brought into our conversation. It doesn't seem decent, somehow. It's like bringing her in here to listen to our quarrels. I'm sorry I hurt you. I'm trying not to, but you're so peculiarly hard to keep peace with lately. What's the reason, darling?”
Charity was smitten with a fear more terrible than any yet. She heard its confirmation. Zada whispered:
“Can't you guess?”
“No, I can't.”
“Stupid!” Zada murmured. “You poor, stupid boy.”
Charity heard nothing for a long moment—then a gasp.
“Zada!”
She greeted his alarm with a chuckle and a flurry of proud laughter. He bombarded her with questions:
“Why didn't you tell me? How long? What will you do? How could you?—you're no fool.”
Her answers were jumbled with his questions—his voice terrified, hers victorious.
“I've kept it a secret for months, because I was afraid of you. It's my right. It's too late to do anything now. And now we'll see whether you love me or not—and how much, if any.”
There was again silence. Charity could hardly tolerate the suspense. Both she and Zada were hanging breathlessly on Cheever's answer.
He did not speak for so long that Zada gave up. “You don't love me, then? I'd better kill myself, I suppose. It's the only solution now. And I'm willing, since you don't love me enough.”
“No, no—yes, I do. I adore you—more than ever. But it's such a strange ambition for you; and, God! what a difference it makes, what a difference!”
That was what Charity thought. For once she agreed with Cheever, echoed his words and his dismay and stood equally stunned before the new riddle. It was a perfect riddle now, for there was no end to the answers, and every one of them was wrong.
Charity let the receiver fall. She had had enough. She sank into a chair and would have slipped to the floor, but her swimming eyes made out the blurred face of Hodshon, terrified at her pallor.
If she fainted he would resuscitate her. She could not add that to her other ignominies. She clenched herself like one great fist of resolution till the swoon was frustrated. She sat still for a while—then rose, put on her hat, swathed her face in the veil, and went down the flights of stairs and out into the cool, dark street.
She had forgotten that she had dismissed the taxicab. Fortunately another was lurking in the lee of the apartment-house. Hodshon summoned it and would have ridden home with her, but she forbade him. She passed on the way the church of Doctor Mosely and his house adjoining. She was tempted to stop, but she was too weary for more talk.
She slept exceedingly well that night, so well that when she woke she regretted that she had not slept on out of the world. She fell asleep again, but was trampled by a nightmare. She woke trying to scream. Her eyes, opening, found her beautiful room about her and the dream dangers vanished.
But the horrors of her waking hours of yesterday had not vanished. They were waiting for her. She could not end them by the closing of her eyes. In the cool, clear light of day she saw still more problems than before—problems crying for decisions and contradicting each other with a hopeless conflict of moralities. To move in any direction was to commit ugly deeds; to move in no direction was to commit the ugliest of all.
She rang for her coffee, and she could hardly sit up to it. Her maid cried out at her age-worn look, and begged her to see a doctor.
“I'm going to as soon as I'm strong enough,” said Charity Coe. But she meant the Reverend Doctor Mosely. She thought that she could persuade even him that surgery was necessary upon that marriage. At any rate, she determined to force a decision from him. She telephoned the unsuspecting old darling, and he readily consented to see her. She spent an hour or two going over her Bible and concordance. They gave her little comfort in her plight.
When finally she dragged herself from her home to Doctor Mosely's his butler ushered her at once into the study. Doctor Mosely welcomed her both as a grown-up child and as an eminent dealer in good deeds.
She went right at her business. “Doctor Mosely, I loathe myself for adding to the burdens your parish puts upon your dear shoulders but you're responsible for my present dilemma.”
“My dear child, you don't tell me! Then you must let me help you out of it. But first tell me—what I'm responsible for.”
“You married me to Peter Cheever.”
“Why, yes, I believe I did. I marry so many dear girls. Yes, I remember your wedding perfectly. A very pretty occasion, and you looked extremely well. So did the bridegroom. I was quite proud of joining two such—such—”
“Please unjoin us.”
“Great Heavens, my child! What are you saying?”
“I am asking you to untie the knot you tied.”
The old man stared at her, took his glasses off, rubbed them, put them on, and peered into her face to make sure of her. Then he said:
“If that were in my power—and you know perfectly well that it is not—it would be a violation of all that I hold sacred in matrimony.”
“Just what do you hold sacred, Doctor Mosely?”
“Dear, dear, this will never do. Really, I don't wish to take advantage of my cloth, but, really, you know, Charity, you have been taught better than to snap at the clergy like that.”
“Forgive me; I'm excited, not irreverent. But—well, you don't believe in divorce, do you?”
“I have stated so with all the power of my poor eloquence.”
“Do you believe that the seventh commandment is the least important of the lot?”
“Certainly not!”
“If a man breaks any commandment he ought to do what he can to remedy the evil?”
“Yes.”
“Then if a man violates the seventh, why shouldn't he be compelled to make restitution, too?”
“What restitution could he make?”
“Not much. He has taken from the girl he marries her name, her innocence, her youth—he can restore only one thing—her freedom.”
“That is not for him to restore. 'What, therefore, God hath joined, let not man put asunder.'”
The old man grew majestic when he thundered the sonorities of Holy Writ. Charity was cowed, but she made a craven protest:
“But who is to say what God hath joined?”
“The marriage sacraments administered by the ordained clergy established that. There is every warrant for clergymen to perform marriages; no Christian clergyman pretends to undo them.”
“You believe that marriage is an indissoluble sacrament, then?”
“Indeed I do.”
“Who made my marriage a sacrament?”
“I did, as the agent of God.”
“And the minute you pronounce a couple married they are registered in heaven, and God completes the union?”
“You may put it as you please; the truth is divine.”
“In other words, a man like you can pronounce two people man and wife, but once the words have escaped his lips nothing can ever correct the mistake.”
“There are certain conditions which annul a marriage, but once it is genuinely ratified on earth it is ratified in heaven.”
“In heaven, where, as the New Testament says in several places, married people do not live together? The woman who had seven husbands on earth, you know, didn't have any at all in heaven.”
“So Christ answered the Sadducee who tempted him with questions.”
“Marriage is strictly a matter of the earth, earthy, then?”
“Nothing is strictly that, my child. But what in the name of either earth or heaven has led you to come over here and break into my morning's work with such a fusillade of childish questions? You know a child can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer. Also, a child can ask questions which a wise man can answer to another wise man but not to a child. You talk like an excited, an unreasoning girl. I am surprised to hear you ridiculing the institution of Christian marriage, but your ridicule does not prove it to be ridiculous.”
“Oh, it's not ridiculous to me, Doctor Mosely; and I'm not ridiculing it. I am horribly afraid of what it has done to me and will do to me.”
“Explain that, my dear.”
She did explain with all bluntness: “My husband openly lives with a mistress. He prefers her to me.”
The old man was stunned. He faltered: “Dear me!”
“That is most reprehensible—most! He should be subjected to discipline.”
“Whose? He isn't a member of your church. And how can you discipline such a man—especially as you don't believe in divorce?”
“Have you tried to win him back to the path of duty, to waken him to a realizing sense of his obliquity?”
“Often and long. It can't be done, for he loves the other woman.”
“Don't use the beautiful word love for such a debasing impulse.”
“But I know he loves her!”
“How could you know?”
“I heard him tell her.”
“You heard him! Do you ask me to believe that he told her that in your presence?”
“I heard him on the dictagraph.”
“You have been collecting evidence for divorce, then?”
“No, I was collecting it to assure myself that the gossip I had heard was false—and to submit to you.”
“But why to me?”
“When I first learned of this hideous situation my first impulse was to rush to the courts. I went to church instead. I heard your sermon. It stopped me from seeing a lawyer.”
“I am glad my poor words have served some useful end.”
“But have they?”
“If I have prevented one divorce I have not lived in vain.”
“You don't think I have a right to ask for one?”
“Absolutely and most emphatically not.”
“In spite of anything he may do?”
“Anything! He will come back to you, Charity. Possess your soul in patience. It may be years, but keep the light burning and he will return.”
“In what condition?”
“My child, you shock me! You've been reading the horrible literature that gets printed under the guise of science.”
“I must wait, then?”
“Yes, if you wish to separate from him for a time, your absence might waken him to a realizing sense. There are no children, I believe.”
“None, yet.”
“Yet? Oh, then—”
“If there were, would it make a difference?”
“Of course! an infinite difference!”
“You think a man and woman ought to let their child keep them together in any event?”
“Need I say it? What greater bond of union could there be? Is it not God's own seal and blessing on the wedlock, rendering it, so to speak, even more indissoluble? You blush, my child. Is it true, then, that—”
“A child is expected.”
“Ah, my dear girl! How that proves what I have maintained! The birth of the little one will bring the errant father to his senses. The tiny hands will unite its parents as if they were the hands of a priest drawing them together. That child is the divine messenger confirming the sacrament.”
“You believe that?”
“Utterly. Oh, I am glad. Motherhood is the crowning triumph; it hallows any woman howsoever lowly or wicked. And you are neither, Charity. I know you to be good and busy in good works. But were you never so evil, this heavenly privilege would make of you a very vessel of sanctity.”
Charity turned pale as she sprung the trap. “The child is expected—not by me, but by the other woman.”
Doctor Mosely's beatitude turned to a sick disgust. Red and white streaked his face. His first definite reaction was wrath at the trick that had been played upon him.
“Mrs. Cheever! This is unworthy of you! You distress me! Really!”
“I was a little distressed myself. What am I to do?”
“I will not believe what you say.”
“I heard her confess it—boast of it. She agrees with you that the tiny hands will bring her and the father together and confirm the sacrament.”
“It can't be. It must not be!”
“You don't advocate that form of birth-control? They are arresting people who preach prevention of conception. You are not so modern as that.”
“Hush!”
“What am I to do? You advise me to possess my soul in patience for years. But the child won't wait that long. Doesn't the situation alter your opinion of divorce?”
“No!”
“But if I don't divorce Mr. Cheever and let him marry her the child will have no father—legally.”
“The responsibility is his, not yours.”
“You don't believe in infant damnation, do you? At least not on earth, do you?”
“I cannot control the evil impulses of others. The doctrines of the Church cannot be modified for the convenience of every sinner.”
“You advise against divorce, then?”
“I am unalterably opposed to it.”
“What is your solution, then, of this situation?”
“I shall have to think it over—and pray. Please go. You have staggered me.”
“When you have thought it over will you give me the help of your advice?”
“Certainly.”
“Then shall I wait till I hear from you?”
“If you will.”
“Good-by, Doctor Mosely.”
“Good-by, Mrs.—Charity—my child!”
He pressed her long hand in his old palms. He was trembling. He was like a priest at bay before the altar while the arrows of the infidel rain upon him. These arrows were soft as rain and keen as silk. He was more afraid of them than if they had been tipped with flint or steel.
Charity left the parsonage no wiser than she entered it. She had accomplished nothing further than to ruin Doctor Mosely's excellent start on an optimistic discourse in the prevailing fashion of the enormously popular “Pollyanna” stories: it was to be a “glad” sermon, an inexorably glad sermon. But poor Doctor Mosely could not preach it now in the face of this ugly fact.
Charity went home with her miserable triumph, which only emphasized her defeat.
She found at home a mass of details pressing for immediate action if the big moving-picture project were not to lapse into inanity. The mere toil of such a task ought to have been welcomed, at least as a diversion. But her heart was as if dead in her.
She wondered how Jim Dyckman was progressing with his portion of the task. He had not reported to her. She wondered why.
She decided to telephone him. She put out her hand, but did not lift the receiver from the hook. She began to muse upon Jim Dyckman. She began to think strange thoughts of him. If she had married him she might not have failed so wretchedly to find happiness. Of course, she might have failed more wretchedly and more speedily, but the wayfarer who chooses one of two crossroads and meets a wolf upon it does not believe that a lion was waiting on the other.
Charity pondered her whole history with Jim Dyckman, from their childhood flirtations on. He had had other flings, and she had flung herself into Peter Cheever's arms. Peter Cheever had flung her out again. Jim Dyckman had opened his arms again.
He had told her that she was wasting herself. He had offered her love and devotion. She had struck his hands away and rebuked him fiercely. A little later she had felt a pang of jealousy because he looked at that little Greek dancer so interestedly. She had tried to atone for this appalling thought by interesting herself in the little dancer's welfare and hunting a position for her with the moving-picture company. She had told Jim Dyckman to look for the girl in the studio and find how she was getting along. He had never reported on that, either. Charity smiled bitterly.
Last night it had come over her that her love for Peter Cheever was dead. Was love itself, then, dead for her? or was her heart already busy down there in the dark of her bosom, busy like a seed germinating some new lily or fennel to thrust up into the daylight?
The sublime and the ridiculous are as close together as the opposite sides of a sheet of cloth. The sublime is the obverse of the tapestry with the figures heroic, saintly or sensuous, in battle or temple or bower, in conquest, love, martyrdom, adoration. The reverse of the tapestry is a matter of knots and tufts, broken patterns, ludicrous accidents of contour. The same threads make up both sides.
On one side of Charity's tapestry she saw herself as a pitiful figure, a neglected wife returned from errands of mercy to find her husband enamoured of a wanton. She spurned the proffered heart of a great knight while her own heart bled openly in her breast.
On the other side she saw the same red threads that crimsoned her heart running across the arras to and from the heart of Jim Dyckman. It was the red thread of life and love, blood-color—blood-maker, blood-spiller, heart-quickener, heart-sickener, the red thread of romance, of motherhood and of lust, birth and murder, family and bawdry.
In the tapestry her heart was entire, her eyes upon her faithless husband. On the other side her eyes faced the other knight; her heartstrings ran out to his. She laughed harshly at the vision. Her laugh ended in a fierce contempt of herself and of every body and thing else in the world.
She was too weak to fight the law and the Church and the public in order to divorce her husband. Would it be weakness or strength to sit at home in the ashes and deny herself to life and love? She could always go to Jim Dyckman and take him as her cavalier. But then she would become one of those heartbroken, leash-broken women who are the Mænads of society, more or less circumspect and shy, but none the less lawless. But wherein were they better than the Zadas?
Charity was wrung with a nausea of love in all its activities; she forswore them. Yet she was human. She was begotten and conceived in the flesh of lovers. She was made for love and its immemorial usages. How could she expect to destroy her own primeval impulse just because one treacherous man had enjoyed her awhile and passed on to his next affair?
There was no child of hers to grow up and replace her in the eternal armies of love and compel her aside among the veteran women who have been mustered out. She was in a sense already widowed of her husband. Certainly she would never love Cheever again or receive him into her arms. He belonged to the mother of his child. Let that woman step aside into the benches of the spectators, those who have served their purpose and must become wet-nurses, child-dryers, infant-teachers, perambulator-motors, question-answerers, nose-blowers, mischief-punishers, cradleside-bards.
Charity laughed derisively at the vision of Zada as a mother. The Madonna pose had fascinated this Magdalen, but she would find that mothers have many, many other things to do for their infants than to sit for portraits and give them picturesque nourishment—many, many other things. If Zada's child inherited its father's and mother's wantonness, laziness, wickedness, and violence of temper, there was going to be a lively nursery in that apartment.
Zada had so wanted a baby as a reward of love that she was willing to snatch it out of the vast waiting-room without pausing for a license. She would find that she had bought punishment at a high price. The poor baby was in for a hard life, but it would give its parents one in exchange.
Charity was appalled at this unknown harshness of her soul; it sneered at all things once held beautiful and sacred. Her soul was like a big cathedral broken into by a pagan mob that ran about smashing images, defiling fonts, burlesquing all the solemn rituals. Her quiet mind was full of sunburnt nymphs and goatish fauns with shaggy fetlocks. She saw the world as a Brocken and all the Sabbath there was was a Sabbath orgy of despicably brutish fiends.
She tried to run away. She went to her piano; her fingers would play no dirges; they grew flippant, profane in rhythm. She could think of no tunes but dances—andantes turned scherzi, the Handelian largo became a Castilian tango. She found herself playing a something strange—she realized that it was a lullaby! She fled from the piano.
She went to her books for nepenthe. There were romances in French, Italian, German, English, and American, new books, old books, all repeating the same stencils of passion in different colors. She could have spat at them and their silly ardors over the same old banality: I love him; he loves me—beatitude! I love him; he loves her—tragedy!
The novelists were like stupid children parroting the ancient monotony—amo,amas,amat;amamus,amatis,amant;amo,amas,amat—away with such primer stuff! She had learned the grammar of love and was graduated from the school-books. She was a postgraduate of love and wedlock. She had had enough of them—too much; she would read no more of love, dwell no more upon it; she would forget it.
She wanted some antiseptic book, something frigid, intellectual, ascetic. At last she thought she had it. On her shelf she found an uncut volume, a present from some one who had never read it, but had bought it because it cost several dollars and would serve as a gift.
It was Gardner's biography of Saint Catherine of Siena, “a study in the religion, literature, and history of the fourteenth century of Italy.” That sounded heartless enough. The frontispiece portrait of the wan, meager, despondent saint promised freedom from romantic balderdash.
Charity found a chair by a window and began to read. The preface announced the book to be “history centered in the work and personality of one of the most wonderful women that ever lived.” This was the medicine Charity wanted—the story of a woman who had been wonderful without love or marriage.
There followed a description of the evil times—and the wicked town in which Caterina Benincasa was born—as long ago as 1347. A pestilence swept away four-fifths of the populace. One man told how he had buried five of his sons in one trench. People said that the end of the world had come.
The wordtrench, the perishing of the people and the apparent end of the world, gave the story a modern sound. It might concern the murderous years of 1914-16.
Catherine was religious, as little girls are apt to be. She even wanted to enter a monastery in the disguise of a boy. Later her sister persuaded her to dye her hair and dress fashionably. Charity began to fear for her saint, but was reassured to find that already at sixteen she was a nun and had commenced that “life of almost incredible austerity,” freeing herself from all dependence on food and sleep and resting on a bare board.
Charity read with envy how Catherine had devoted herself for three whole years to silence broken only by confessions. How good it would be not to talk to anybody about anything for years and years! How blissful to live a calm, gray life in a strait cell, doing no labor but the errands of mercy and of prayer!
Charity read on, wondering a little at Catherine's idea of God, and her morbid devotion to His blood as the essence of everything beautiful and holy. Charity could not put herself back into that Middle Age when the most concrete materialism was mingled inextricably with the most fantastic symbolism.
Suddenly she was startled to find that appalling temptations found even Catherine out even in her cloistral solitude. It frightened Charity to read such a passage as this:
There came a time, towards the end of these three years, when these assaults and temptations became horrible and unbearable. Aerial men and women, with obscene words and still more obscene gestures, seemed to invade her little cell, sweeping round her like the souls of the damned in Dante's “Hell,” inviting her simple and chaste soul to the banquet of lust. Their suggestions grew so hideous and persistent that she fled in terror from the cell that had become like a circle of the infernal regions, and took refuge in the church; but they pursued her thither, though there their power seemed checked. And her Christ seemed far from her. At last she cried out, remembering the words in the vision: “I have chosen suffering for my consolation, and will gladly bear these and all other torments, in the name of the Saviour, for as long as shall please His Majesty.” When she said this, immediately all that assemblage of demons departed in confusion, and a great light from above appeared that illumined all the room, and in the light the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, nailed to the Cross and stained with blood, as He was when by His own blood He entered into the holy place; and from the Cross He called the holy virgin, saying: “My daughter Catherine, seest thou how much I have suffered for thee? Let it not then be hard to thee to endure for Me.”
This terrified Charity, and the further she read the less comfort she gained. Her matter-of-fact Manhattan mind could vaguely understand Saint Catherine's mystic nuptials with Christ; but that definite gold ring He placed on her finger, that diamond with four pearls around it, frustrated her comprehension.
When she read on and learned how Catherine's utter self-denial offended the other churchmen and church-women; how her confessions of sinful thought brought accusations of sinful deed; how the friars actually threw her out of a church at noon and kicked her as she lay senseless in the dust; how she was threatened with assassination and was turned from the doors of the people; and in what torment she died—from these strange events in the progress of a strange soul through a strange world Charity found no parallel to guide her life along.
For hours she read; but all that remained to her was the vision of that poor woman who could find no refuge from her flesh and from the demons that played evil rhapsodies upon the harp-strings of her nerves.
Charity closed the book and understood fear. She was now not so much sick of love as afraid of it. She was afraid of solitude, afraid of religion and of the good works that cause ridicule or resentment.
Darkness gathered about her with the closing of the day. She dreaded the night and the day, people and the absence of people. She knew no woman she could take her anguish to for sympathy; it would provoke only rebuke or laughter. The Church had rebuffed her. There remained only men, and what could she hope from them? Even Jim Dyckman had not been a friend merely. He had told her that she wasted herself as well as him.
Beyond this night there were years of nights, years on years of days. She could not even be alone; for who was ever actually alone? Even in the hush and the gloom of the deepening twilight there were figures here, shadows that sighed, delicate insinuators. There were no satyrs or bassarids, but gentlemen in polo garb, in evening dress, in yachting flannels. There were moon-nights in Florida, electric floods on dancing-floors, this dim corner of this room with some one leaning on her chair, bending his head and whispering:
“Charity, it's Jim. I love you.”
She rose and thrust aside the arms that were not there. She could not order him away, because he was not there. And yet he was there.
She was afraid that he still loved her and afraid that he did not. She was afraid that she had always loved him and that she never could. She was afraid that she would go to him or send for him, and afraid that she would be afraid to. She thrust away the phantom, but her palms pleaded against his departure. Softer than a whisper and noisier than a cry was her thought:
“I don't want to be alone, I am afraid to be alone.”