Since he had declared himself so decidedly and at once, no hesitation
was possible; he must, he was aware, move remorselessly forward in
assault. To sweep Susan Brundon into his desire, overwhelm her
defences--he called them prejudices but immediately after withdrew that
term--offered the greatest, the only promise of success. An obliterating
snow fell for the following thirty hours, and a week went by in the
readjustment to ordinary conditions of living and travel. But at the end
of that period Jasper Penny left Myrtle Forge for the city, with a
determined, an almost confident, mouth, and a bright, hard gaze. Late
afternoon, he decided, would be the best time for his appearance at the
Academy. And the western sky was a luminous, bright red when he passed
under the stripped, uneasy branches of the willow trees to the school
door.
Miss Brundon's office, rigorous as the corridor of a hospital, had a
table and uncompromising wooden chairs on a rectangle of bluish-pink
carpet; a glowing, round stove held a place on a square of gleaming,
embossed zinc, while the remaining surfaces were scrubbed oak flooring
and white calcimine. A large geographer's globe, a sphere of pale,
glazed yellow traced in violet and thin vermilion and cobalt, rested on
an involuted mahogany stand; and a pile of text books covered in gay
muslin made a single, decisive note of colour.
She kept him waiting, he felt uneasily, a long while; perhaps she had a
class; but he felt that that was not the reason for her delay. When she
finally appeared in soft brown merino, with a deep fichu of old, dark
lace, and black ribbons, she courageously held out a delightfully cool,
smooth hand. "At first," she said directly, "I thought it would be
better not to see you at all. Yet that wasn't genteel; and I felt, too,
that I must speak to you. Even at the danger, perhaps, of trespassing
into your privacy."
"I have given you the absolute right to do that," he told her. "It will
only bring me pleasure, to--to suppose I interest you enough--"
"Ah, but you do," she cried with clasping fingers. "It has made my work
here very difficult; the quiet has gone before echoes that I think every
child must hear, echoes from spaces and things that appall me. Here, you
see, I have lived so apart from others, perhaps selfishly, that I had
grown accustomed to a false sense of peace. Only lessons and little
questions, little hands. It seems now that I have been outside of life
itself, in a cowardly seclusion. Yet it had always been that way; I
didn't know." Her face was deeply troubled, the clear depths of her eyes
held a new questioning doubt.
"It's because of that, mainly, I ask you to marry me," he replied,
standing before the table at which, unconsciously, she had taken her
place; "it is because of your astonishing purity. You are so beautiful;
and this quiet, peace--you must have it all your life; it is the air,
the garden air, for you to flower in. I can give it to you, miles of it,
farther than you can see. All that you care for heaped about you. But
not that only," he insisted, "for I realized that no one lives to whom
such things are less; I can give you something more, not to be talked
about; whatever my life has been it has at least brought me to your
feet. I have learned, for you, that there is a thing men must have, God
knows exactly what--a craving to be satisfied, a--a reaching. And that
itself, the knowledge of such need, is not without value. Because of it
I again, and shall again, if necessary, ask you to marry me."
She replied in a low voice. "You must marry the child's mother." For the
first time she avoided him; bright blood burned in her cheeks; a hand on
the edge of the table was straining, white. A sudden feeling of
helplessness came over him, with, behind it, the ever-present edge of
anger, of impatience. He took a step forward, as if to crush, by sheer
insistence, her opposition; but he stopped. He lost entirely the sense
of her fragile physical being; she seemed only a spirit, shining and
high, and insuperably lovely. Then all feeling was lost but the
realization that he could not--in any true sense--live without her.
"Susan," he said, leaning forward, "you must marry me. Do you care for
me at all?"
Her breast rose and fell under the delicate contour of her wool gown.
"The child's mother," she repeated, "you should marry her. How can you
do differently? What can it matter if I care about you?" She raised a
miserable face. "How can I?" she asked.
He could think of no other answer than to repeat his supreme necessity
for her. He struggled to tell her that this was an altogether different
man from Essie Scofield's companion; but his words were unconvincing,
limited by the inhibition of custom. A transparent dusk deepened in the
room accompanied by a pause only broken by the faint explosions of the
soft coal. The power of persuasion, of speech, appeared to have left
him. There must be some convincing thing to say, some last,
all-powerful, argument. It eluded him. The exasperation returned,
spreading through his being.
"Surely," she said laboriously, "there is only one course for you, for
us all."
"I'll never marry Essie Scofield!" he declared bluntly. His voice was
unexpectedly loud, unpleasant; and it surprised him only less than Susan
Brundon. She drew back, and the colour sank from her cheeks; an
increasing fear of him was visible. "In the first place," he continued,
"Essie probably wouldn't hear of it. And if I managed that it would be
only to make a private hell for us both. It would not, it couldn't, last
a month. There is nothing magical in marriage itself, there's no general
salvation in it, nothing to change a man or woman. Why, by heaven,
that's what you have taught me, that is the heart of my wanting you. You
must feel it to understand." He circled the table and laid a hand on the
back of her chair. "Susan."
Her head was bowed, and he could see only her smooth, dark bands of hair
and the whiteness of her neck. "Susan," he said again. "A second wrong
will not cure the first. If one was inexcusable the other would be
fatal. Married--to some one else, with yourself always before me--surely
you must see the impossibility of that. And am I to come to nothing,
eternally fail, because of the past? Isn't there any escape, any hope,
any possibility? You don't realize how very much will go down with me. I
am a man in the middle of life, and haven't the time, the elasticity, of
youth. A few more years to the descent. But, with you, they could be
splendidly useful, happy; happy, I think, for us both. I know that a
great many people would say as you have, but it is wrong in every
aspect, absolutely hopeless. Essie's values are totally different from
yours; she has her own necessities; one measure will not do for all
women."
She rose and stood facing him, very near, her crinoline swaying against
him, and said blindly, "You shall marry her."
"I'll be damned if I do," Jasper Penny asserted. "I will marry you,
you," he whispered, with his lips against the fineness of her ear. Her
hands were on his shoulders; but she neither drew herself into his
embrace nor repulsed him. He wanted to crush her softness in his arms,
to kiss her still face into acquiescence. The quality, the kind, of his
need made it impossible. She slipped back without a sound into her
chair, drooping forward over the table.
A sharp pity invaded him, holding him back from her, silencing the flow
of his reasoning and appeal. It defeated, in the stirring tenderness of
its consideration, his purpose. He could not continue tormenting her,
racking her delicate, taut sensibilities by a hard insistence. He
withdrew quietly, to where his hat and stick rested on a chair, and
gathered them up. Still she didn't move, raise her head, break the low
fumbling of the soft coal. He could no longer distinguish her clearly,
she was blurring in a dusk deeping so imperceptibly that it seemed a
gradual failing of his vision. The geographer's globe appeared to sway
slightly, like a balloon tied to a string; the gay muslin of the piled
text books had lost their designs. Suddenly the room without motion, the
approaching night, the desirable presence of the woman growing more
immaterial, more shadow-like to elude his reaching hands, presented a
symbol, an epitome, of himself. Day fading swiftly into dark; dissolving
the realities of table and flesh and floor; leaving only the hunger,
the insuperable inner necessity and sense of loss.
"Good-bye," he breathed. Jasper Penny saw that she raised her head, he
caught the glimmering pallor of her face. But she said nothing, and sank
back into the crumpled position on the table. He went out, closing the
door of the office, shutting her into the loneliness of her resolve, her
insistence.
In the familiar rooms at Sanderson's Hotel he revolved again and again
all that she had said. For a little he even endeavoured to inspect
calmly the possibility of a marriage with Essie Scofield. Steeped in
Susan's spirit he thought of it as a reparation, to Eunice, perhaps to
Essie, but more certainly to an essence within himself. But immediately
he saw the futility of such a course; the inexorable logic of existence
could not be so easily placated, its rhyming of cause and effect
defeated. All that he had told Susan Brundon recurred strengthened to an
immovable conviction. The thought of marrying Essie was intolerable,
farcical; to the woman herself it would mean utter boredom. Such a thing
must lead inevitably to a greater misfortune than any of the past.
Susan, in her resplendent ignorance of facts, failed to realize the
impossibility of what she upheld. No, no, it was out of the question.
He wondered if he had progressed in the other, his supreme, wish. And he
felt, with a stirring of blood, that he had. Susan cared for him; her
action had made that plain. That was a tremendous advantage; with
another he would have thought it conclusive; but not--not quite with
Susan Brundon. He had a deep regard for her determination, so surprising
in the midst of her fragility. Yet, if pity had not prevented him, this
afternoon, in her office, he might have forced her to a sharper
realization of a more earthly need, the ache for sympathy, consolation,
the imperative cry of self. That was his greatest difficulty, to
overcome her lifelong habit of thinking of others before herself. Such,
he knew, was the root of her appeal for Essie, rather than a cold,
dogmatic conception. Self-effacement.
At this a restive state followed; personally he had no confidence in the
sacrifice of individual aims and happiness. Any course of that sort, he
told himself, in the management of his practical affairs, would have
resulted in his failure. There were a hundred men in the country
plotting for his overthrow, anxious to take his position, scheming to
undersell him, to discover the secret of the quality of his iron rails.
Others he had deliberately, necessarily, ruined. No good would have been
served by his stepping aside, allowing smaller men to flourish and annoy
him, cut down his production by inconsiderable sales. He, and his
family, had built a great, yes, and beneficial, industry by ruthlessly
beating out a broad and broader way for their progress. It was needful
to gaze fixedly at the end desirable and move in the straightest line
possible.
Susan stopped by the way. A thousand little acts of alleviation, at
best temporary, interrupted her living. Children, not hers, dragged at
her skirt. How much better for her to have a child of her own. Their
child! A great deal that had been vague in his thoughts became concrete
at that last period; not only the possible succession of the iron, but
the comprehension that a child now, before the increasing sterility of
multiplying years, would be an image of all his inmost craving and which
must else be lost.
Eunice was different. Pity, mingled with a rigid sense of his duty and a
faint accent of parenthood, comprehended his feeling for her. He stated
this to himself clearly, admitting what delinquency it carried. It was,
simply, an incontrovertible fact; and it was his habit to meet such
things squarely. A black Penny, he had no impulse to see existence in
imposed sentimental or formally moral conceptions. From all this he
returned with a feeling of delight to his personal longing for Susan
Brundon; he saw her bowed over the table in an exhaustion almost an
attitude of surrender. A slender, pliable figure in soft merino and
lace. He saw her beyond the candles of Graham Jannan's supper table, a
rose geranium at her breast. The motto of the bon bon partially
returned:
"... ange du ciel ... je t'aime!
... le bon heur supreme!"