Frida had played high and yet she had won the game of life; that
dangerous game which most women playing single-handed are bound to
lose. She had won, but whether by apathy or care, by skill or
divine chance, he could not tell. As to himself he was very certain;
when he might have won her he did not care to win, now that he had
lost her he would always care. That was just his way.
Alone in the little hotel that looked over the harbor, left to the
tyrannous company of his own thoughts, he made a desperate effort to
understand her, to accept her point of view, to be, as she was,
comprehensive and generous and just.
He believed every word she had ever said to him, for she was truth
itself; he believed her when she said that she had loved him, that
she loved him still. Of course she loved him; but how?
They say that passion in a pure woman is first lit at the light of
the ideal, and burns downward from spirit to earth. But Frida's had
shot up full-flamed from the dark, kindled at the hot heart of
nature, thence it had taken to itself wings and flown to the ideal;
and for its insatiable longing there was no ideal but the whole.
Other women before Frida had loved the world too well; but for them
the world meant nothing but their own part and place in it. For
Frida it meant nothing short of the divine cosmos. Impossible to fix
her part and place in it; the woman was so merged with the object of
her desire. He, Maurice Durant, was as she had said a part of that
world, but he was not the whole; he was not even the half, that half
which for most women is more than the whole. From the first he had
been to her the symbol of a reality greater than himself; she loved
not him, but the world in him. And thus her love, like his own art,
had missed the touch of greatness. It was neither the joy nor the
tragedy of her life, but its one illuminating episode; or, rather,
it was the lyrical prologue to the grand drama of existence.
He did her justice. It was not that she was changeable or
capricious, or that her love was weak; on the contrary, its very
nature was to grow out of all bounds of sex and mood and
circumstance. Its progress had been from Maurice Durant outward;
from Maurice, as the innermost kernel and heart of the world, to the
dim verge, the uttermost margin of the world; and that by a million
radiating paths. It was not that she left Maurice behind her, for
all those million paths led back to him, the man was the center of
her universe; but then the center is infinitely small compared with
the circumference. He saw himself diminished to a mathematical point
in this cosmopolitan's cosmos. For Frida he had ceased to have any
objective existence, he was an intellectual quantity, what the
Colonel would have called an abstraction. There was nothing for him
to do but to accept the transcendent position.
Thus, through all the tension of his soul, his intellect still
struggled for comprehension.
Meanwhile, from his window looking over the white-walled harbor, he
could see the _Windward_ with all her sails spread, outward bound.
He watched her till there was nothing to be seen but her flying
sails, till the sails were one white wing on a dim violet sea, till
the white wing was a gray dot, indistinct on the margin of the
world.