The former delight of their life together was frequently turned to
bitterness by just such disillusionizing scenes as this. The time had
long passed when she could please and amuse and occasionally puzzle him
with her romancing, her manifest infatuation. King seemed unable to grasp
or tolerate such things as romance any more. Sometimes, indeed, he would
go for days without more than casually recognizing her mere presence in
the house. Again, a mood of tenderness would come upon him and she would
see that his eyes glistened with tears. The sense of mirage would be
strong in her heart, for Stella was growing wary; yet even so, it would
seem, at such times, as though a little light were breaking along the
path ahead of them. But it couldn’t last—and she was never really fooled.
Sometimes her husband’s eyes would even take on their old look of
roundness and fascination, and, as though psychically stirred by the
unuttered anguish within her, he would go on in the old way, laying
extravagant plans—all the things they would do by and bye: the places
they would visit, the brilliant life they’d live. But she felt him,
to employ metaphor, puffing, a little, always, at such times, like a
half spent runner, in an effort to make spontaneous what had lost the
persuasive ring of spontaneity. Also, she made the discovery, after a
while, that King only reverted to these flashes of the old-time splendour
when an opium mood reined most benignly in his heart—a heart, after all,
mysterious still, and unsearchable as the forces Stella felt at work all
about her in this little empire of the poppy.
She grew bold and fearless in a new determination to tear away all the
films from her own vision and face the naked facts of her life, whatever
they might prove.
“It’s a queer thing,” she mused, “that there weren’t any premonitions
of all this in the old days....” But then she remembered how her father
had been so troubled and swayed with doubt at first: how he had held her
close and asked: “Are you sure, girlie—_dead_ sure?” Yes, there had been
that note—she lingered over it almost caressingly. And then those words
of Elsa’s: “Don’t you hold on so hard to your ideals, Stella,” or however
she had phrased it—yes, they, too had a haunting way of returning. “But
what were my ideals?” she asked herself searchingly. “Did I have any?
What was it I thought I wanted? What was I so eager to grasp, after all?”
She had played, as it had seemed to her, so brilliantly. He had fanned
her at the ball as though she were a princess. He had sent her violets
and taken her to the matinée. Then their lives had intertwined, and they
had married. She had been so eager to thrust her destiny into his hands.
She had run neck and neck with glittering Irmengarde....
“Irmengarde!” she muttered. “Only think of it!”
Now the pace had retarded. How far back all that seemed! How little she
had understood life; how little she had understood her own heart. Time
stood drowsy and stagnant, and her prince was tampering with a dread
elixir. Yes, the gay, magnetic prince, with white at either temple, who
had murmured so enchantingly in the long-ago: “Curly Locks, Curly Locks,
wilt thou be mine?”
“What I fell in love with must have been nothing more than a myth, I
guess,” she faltered. For time and silence were bringing her to deep and
pitiless introspection. She had been just in the mood ... he had set her
young girl fancy afire. But adversity was turning her into a woman, and
she knew what it was to drink from a very bitter cup indeed.
Love flew out of the window. But the awful reality of Hagen’s Island
could not be dispelled. Her dreams all glimmered out, too. But her
husband remained, like a heavy dross of fact. With the shine gone, she
was no longer blinded. There was bitter comfort in this.
If she still pleaded with him, it was no longer like a frightened doll.
It might not, somehow, be too late, even now, she sometimes groped, if
the Captain.... But time would mock her with its everlasting patience.
“What a strange thing life is,” she mused.
One day she grasped his hands and gripped them tight. “Let me throw the
stuff into the sea,” she urged. “Give me the pipe and all the things
you use, and try....” But she could not, after all, quite face the look
in his eyes without faltering, even though she had learned to speak so
simply, from her heart.
“God help me!” he muttered brokenly. It sounded like a terrible amen in
some ironic ritual of praise.
She braced herself with an immense effort of will, met his gaze again,
and went on earnestly: “I’ll help you with the work—we’ll try to make
a success of the island together, since the island has to be.” Yes,
adversity was making a woman of her after its own inexorable pattern, and
she was no longer hoodwinked by that curious superstition about a woman’s
fingers and a man’s work....
On the point of reminding him of the fine things they had so often
planned to do, a quite wonderful half inspired impulse came to her, and
she said: “I’ve heard you speak many times of wanting to settle down
somewhere in a cheerful little flat without bothering much if nothing
ever happened. It used to seem to me as though I couldn’t endure a life
like that; but now it’s really all the same to me. If you’d rather live
that kind of a life, then it will suit me too, I guess. Anything you can
fix your mind on strong enough, so you....”
In spite of everything, her words sounded a little hollow to her. Yet
back of them was such burning sincerity, too; and she felt that she
couldn’t go on living at all, after this, if he patted her head and
laughed, or if he said: “Don’t worry, little girl!”
He did not laugh, but clung to her—even frantically. He gazed at his wife
with wild, brimming eyes, and caressed her hair with gentle trembling
fingers. He pressed her passionately against his heart, and with a
shaking voice he murmured: “I swear—I swear to you....” There seemed a
faint cloud of exaltation about them.
But at evening she saw him again relaxed and ravenous, twirling the
little fatal drop above the flame of the spirit lamp. And she saw that it
was all irrevocable. And she saw how hopeless it all was....