PHILIP TO THE RESCUE.
It is always the little things in human relations that have the most
far-reaching results. Claire might have avoided much trouble with a few
well-chosen words to Lawrence, but her own mental state prevented her
from speaking.
On his part, Lawrence was so shaken by her outburst that his love for
her was driven deep into his subconscious self, and for the time it lay
there dormant. After the sudden volcanic upheaval of his entire
universe, he was utterly absorbed in the immediate task of
reconstructing his faith in himself. The primitive stages of his
thinking did not allow for any relation between himself and the woman
who had released the dam of self-abasement. She was unavoidably at hand,
reminding him of her speech, and that alone delayed what otherwise would
have been an unconscious process.
Claire was not able to forget the intense desire which, she now
realized, had prompted her terrible diatribe. Humiliation held her in
its throes, and she was reserved, distant, and unnatural toward him.
Philip saw it all, and his mind was filled with conjectures which made
him less and less charitable toward Lawrence, more jealous, and more
hopeful of a happy issue of his love for Claire. She turned to him
eagerly for companionship. Instinctively she sought refuge from her own
thoughts--and from Lawrence--by talking to Philip.
The morning after the incident between Lawrence and Claire there had
been an austere reserve in the cabin. Claire had fled from the
oppressive gloom into the open. Outside Philip joined her, and they
walked together in silence. He was determined not to ask Claire what had
happened, although he was extending her a silent sympathy which she felt
and a little resented.
Lawrence, left alone in the cabin, gave small heed to their departure.
He had risen with a frightful headache and a fever. He lay on the bed
and thought of his situation, his past life, and his future chances, in
bitter, heartrending, self-condemnatory sarcasm which made his condition
even less tolerable than it would have been otherwise.
"I am a miserable groveler at the feet of humanity," he thought,
"clutching at shrinking shoestrings for a piece of bread in pity's name.
If I could see, God, if I only could!"
He thought of all the little things which his blindness made it
absolutely necessary for others to do for him, and his excited mind
magnified them into colossal proportions. If his landlady in New York
had removed a spot from his clothes, as she had often done, that was a
proof of his despised state. He fell to imagining that he was unkempt,
dirty, disgustingly unclean, and that people had tolerated it because
they had pitied him. At last, with a cry of anguish, he thought: "And my
work, too, it is a botched mess which they are amused at and do not dare
to tell me the truth about. It, too, is a jest that the world is having
at my expense." He remembered praise and prizes that he had won in
contests with other students, and he was too excited to see the folly of
his answer: "That was charity, the award of kindness to me. I know now
what they thought--that for a blind man the thing was nearly enough
correct to be interesting and quite amusing."
His body felt hot, and he went outside to prowl about in the wind and
snow, like a despairing beast. His mind kept up its terrible work, and
he did not notice the continual drop in temperature. Round and round the
cabin he walked, instead of going into the forest, as he would have done
the day before. In his mind was a sudden doubt of his own ability, and
he said that Claire had been right to keep him in. She was more aware of
his pitiable weakness than he. At last, however, from sheer weariness he
went inside. He was chilled through, but instead of rebuilding the fire
and warming himself, he rolled up in a blanket and lay on the bed,
chilling and burning by turns.
In the mean time Claire and Philip were discussing the man in the cabin.
Philip had finally broken the silence by saying: "Claire, you needn't
feel so about whatever has happened. Remember he is blind and must be
treated less critically than other men."
She knew that that was just what had made Lawrence so deadly white when
she had spoken, and it filled her with sickening pain. She answered
unsteadily: "That isn't true. It isn't Lawrence, anyway, it's myself who
should be condemned."
Philip was thoughtful. "It is like you to take the blame on yourself.
You are so kind-hearted that way."
In her present state, his words seemed like a reproach. "Philip, don't,"
she said sadly. "I know better than that."
He persisted. "No, you do not. You are too sympathetic, and you let your
heart get the better of you."
"I wish you wouldn't talk that way," she repeated. "You wouldn't, if you
knew the truth."
"Of course, I do not know what happened," he said, "but I do know
you--even better than you know yourself."
"Do you know what I've done?"
"No, and I do not care. It was right, I am sure. The queen can do no
wrong." He was intensely serious.
"Isn't there any common sense left in you, Philip?" she railed. "Have
you gone clear back into medieval nonsense in your feeling toward me? I
tell you, you are indulging in foolishness."
"Am I?" He smiled. "Well, if that is the best I have to give--"
"I don't want you to give me anything."
"But I cannot help it, neither can you."
"I have killed a man's love before this," she answered bitterly.
"But you cannot kill mine. I love you, whether you love me or not. I am
proud to acknowledge my unreturned love."
"As you please." Claire stopped suddenly. "Are we apt to get anywhere
with this subject?" she asked ironically.
"I don't know. I earnestly hope so."
She looked at Philip thoughtfully. Perhaps the truth about her own
weakness might cure him.
"Suppose I allowed you to love me, and you found that you had won a
woman whose passions were her whole life. Suppose she should prove to be
a mere bundle of sex, all polished over with other people's ideas, a
social manner, and a set of morals which she did not really feel, which
were deceiving ornaments hiding her soul. What would you think of your
prize?"
"I should not love such a woman. I could not."
"But suppose you were deceived and thought her other than she was."
"I hardly expect such a thing to happen. Why suppose?"
"Because if I were your wife you might find it to be true."
Philip laughed aloud. "Claire, how preposterous! Are you trying to kill
my love for you with such terrifying pictures of depravity?"
"I wasn't trying to do anything. I just wanted to know."
"Have you been answered?"
"Yes, you are like all of your type; you are in love with what your own
desire chooses as an ideal, and then you shout, 'Behold, I am not a
sensual lover!'"
He stared at her in amazement. "What sort of a thing do you think I am?"
She laughed carelessly. "A man. And what do you think I am?"
"A very strange woman, but a dear one," he said earnestly.
"Why strange, Philip?"
"Because you talk of love as Lawrence might."
She winced. "He would know," she said. "He does know, perhaps." She was
talking to herself, and her voice was pathetic.
Philip's eyes grew fierce with anger. "What do you mean?"
"Not what your very ideal mind thinks," she said coldly.
He flamed scarlet, and looked away. "Claire," he said softly, "will you
never have done stirring up suspicions no man could avoid, and then
condemning them?"
"I didn't stir them up," she mocked.
"Who did, then?"
Claire was undergoing a developing reconstruction, but that she did not
know. She thought she was degenerating, and the immediate result was to
make her careless and ironical.
"Oh, the devil, perhaps," she hazarded.
"What are you, Claire?" Philip demanded hoarsely.
Suddenly her suffering broke into tears. To his utter amazement, she
began to cry unrestrainedly.
Over and over she sobbed: "I don't know, I don't know."
For a moment Philip stood motionless, bewildered, then his love and
natural tenderness swept over him, and he said tenderly, "Don't, Claire,
please."
She only cried harder, weakened the more by his pity. He took her in his
arms as he would a child, and comforted her. She was tempted to
struggle, but her need for sympathy prevailed, and she did not resist
him. He held her in his arms, pouring out his love, his anxiety, his
tenderness, and in her momentary condition she listened and made no
protest. In her aching mind she kept repeating, "I have killed
Lawrence's love with my bestial talk"--and she wanted love. She did not
think of her husband. He was too far away. In her present attitude she
exalted Lawrence to the unattainable, and, without formulating the
thought, she was willing to lie in Philip's arms and take what he could
give. They were two of a kind, she thought scornfully. In her
bitterness, the bleak, snow-covered land, with its drooping pines,
seemed in its cold monotony a fitting background for two such worthless
derelicts.
In the Spaniard's mind was but one thought--to comfort Claire and
restore her to her usual self. Vaguely he knew that love was already
promised by the unresisting body in his arms, but there was no thought
of immediately pressing his suit. He petted and talked until she stopped
crying, then he stood her on her feet, and said, with a tender laughter
in his words: "There, you are all right again. We would better go in.
You are cold."
Silently she walked beside him back to the cabin. She was indifferent,
she thought, as to whether he did or did not continue his appeals for
love. She was under her own deep, unexplained, emotional control which
led her forward. She was finding herself, but before she would be safe
she would have to throw off a mass of traditional views, beliefs, and
teachings. If Philip chose to press his suit while her knowledge of
herself still seemed vile and abnormal, she would be surely his. Claire
thought herself lost. She had revealed her terrible state to Lawrence,
killed his love, filled him with abhorrence, and struck at his life's
source.
With silent turmoil in her brain she entered the cabin beside Philip.
When she saw Lawrence, a sharp pain went through her. He was white as
death save for the red spots that marked his fever. She took off her
coat and snow-cap hurriedly.
"Lawrence," she said softly, going toward him.
He lifted his head slightly.
"What is it, Claire?"
"I want to do something for you. You're ill."
His face clouded. "No, thanks," he said. "You've done too much for me
already."
"Won't you do anything for yourself?" she begged.
"I'll be all right. It's just a cold, I guess."
Philip came and stood looking down at Lawrence scrutinizingly, while
Claire went to the fire and heated water.
"I am going to fill you up with quinin," he announced. "It is never
missing from my medicine-chest."
"All right," Lawrence laughed. "It isn't bitter compared to what I'm
filling myself with."
"Are you not making a fool of yourself?" Philip asked plainly.
"Yes. I know it. That doesn't keep me from doing it, though."
Claire turned and looked at them, her eyes sternly reproachful toward
Philip.
"One can't help thinking," she said. "I can't."
"I shouldn't want you to," Lawrence returned. "Indeed, I'm grateful to
you for making me think, too."
"She started you off, did she?" Philip smiled.
Lawrence did not answer, and Philip sat down by the fire where he could
watch Claire as she worked.
After a time Lawrence said thoughtfully: "If one could establish some
sort of a relation between himself and the ultimate first cause of all
this blind snowstorm we call life, things might get shaped with some
measure for perspectives."
"Yes," Philip assented. "I manage to establish one, though I confess it
isn't clearly logical."
"What is it?" Lawrence asked.
"Simply having faith; hope, if you prefer it."
"But faith in what, and what do you base it on?"
"Oh, on my experience."
"I wonder if we really matter at all to the rest of the scheme," Claire
voiced.
"I am inclined to think not," replied Lawrence. "We matter only to
ourselves, and what we can do with the universe around us."
"We matter to God, I think," said Philip. "I don't mean in the old
accepted sense; but we must matter to Him in some way, perhaps as your
statue here matters to you."
Lawrence chuckled weakly. "It mattered tremendously when I was doing
it. Now it doesn't in the least matter. I shouldn't care if you burned
it as firewood."
"But you must care," Claire protested, feeling that he was losing
interest in his work because of her.
"I don't see why. I haven't any real assurance as to its value. It may
be good, more likely it isn't; in any case, I have turned it loose to
shift for itself. It can survive or not; its doing so is immaterial.
Perhaps as immaterial as my existence is to the Great Artist who
conceived the botched job called me."
"But, Lawrence, why insist that you don't matter to Him?"
"Oh, because I am scarcely aware of Him at all; indeed, I am not aware
of Him, and I am sure He isn't aware of me."
"You have not any way to prove that," declared Philip.
"True, except that I can imaginatively comprehend the size of time and
space, and all that is therein. I know my own size, and I can readily
imagine that the creator of the whole is no more aware of me than I am,
say, of a small worm that may be in the heart of my cherub there."
"We do seem pretty small in the face of the stars," said Claire.
"Yes, and so impossible," added Lawrence. "I didn't realize until to-day
how utterly impossible I really am."
"But, impossible or not, here you are," Philip laughed.
"Yes, here I am and there I may be, but in either place I am not
especially possible. You are; you can go out and make a definite,
independent impression on life; that makes you possible in that you are
forcing recognition of power and capability. I can't do that. The
impression I make is one of incapability. For myself I am impossible,
and for others more so."
"Which has nothing to do with God," said Philip, in his tone a touch of
distaste.
Lawrence recognized it and became silent.
Claire made him take the quinin and heated bricks for his feet. Philip
went out to cut wood for the fire, leaving her alone with the sick man.
She was so full of her own wickedness, as she conceived it, that she
dared not tell him her thoughts. She wanted to explain that she loved
him, that she had loved him all along, but she could not. She looked at
him, and felt sure that he had now no love for her.
Lawrence was trying to follow out in his mind a searching inquiry as to
his relation to life. "If I could only establish that," he thought, "I
could get myself straight and there would be something to start from. If
I knew which way to move!" But he was unable to do any coherent
thinking. His head ached, his lips burned with fever, and his body kept
him busy with the sensation of pain. It seemed to him that illness made
his state more detestable, but it also offered him a chance of escape
from the whole drab business. He was quite sure that he wanted to
escape, and he would not have believed it if any one had told him that
he would resist death to the uttermost; yet deep within him was that
will to live which had made him the creative artist. It was working,
unknown to him, now, toward the reconstruction he so needed.
He turned restlessly, and muttered something about his foolishness.
Claire came and sat beside him silently. She was wondering what would
happen if she should tell him of her discovery of herself.
"Claire!" Lawrence spoke. "Is it possible for any one to get his life
platform built so that it will stand without that first great plank?"
"What plank?"
"God."
"I don't know."
"It seems to me that you couldn't have shaken me so yesterday if I had
been built up right."
"Lawrence," she said piteously, "I didn't mean to do that, to say that."
He waved her words aside. "Never mind, Claire, it did me good. I was not
realizing, quite, just what I was. I'm finding it out, and when I get
right I'll be all the better for it."
"But you don't know why I did it."
"Yes, I do, but it doesn't matter, anyway. What was behind your words
doesn't count so long as you told the truth."
"But it does count, and I didn't tell the truth."
"I'm afraid you did. Please don't try to cover it with kind fibs now."
"I sha'n't, but you don't understand."
"Well, Claire, it doesn't matter, as I said. What is it to me what you
do or don't do, so long as you bring me face to face with more truth?"
She thought he was telling her that he cared nothing for her. She did
not blame him, yet there was a tiny streak of pride that said, "At least
Philip finds me worth while."
"It is simply my own salvation that is involved," Lawrence went on.
"Well, I hope you find it," she said simply.
"I must find it to live," he answered.
"And how do you propose to find it?"
"I don't know. I wish I did."
"You might find it, as you once said, in creative work."
"No, that isn't a salvation. I must have a platform from which to work.
Don't you see that, Claire?"
"I don't understand anything about it."
"Pardon me, I didn't intend to force this upon you."
"That isn't what I mean, Lawrence." Her eyes were moist. "What I meant
was that you live above me entirely."
"Nonsense," he said wrathfully. "You talk like a silly girl, Claire."
"Do I? Well, I am perhaps less worth while than you think."
"Oh, I guess not," he returned carelessly.
She covered her face with her hands.
"I know you are worth all that I think you are," he continued. "But I am
afraid that just now I am too interested in my own salvation to think of
you at all correctly."
"Yes," she observed wearily.
She was thinking of Philip as he had comforted her that morning, and his
tenderness, compared to this cold statement from Lawrence, seemed
attractive beyond measure. She admitted that all hope of Lawrence's
loving her was dead, and she said to herself: "It is what I wanted. I
can go back to my husband." But she did not want to go back to Howard.
She received this discovery calmly. She would never go back. But why
shouldn't she? She could not tell for certain. She thought it was
because she had found herself unworthy, but deep within her was the
knowledge that she no longer loved him. It would be useless to go back
to him in any event. He could never be the same to her after hearing of
her long months with this blind man in the wilderness.
What months they had been! She thought them over, day by day, and she
saw what might have been a great joy sink, after a glimpse, into utter
darkness. Before her she saw the endless gray years beside Philip. Yes,
she would stay with him. At least he loved her, and she could help him.
If she did not love him, what of it? She would be an able wife to him.
She could keep him from ever knowing that her heart was away with
Lawrence, who would be back in the world at home and have forgotten her.
"Claire!" Lawrence was speaking. "We have certainly reaped a strange
harvest from our months of sowing in the wilderness."
"Yes."
"Whatever brought it about?"
"I don't know."
"Perhaps it was fate, that you should teach me where I stand in life."
"Perhaps."
"And perhaps you, too, will find that I have been of some value when we
are separated."
"It may be."
"I wish things might have gone differently."
"They didn't."
"No, and they can't. Well, let them be as they are."
"I guess we'll have to, Lawrence."
A few minutes later, when she looked at him, he was asleep.