XIVISIONπολλάς δ’οδους ἐλθοντα ϕροντιδος πλανοιςTHEREcame a letter from Joe to say that he had obtained work with a good firm within a week of landing, and would soon be able to save or borrow enough to pay for his wife and children to join him. Rita, who had sunk into a despondent lethargy, was roused to excitement and began to thrill the children with tales of the adventure before them. She quickly recovered her health and energy, and wrested the control of her affairs from Ann, who did not like it. Feeling ran high, and things came to such a pass that the two women quarreled, and Rita so far forgot herself as to fling a sneer about marriage-lines at her friend. Ann came running to René for comfort, and tried to enrage him at the tale of such base ingratitude. He was not to be enraged, however, for he had been pondering the subject of gratitude and come to the conclusion that he who lays claim to it forfeits it. He tried to explain to Ann that she had overdone her kindness and should have known the moment to withdraw. She was dismayed.“Of course,” she cried, “you would take her side against mine.”“It isn’t a question of sides. You couldn’t expect her to let you go on running her house forever.”“A shiftless little fool like that! I wouldn’t have minded if she’d only said ‘Thank you.’ Not a word did she say, but just flung you in my face. And now you say she’s right! I wish you’d never come, I do.”“Ann, dear, don’t be silly.”“I do wish it with all my heart and soul. You’ve made me be different. You’ve made me want to do good things, and then you’re nothing but a shadow slipping away. And, oh! it does hurt so.”“Dear, dear Ann, don’t you see that Rita wanted to get rid of you and didn’t know how to without a quarrel?”“Why should she want to get rid of me? Nice mess she’d have been in without you and me.”“You go and see her to-morrow, and you’ll find her all right.”“I don’t want to see her ever again, nasty ungrateful rubbish!”“Then I’ll go and see her.”“You won’t see me again if you do. I can up and off when I like. We’re not married, remember.”“You leave me nothing to say. I’ve learned a good deal from the people in the mews, but not their way of quarreling.”He had been irritated into the reproof and was sorry as soon as it was uttered. She was furious. Never before had she lost her temper with him, though theyhad had wordy passages. Now she turned and rent him:“I don’t believe you’re a man at all, and I don’t believe you’ve got a heart. Squabble, you call it? I wish you would. You sit there with your fishy eyes staring at nothing, thinking, thinking, thinking. What’s the good of it all? Who’s right and who’s wrong? What’s it matter? If you loved me I’d be right whatever I did. Go on! Look at me! You don’t know me, don’t you? I’m the woman you’ve been living with these last two years. That’s who I am. If you’re sick of me, why don’t you say so? I’m no lady, thank God. I do know when I’m not wanted. I’m not going to stay with any man on God’s earth when he doesn’t want me. I’ve nearly left you time and time again, when you’ve looked at me like that.”He brushed his hand across his eyes. He was feeling sick and dazed. She looked so ugly.She went on:“I’ve put up with things because of you, I have. You don’t know what people say, or care. You won’t never know what they say, you’re that blooming innocent, thinking everybody means well. I’ve put up with things, and been glad of ’em, and I’ve put up with things from you that I couldn’t have believed any woman would ever have to put up with——”He said quietly:“Have you done?”She gasped at him, tried to stop, but because she had begun to enjoy her fury, she forced the note and screamed at him:“You want a virgin saint to live with you, not a woman.”Now she stopped, aghast at herself, horrified by the pain and disgust she had brought into his eyes. He could hardly speak, and jerked out:“I didn’t know. . . . I didn’t know I’d done all that to you, Ann. I’m so terribly sorry. I seem to make a mess of things always.”She had turned her back on him, and he knew that she was weeping. He had no desire to console her. He wished only to get away. Neither could break the heavy silence that followed the storm. He left her, though he could hardly move, so acute was his physical exhaustion. Groping his way along the wall of the mews, he counted the doors until he came to Kilner’s. The rooms were empty. He flung himself on the bed and lay chilled and racked, thinking only of Ann weeping, unmoved, detached, feeling neither sorrow nor hate. She had robbed him of all capacity of emotion, all power of thought. The storm had been so unlocked for. Rita was so remote from them. Why should Rita and anything she said or did have let loose upon them so violent a convulsion?Ann weeping, Ann silent, so appallingly silent. Her silence weighed on him more than her words. Desire grew in him slowly and painfully, a desire to understand. He remembered exactly what he had said to her, and the words seemed meaningless. Her silence had killed them. They were genuine as he spoke them. Speaking them, he had surmounted his disgust and horror at her rage. Yet there was an even more burningfury in her silence. She was weeping; Ann, the gay little comrade, was weeping, and her tears had moved him not at all.He began to think again, and to think with a new power. His body was cold and aching. His mind seemed to leave it. His mind played about Ann, the figure of Ann, weeping in silence. It played maliciously about her, stripped her, let down her hair, revealed her nakedly as woman, short-legged, wide-hipped, small-breasted, not so unlike a boy save for the excrescences and distortions created by her physical functions. That was too horrible. With an effort of will he brushed it aside, wrenched away from its fascination. Her individuality was restored to her and a little warmth crept into his vision of her. He was not sensible of her charm, and he was free of all lover’s memory of her attraction. His mind went probing into hers, saw how it delighted in impressions, but could make no store of them; how her delight had been increased by love and how she had used her love to aggravate her sensibility to the point of intoxication; how the fierce hunger for intoxication had desired to feed on him, and how her love for him had made her desire to bring him to the same condition. He saw her innocence; how free she was of deliberate purpose and set greed; how animal and yet how little sensual; and how she was snared in her own ignorance of love and its ways. Trapped she was and baffled. She could have been so happy with a mate as ignorant as herself, as willing to be snared. They could so easily have perished together, and sunk into resignation, sheand such a mate. And inexorable nature had made her fruitful, to bring forth in her rage, when she would be spent with tearing at the meshes that had caught her. She would go on tearing, tearing, and he could spare her nothing. His strength could not sustain her. She desired only his weakness, to have him with her, caught and struggling; to have him by her side, spent and broken, to take comfort in the child.He seemed to himself to be so near this fate, so nearly caught, that he cried out:“I will not! I will not!”For a moment the words startled him and shook him out of his stupor. Then his agony came back with a redoubled fury, and in the desperate hope of fighting it back he let words come tumbling out, hurling them from him:“I will not be used for a creation in which I know no joy. I will not cloak brute creation with a seeming joy distilled by mind and time and custom. I will not be used up and broken and cover indecency with false decency, nor be comforted with the life that has stolen my own. My life shall give life, and for the giving have only the more to give. That which I have done with the spirit not awakened in me is done and no longer a part of me. That which the spirit does in me lives on forever and ever.”Kilner found him lying in the darkness, staring with vacant eyes. He was terrified. René looked so deathly. He sat by his side and chafed his hands, and caressed him tenderly, soothed him, spoke to him in littlestaccato phrases, and went on with them until he seemed to listen:“The lamps aren’t lit to-night. It’s very dark. Do you hear? Stars shining. Wonderful stars. Better than lamps. I say, stars are better than lamps.”At length René said:“Yes. Stars are much better than lamps. Lamps are only to prevent people committing a nuisance. Stars don’t give a damn if they do.”“I quite agree,” said Kilner. “Drink this brandy.”When he had drunk, René said:“Women ought to be like stars.”“Rubbish!” grunted Kilner. “Women ought to be like women.”“I’ve been trying to understand things.”“Awful mistake. A fellow like you can’t understand things. He can only live them. That’s why you have such a rotten time. No power of expression. If only you could write or draw, or play some instrument—though I hate music. But if you could, you wouldn’t be you.”“You’re a clever fellow, Kilner. I wish you’d tell me what’s the matter with me.”“Too much vitality for a society which dislikes it, as it always will as long as it prefers the shadow to the substance, bad art to good, and imitations of things to the things themselves.”René looked disappointed. Kilner patted his hand.“Too intellectual! Personal, then. What’s wrong with you, my friend, is that you are out for the grand passion. It doesn’t happen more than about once intwo hundred years. Why? I don’t know. It depends on two people, you see, and I suppose two first-rate people don’t often meet. The rest of us lie about our love affairs to make them tolerable. I lied that night when I first met you. I wanted to make an impression. The only reason for lying I ever knew. I told you my one decent love affair lasted for five weeks. It didn’t. It lasted for exactly five seconds, the time of the kiss under the almond-tree in which it was born and died. Nothing more was possible, she being she and I being I. It was a decent business because we didn’t try to pretend it was anything else. So far as it went, it was so true as to make falseness impossible. We shall both live on that for the rest of our lives. Just enough to make marriage impossible for us. We shall both marry someone else for company, and as a defense against a growing tendency to promiscuity. You don’t seem to have that tendency. Life’s too serious for you. You are incapable of a love affair without an attempt to make it a spiritual thing. Where we get excited, you get exalted, which is infernally bad luck on the average woman. Feelin’ better?”“Yes,” said René, “but you do talk a lot of drivel.”“Hurray!” cried Kilner. “He’s beginning to find himself. I wonder if you’ll ever see how funny you are?”“I wonder?” said René, and he turned over, and in one moment was fast asleep.
πολλάς δ’οδους ἐλθοντα ϕροντιδος πλανοις
THEREcame a letter from Joe to say that he had obtained work with a good firm within a week of landing, and would soon be able to save or borrow enough to pay for his wife and children to join him. Rita, who had sunk into a despondent lethargy, was roused to excitement and began to thrill the children with tales of the adventure before them. She quickly recovered her health and energy, and wrested the control of her affairs from Ann, who did not like it. Feeling ran high, and things came to such a pass that the two women quarreled, and Rita so far forgot herself as to fling a sneer about marriage-lines at her friend. Ann came running to René for comfort, and tried to enrage him at the tale of such base ingratitude. He was not to be enraged, however, for he had been pondering the subject of gratitude and come to the conclusion that he who lays claim to it forfeits it. He tried to explain to Ann that she had overdone her kindness and should have known the moment to withdraw. She was dismayed.
“Of course,” she cried, “you would take her side against mine.”
“It isn’t a question of sides. You couldn’t expect her to let you go on running her house forever.”
“A shiftless little fool like that! I wouldn’t have minded if she’d only said ‘Thank you.’ Not a word did she say, but just flung you in my face. And now you say she’s right! I wish you’d never come, I do.”
“Ann, dear, don’t be silly.”
“I do wish it with all my heart and soul. You’ve made me be different. You’ve made me want to do good things, and then you’re nothing but a shadow slipping away. And, oh! it does hurt so.”
“Dear, dear Ann, don’t you see that Rita wanted to get rid of you and didn’t know how to without a quarrel?”
“Why should she want to get rid of me? Nice mess she’d have been in without you and me.”
“You go and see her to-morrow, and you’ll find her all right.”
“I don’t want to see her ever again, nasty ungrateful rubbish!”
“Then I’ll go and see her.”
“You won’t see me again if you do. I can up and off when I like. We’re not married, remember.”
“You leave me nothing to say. I’ve learned a good deal from the people in the mews, but not their way of quarreling.”
He had been irritated into the reproof and was sorry as soon as it was uttered. She was furious. Never before had she lost her temper with him, though theyhad had wordy passages. Now she turned and rent him:
“I don’t believe you’re a man at all, and I don’t believe you’ve got a heart. Squabble, you call it? I wish you would. You sit there with your fishy eyes staring at nothing, thinking, thinking, thinking. What’s the good of it all? Who’s right and who’s wrong? What’s it matter? If you loved me I’d be right whatever I did. Go on! Look at me! You don’t know me, don’t you? I’m the woman you’ve been living with these last two years. That’s who I am. If you’re sick of me, why don’t you say so? I’m no lady, thank God. I do know when I’m not wanted. I’m not going to stay with any man on God’s earth when he doesn’t want me. I’ve nearly left you time and time again, when you’ve looked at me like that.”
He brushed his hand across his eyes. He was feeling sick and dazed. She looked so ugly.
She went on:
“I’ve put up with things because of you, I have. You don’t know what people say, or care. You won’t never know what they say, you’re that blooming innocent, thinking everybody means well. I’ve put up with things, and been glad of ’em, and I’ve put up with things from you that I couldn’t have believed any woman would ever have to put up with——”
He said quietly:
“Have you done?”
She gasped at him, tried to stop, but because she had begun to enjoy her fury, she forced the note and screamed at him:
“You want a virgin saint to live with you, not a woman.”
Now she stopped, aghast at herself, horrified by the pain and disgust she had brought into his eyes. He could hardly speak, and jerked out:
“I didn’t know. . . . I didn’t know I’d done all that to you, Ann. I’m so terribly sorry. I seem to make a mess of things always.”
She had turned her back on him, and he knew that she was weeping. He had no desire to console her. He wished only to get away. Neither could break the heavy silence that followed the storm. He left her, though he could hardly move, so acute was his physical exhaustion. Groping his way along the wall of the mews, he counted the doors until he came to Kilner’s. The rooms were empty. He flung himself on the bed and lay chilled and racked, thinking only of Ann weeping, unmoved, detached, feeling neither sorrow nor hate. She had robbed him of all capacity of emotion, all power of thought. The storm had been so unlocked for. Rita was so remote from them. Why should Rita and anything she said or did have let loose upon them so violent a convulsion?
Ann weeping, Ann silent, so appallingly silent. Her silence weighed on him more than her words. Desire grew in him slowly and painfully, a desire to understand. He remembered exactly what he had said to her, and the words seemed meaningless. Her silence had killed them. They were genuine as he spoke them. Speaking them, he had surmounted his disgust and horror at her rage. Yet there was an even more burningfury in her silence. She was weeping; Ann, the gay little comrade, was weeping, and her tears had moved him not at all.
He began to think again, and to think with a new power. His body was cold and aching. His mind seemed to leave it. His mind played about Ann, the figure of Ann, weeping in silence. It played maliciously about her, stripped her, let down her hair, revealed her nakedly as woman, short-legged, wide-hipped, small-breasted, not so unlike a boy save for the excrescences and distortions created by her physical functions. That was too horrible. With an effort of will he brushed it aside, wrenched away from its fascination. Her individuality was restored to her and a little warmth crept into his vision of her. He was not sensible of her charm, and he was free of all lover’s memory of her attraction. His mind went probing into hers, saw how it delighted in impressions, but could make no store of them; how her delight had been increased by love and how she had used her love to aggravate her sensibility to the point of intoxication; how the fierce hunger for intoxication had desired to feed on him, and how her love for him had made her desire to bring him to the same condition. He saw her innocence; how free she was of deliberate purpose and set greed; how animal and yet how little sensual; and how she was snared in her own ignorance of love and its ways. Trapped she was and baffled. She could have been so happy with a mate as ignorant as herself, as willing to be snared. They could so easily have perished together, and sunk into resignation, sheand such a mate. And inexorable nature had made her fruitful, to bring forth in her rage, when she would be spent with tearing at the meshes that had caught her. She would go on tearing, tearing, and he could spare her nothing. His strength could not sustain her. She desired only his weakness, to have him with her, caught and struggling; to have him by her side, spent and broken, to take comfort in the child.
He seemed to himself to be so near this fate, so nearly caught, that he cried out:
“I will not! I will not!”
For a moment the words startled him and shook him out of his stupor. Then his agony came back with a redoubled fury, and in the desperate hope of fighting it back he let words come tumbling out, hurling them from him:
“I will not be used for a creation in which I know no joy. I will not cloak brute creation with a seeming joy distilled by mind and time and custom. I will not be used up and broken and cover indecency with false decency, nor be comforted with the life that has stolen my own. My life shall give life, and for the giving have only the more to give. That which I have done with the spirit not awakened in me is done and no longer a part of me. That which the spirit does in me lives on forever and ever.”
Kilner found him lying in the darkness, staring with vacant eyes. He was terrified. René looked so deathly. He sat by his side and chafed his hands, and caressed him tenderly, soothed him, spoke to him in littlestaccato phrases, and went on with them until he seemed to listen:
“The lamps aren’t lit to-night. It’s very dark. Do you hear? Stars shining. Wonderful stars. Better than lamps. I say, stars are better than lamps.”
At length René said:
“Yes. Stars are much better than lamps. Lamps are only to prevent people committing a nuisance. Stars don’t give a damn if they do.”
“I quite agree,” said Kilner. “Drink this brandy.”
When he had drunk, René said:
“Women ought to be like stars.”
“Rubbish!” grunted Kilner. “Women ought to be like women.”
“I’ve been trying to understand things.”
“Awful mistake. A fellow like you can’t understand things. He can only live them. That’s why you have such a rotten time. No power of expression. If only you could write or draw, or play some instrument—though I hate music. But if you could, you wouldn’t be you.”
“You’re a clever fellow, Kilner. I wish you’d tell me what’s the matter with me.”
“Too much vitality for a society which dislikes it, as it always will as long as it prefers the shadow to the substance, bad art to good, and imitations of things to the things themselves.”
René looked disappointed. Kilner patted his hand.
“Too intellectual! Personal, then. What’s wrong with you, my friend, is that you are out for the grand passion. It doesn’t happen more than about once intwo hundred years. Why? I don’t know. It depends on two people, you see, and I suppose two first-rate people don’t often meet. The rest of us lie about our love affairs to make them tolerable. I lied that night when I first met you. I wanted to make an impression. The only reason for lying I ever knew. I told you my one decent love affair lasted for five weeks. It didn’t. It lasted for exactly five seconds, the time of the kiss under the almond-tree in which it was born and died. Nothing more was possible, she being she and I being I. It was a decent business because we didn’t try to pretend it was anything else. So far as it went, it was so true as to make falseness impossible. We shall both live on that for the rest of our lives. Just enough to make marriage impossible for us. We shall both marry someone else for company, and as a defense against a growing tendency to promiscuity. You don’t seem to have that tendency. Life’s too serious for you. You are incapable of a love affair without an attempt to make it a spiritual thing. Where we get excited, you get exalted, which is infernally bad luck on the average woman. Feelin’ better?”
“Yes,” said René, “but you do talk a lot of drivel.”
“Hurray!” cried Kilner. “He’s beginning to find himself. I wonder if you’ll ever see how funny you are?”
“I wonder?” said René, and he turned over, and in one moment was fast asleep.