women whom he had known in various degrees from warmth to white-heat,
there had been interruptions, no such constant freedom of access, no
such intermingling of daily life. Her he had seen at all hours and in
all circumstances. She never disturbed him but was ready to talk when
he wished to listen, listened eagerly when he talked, and was silent
and beautiful and restful to look at when he wished to indulge in the
dissipation of mental laziness.
As she loved him, she showed him only the best that there was in her and
showed it in the most attractive of all lights.
While he was still wavering or fancying that he was wavering, the
Managing Editor sent him to “do” a great strike-riot in the coal regions
of Pennsylvania. He was there for three weeks, active day and night,
interested in the new phases of life--the mines and the miners, the
display of fierce passions, the excitement, the peril.
When he returned to New York, Alice had ceased to tempt him.
* * * * *
One midnight in the early spring he was in his sitting room, reading
and a little bored. There came a knock at the door. He hoped that it was
some one bringing something interesting or coming to propose a search
for something interesting. “Come in,” he said with welcome in his voice.
The door opened. It was Alice.
She was dressed much as she had been the first time he talked with
her--a loose, clinging wrapper open at the throat. There was a change
in her face--a change for the better but also for the worse. She looked
more intelligent, more of a woman. There was more sparkle in her eyes
and in her smile. But--Howard saw instantly the price she had paid. As
the German had suggested, she had “got on up town.”
She was pulling at the long broad blue ribbons of her negligee. Her
hands were whiter and her pink finger nails had had careful attention.
She smiled, enjoying his astonishment. “I have come back,” she said.
Howard came forward and took her hand. “I’m glad, very glad to see you.
For a minute I thought I was dreaming.”
“Yes,” she went on, “I’m in my old room. I came this afternoon. I must
have been asleep, for I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I hope it isn’t bad luck that has flung you back here.”
“Oh, no. I’ve been doing very well. I’ve been saving up to come. And
when I had enough to last me through the summer, I--I came.”
“You’ve been at work?”
She dropped her eyes and flushed. And her fingers played more nervously
with her ribbons.
“You needn’t treat me as a child any longer,” she said at last in a low
voice; “I’m eighteen now and--well, I’m not a child.”
Again there was a long pause. Howard, watching her downcast face, saw
her steadying her expression to meet his eyes. When she looked, it was
straight at him--appeal but also defiance.
“I don’t ask anything of you,” she said, “we are both free. And I
wanted to see you. I was sick of all those others--up there. I’ve
never had--had--this out of my mind. And I’ve come. And I can see you
sometimes. I won’t be in the way.”
Howard went over to the window and stared out into the lights and
shadows of the leafy Square. When he turned again she had lighted and
was smoking one of his cigarettes.
“Well,” he said smiling down at her, “Why not? Put on a street gown and
we’ll go out and get supper and talk it over.”
She sprang up, her face alight. She was almost running toward the door.
Midway she stopped, turned and came slowly back. She put one of her arms
upon his shoulder--a slender, cool, smooth, white arm with the lace of
the wide sleeve slipping away from it. She turned her face up until her
mouth, like a rosebud, was very near his lips. There was appeal in her
eyes.
“I’m very, very glad to see you,” Howard said as he kissed her.
* * * * *
And so Howard’s life was determined for the next four years.
He worked well at his profession. He read a great deal. He wrote fiction
and essays in desultory fashion and got a few things printed in the
magazines. He led a life that was a model of regularity. But he knew the
truth--that Alice had ended his career.
He was content. Ambition had always been vague with him and now his
habit of following the line of least resistance had drifted him
into this mill-pond. Sometimes, he would give himself up to
bitter self-reproach, disgusted that he should be so satisfied, so
non-resisting in a lot in every way the reverse of that which he had
marked out for himself. If he had been chained he might, probably would,
have broken away. But Alice never attempted to control him. His will
was her law. She was especially shrewd about money matters, so often the
source of disputes and estrangements. Two months after she reappeared,
she proposed that they take an apartment together.
“I saw one to-day in West Twelfth Street at seventy dollars a month,”
she said, “and I’m sure I could manage it so that you would be much
better off than you are now.”
He viewed this plan with suspicion. It definitely committed him to a
mode of life which he had always regarded as degrading both to the man
and the woman and as certain of a calamitous ending. So he made excuses
for delay, fully intending never to yield. But although Alice did not
speak of her plan again, he found himself more and more attracted by it,
caught himself speculating about various apartments he happened to see
as he went about the streets. She must have been conscious of what was
going on in his mind; for when, a month after she had spoken, he said
abruptly: “Where was that apartment you saw?” she went straight on
discussing the details as if there had been no interval. She was ready
to act.
The apartment was taken in her name--Mrs. Cammack, the “Mrs.” being
necessary to account for him. They selected the furniture together, he
as interested as she and very pleased to find that she had the same good
taste in those matters that she had in dress. She took all the troubles
and annoyances upon herself. When she invited him to assist in the
arrangement, it was in matters that amused him and at times when she was
sure he had nothing else to do. It is not strange that he got a wholly
false idea of the difficulties of setting up an establishment.
After a month of selecting and discussing, of pleasure in the new
experience, pleasure in Alice’s enthusiasm and excitement and happiness,
he found himself master of five attractive and comfortable rooms, his
clothing, his books, all his belongings properly arranged. The door was
opened for him by a cleanlooking coloured maid, with a tiny white cap on
her head.
As he looked around and then at the beautiful face with the wistful,
gold-brown eyes so anxiously following his wandering glance, he was very
near to loving her. Indeed, he was like a husband who has left out that
period of passionate love which extends into married life until it gives
place to boredom, or to dislike, or to some such sympathetic affection
as he felt for Alice. “It is just this that holds me,” he thought, in
his infrequent moods of dissatisfaction. “If we quarrelled or if there
were any deep feeling on my side, I should not be in this mess. I should
be”--Well, where would he be? “Probably worse off,” he usually added.
Certainly he could not have been freer, for she never questioned
him; and, if she was ever uneasy or jealous when he came in late--for
him--without telling her where he had been, she never showed it. She had
no friends, and he often wondered how she passed the time when he was
not with her. Whenever he inquired he got the same answer: She had been
busying herself with their home; she had been planning to save money or
to make him more comfortable; she had been reading to improve her mind
and to enable herself to start him talking on subjects that interested
him.
No matter how unexpectedly he looked in upon her life or her mind, he
found--himself.
One day she said to him--it was after two years of this life: “Something
is worrying you. Is it about me? You look at me so queerly at times.”
“Yes,” he answered. “It is about you. Tell me, Miss Black-Hair, do you
never think of getting old?”
“No,” she smiled. “I shall wait until I am twenty-five before I begin to
think of that.”
“But don’t you see that this sort of thing must stop sometime? It is
unjust to you. When I think of it, I reproach myself for permitting us
to get into it.”
“I am happy,” she said, looking straight at him, terror in her eyes.
“But you have no friends?”
“Who has? And what do I want with friends?”
“But don’t you see, I can’t introduce you to anybody. I can’t talk about
you to the people I know. I am always having to explain you away, always
having to act as if I were ashamed of this, my real life. At times I am
Anglo-Saxon enough to be really ashamed of it. And I ought to be and am
ashamed of myself.”
“Don’t let’s talk about it. You and I understand. Why should we bother
about the rest of the world?”
“No, we _must_ talk about it. I have been going over it carefully. We
must--must be married.”
He laid his hand upon hers. She blushed deeply and lowered her head.
A tear dropped upon the front of her gown and hung glittering in the
meshes of the white lace. She crept into his arms and buried her face
upon his shoulder and sobbed. He had never seen her even look like tears
before.
“We must be married,” he repeated, patting her on the shoulder.
She shook her head in negation.
“Yes,” he said firmly, mentally noting that this was the very first time
he had ever caught her in a pretense.
“No.” Her tone was as firm as his. She lifted her head and put her
cheek against his. “It makes me very proud that you ask it. But--I--I do
not----”
“Do not--what?”
“I do not want--I will not--risk losing you.”
“But you won’t lose me. You will have me more than ever.”
“Some men--yes. But not you.”
“And why not I, O Wisdom?”
“Because--because--do you think I have watched you all this time,
without learning something about you? The way to keep you is to leave
you free. I do not want your name. I do not want your friends I do not
want to be respectable. I want--just you.”
“But are we not as good as married now?”
“Yes--that’s it. And I want it to keep on. I never cared for anybody
until I saw you. I shall never care for anybody else. I never shall try.
I want you as long as I can have you. And then----”
“And then,” Howard laughed or rather, pretended to laugh, “and then,
‘Oh, dig me a grave both wide and deep, wide and deep.’ How like
twenty-years-old that is.”
She seemed not to hear his jest and presently went on: “Do you remember
the evening before I left, down there at Mrs. Sands’s?”
“The night you proposed to me?” Howard said, pulling her ear.
She smiled faintly and continued: “I thought it all out that night. I
intended to come back just as I did. I went deliberately. I----”
Howard put his hand over her lips.
“O, I am not going to tell anything,”, said she, evading his fingers.
“Only this--that I understood you then, understood just why you
would never marry. Not so clearly as I understand it now, but still
I--understood. And you have been teaching me ever since, teaching me
manners, teaching me how to read and think and talk. And more than all,
you’ve taught me your way of looking at life.”
Howard held her away from him and studied her face, surprise in his
eyes. “Isn’t it strange?” he said.
“Here I’ve been seeing you day after day all this time, have had a
chance to know you better than I ever knew any one in my life, have had
you very near to me day and night. And just now, as I look at you, I see
the real you for the first time in two years.”
“I have been wondering when you would look at me again,” said Alice with
a small, sly smile.
“Why, you are a woman grown. Where is the little girl I knew, the little
girl who used to look up to me?”
“Oh, she’s gone these two years. She proposed to you and, when you
refused her, she--died.”
“Yes--we must be married,” Howard went on. “Why not? It is more
convenient, let us say.”
Alice shook her head and put her cheek against his again and clasped his
fingers in hers. “No, my instinct is against it. Some day--perhaps.
But not now, not now. I want you. I want only you. We are together out
here--out beyond the pale. Inside, others would come in and--and surely
come between us. I want no others--none.”
VII.
A LITTLE CANDLE GOES OUT.
Howard was now thirty years old. Park Row had long ceased talking of him
as a “coming man.” While his style of writing was steadily improving,
he wrote with no fixed aim, wrote simply for the day, for the newspaper
which dies with the day of its date. Some of his acquaintances wondered
why a man of such ability should thus stand still. The less observant
spoke of him as an impressive example of the “journalistic blight.”
Those who looked deeper saw the truth--a dangerous facility, a perilous
inertia, a fatal entanglement. Facility enabled him to earn a good
living with ease, working as he chose. Inertia prevented him from
seeking opportunities for advancement. Entanglement shut him off from
the men and women of his own kind who would have thrust opportunities
upon him and compelled him.
Howard himself saw this clearly in his occasional moods of
self-criticism. But as he saw no remedy, he raged intermittently and
briefly, and straightway relapsed. Vanity supplied him with many
excuses and consolations. Was he not one of the best reporters in the
profession? Where was there another, where indeed in any profession were
there many of his age, making five thousand a year? Was he not always
improving his mind? Was he not more and more careful in his personal
habits? Was he not respected by all who knew him; looked upon as a
successful man; regarded by those with whom he came in daily contact as
a leader in the profession, a model for style, a marvel for facility and
versatility and for the quantity of good “copy” he could turn out in a
brief time? But with all the soothings of vanity he never could quite
hide from himself that his life was a failure up to that moment.
“Why try to lie to myself?” he thought. “It’s never a question of what
one has done but always of what one could have and should have done.
I am thirty and I have been marking time for at least four years.
Preparing by study and reading? Yes, but not preparing for anything.”
On the whole he was glad that Alice had refused to marry him. Her reason
was valid. But there was another which he thought she did not see. He
was deceived as to the depth of her insight because he did not watch her
closely. He had no suspicion how many, many times, in their moments
of demonstrativeness, she listened for those words which never came,
listened and turned away to hide from him the disappointment in her
eyes.
He did not love her--and she knew it. She did not inspire ambition in
him--and she knew it. She simply kept him comfortable and contented.
She simply prevented his amatory instincts from gathering strength
vigorously to renew that search which men and women keep up incessantly
until they find what they seek. She knew this also but never permitted
herself to see it clearly.
He was pleased with her but not proud of her. He was not exactly ashamed
of his relation with her but--well, he never relaxed his precautions for
keeping it conventionally concealed. He still had a room at his club
and occupied it occasionally. He laughed at himself, despised himself
in a--gentle, soothing way. But he excused himself to himself with
earnestness despite his sarcasms at his own expense. And for the most
of the time he was content--so well, so comfortably content that if his
mind had not been so nervously active he would have taken on the form
and look of settled middle-life.
There was just the one saving quality--his mental alertness. All his
life he had had insatiable intellectual curiosity. It had kept him
from wasting his time at play when he was a boy. It had kept him from
plunging deeply into dissipation when youth was hot in his veins. It was
now keeping him from the sluggard’s fate.
* * * * *
On the last day of January--six weeks after his thirtieth birthday--he
came home earlier than usual, as they were going to the theatre and were
to dine at seven. He found Alice in bed and the doctor sitting beside
her.
“You’ll have to get some one else to go with you, I’m afraid,” she said
with good-humoured resignation, a trifle over-acted. “My cold is worse
and the doctor says I must stay in bed.”
“Nothing serious?” Howard asked anxiously, for her cheeks were flaming.
“Oh, no. Just the cold. And I am taking care of myself.”
He accompanied the doctor to the door of the apartment. At the threshold
the doctor whispered: “Make some excuse and come to my office. I wish to
see you particularly.”
He grew pale. “Don’t let her see,” urged the doctor. He went back to
Alice, sick at heart. “I must go out and arrange for some one else to do
the play for me,” he said. “I shall spend the evening with you.”
She protested, but faintly. He went to the doctor’s office.
“She must go south at once,” he began, after looking at Howard steadily
and keenly. “Nothing can save her life. That may prolong it.”
Howard seemed not to understand.
“She must go to-morrow or she’ll be gone forever in ten days.”
“Impossible,” Howard said in a dull, dazed tone.
“At once, I tell you--at once.”
“Impossible,” Howard repeated. He was saying to himself, “And only this
afternoon I wished I were free and wondered how I could free myself.” He
laughed strangely.
“Impossible,” he said again. And again he laughed. The room swam around.
He stood up. “Impossible!” he said a fourth time, almost shouting it.
And he struck the doctor full in the face, reeled and fell headlong to
the floor. When he recovered consciousness he was lying on a lounge, the
doctor’s assistant standing beside him.
“I must go to her,” he exclaimed and sat up. He saw the doctor a few
feet away, holding a cloth odorous of arnica to his cheek. Howard
remembered and began, “I beg your pardon,”--The doctor interrupted with:
“Not at all. I’ve had many queer experiences but never one like that.”
But Howard had ceased to hear. He was staring vacantly at the floor,
repeating to himself, “And I wished to be free. And I am to be free.”
“You must go back to her. Take her south tomorrow. Asheville is the best
place.”
Howard was on his way to the door. “We shall go by the first train,” he
said.
“Pardon me for telling you so abruptly,” said the doctor, following him.
“But I saw that you weren’t--that is I couldn’t help noticing that you
and she were--And usually the man in such cases--well, my sympathy is
for the woman.”
“Do you think a man voluntarily lives with a woman because he hates
her?” Howard asked, with an angry sneer. He bowed coldly and was gone.
As he looked at Alice he saw that it was of no use to try to deceive
her. “We must go South in the morning,” he almost whispered, taking her
hand and kissing it again and again, slowly and gently.
The next day but one they were at Asheville and two weeks later Howard
could not hide from himself that she would soon be gone.
* * * * *
Her bed was drawn up to the open window and she Was propped with
pillows. A mild breeze was flooding the room with the odours of the pine
forests and the gardens. She looked out, dilated her nostrils and her
eyes.
“Beautiful!” she murmured. “It is so easy to die here.”
She put out her hand and laid it in his.
“I want you, my Alice.” He was looking into her eyes and she into his.
“I need you. I can’t do without you.”
She smiled with an expression of happiness. “Is it wrong,” she asked,
“to take pleasure in another’s pain? I see that you are in pain, that
you suffer. And, oh, it makes me happy, so happy.”
“Don’t,” he begged. “Please don’t.”
“But listen,” she went on. “Don’t you see why? Because I--because I love
you. There,” she was smiling again. “I promised myself I never, never
would say it first. And I’ve broken my word.”
“What do you mean?”
“For nearly four years--all the years I’ve really lived--I have had only
one thought--my love for you. But I never would say it, never would say
‘I love you,’ because I knew that you did not love me.”
He was beginning to speak but she lifted her hand to his lips. Then she
put it back in his and pushed her fingers up his coat-sleeve until they
were hidden, resting upon his bare arm.
“No, you did not.” Her voice was low and the words came slowly. “But
since we came here, you have loved me. If I were to get well, were to go
back, you would not. Ah, if you knew, if you only knew how I have wanted
your love, how I have lain awake night after night, hour after hour,
whispering under my breath ‘I love you. I love you. Why do you not love
me?’”
Howard put his head down so that his face was hid from her in her lap.
“After the doctor had talked to me a few minutes, had asked me a few
questions,” she went on, “I knew. And I was not sorry. It was nearly
over, anyhow, dear. Did you know it? I often wondered if you did. Yes, I
saw many little signs. I wouldn’t admit it to myself until this illness
came. Then I confessed it to myself. And I was not sorry we were to
part this way. But I did not expect”--and she drew a long
breath--“happiness!”
“No, no,” he protested, lifting his face and looking at her. She drank
in the expression of his eyes--the love, the longing, the misery--as if
it had been a draught of life.
“Ah, you make me so happy, so happy. How much I owe to you. Four long,
long, beautiful years. How much! How much! And at last--love!”
There was silence for several minutes. Then he spoke: “I loved you
from the first, I believe. Only I never appreciated you. I was
so self-absorbed. And you--you fed my vanity, never insisted upon
yourself.”
“But we have had happiness. And no one, no one, no one will ever be to
you what I have been.”
“I love you.” Howard’s voice had a passionate earnestness in it that
carried conviction. “The light goes out with you.”
“With this little candle? No, no, dear--_my_ dear. You will be a great
man. You will not forget; but you will go on and do the things that I’m
afraid I didn’t help, maybe hindered, you in trying to do. And you will
keep a little room in your heart, a very little room. And I shall be in
there. And you’ll open the door every once in a while and come in and
take me in your arms and kiss me. And I think--yes, I feel that--that I
shall know and thrill.”
Her voice sank lower and lower and then her eyes closed, and presently
he called the nurse.
The next day he rose from his bed, just at the connecting door between
his room and hers, and looked in at her. The shades were drawn and only
a faint light crept into the room. He thought he saw her stir and went
nearer.
“Why, they’ve made you very gay this morning,” he laughed, “with the red
ribbons at your neck.”
There was no answer. He came still nearer. The red ribbons were long
streamers of blood. She was dead.
VIII.
A STRUGGLE FOR SELF-CONTROL.
He left her at Asheville as she wished--“where I have been happiest and
where I wish you to think of me.” On the train coming north he reviewed
his past and made his plans for the future.
As to the past he had only one regret--that he had not learned to
appreciate Alice until too late. He felt that his failure to advance had
been due entirely to himself--to his inertia, his willingness to seize
any pretext for refraining from action. As to the future--work, work
with a purpose. His mind must be fully and actively occupied. There must
be no leisure, for leisure meant paralysis.
At the Twenty-third Street ferry-house he got into a hansom and gave
the address of “the flat.” He did not note where he was until the hansom
drew up at the curb. He leaned forward and looked at the house--at their
windows with the curtains which she had draped so gracefully, which she
and he had selected at Vantine’s one morning. How often he had seen her
standing between those curtains, looking out for him, her blue-black
hair waving back from her forehead so beautifully and her face ready to
smile so soon as ever she should catch sight of him.
He leaned back and closed his eyes. The blood was pounding through his
temples and his eyeballs seemed to be scalding under the lids.
“Never again,” he moaned. “How lonely it is.”
The cabman lifted the trap. “Here we are, sir.”
“Yes--in a moment.” Where should he go? But what did it matter? “To a
hotel,” he said. “The nearest.”
“The Imperial?”
“That will do--yes--go there.”
He resolved never to return to “the flat.” On the following day he sent
for the maid and arranged the breaking up. He gave her everything except
his personal belongings and a few of Alice’s few possessions--those he
could keep, and those which he must destroy because he could not endure
the thought of any one having them.
At the office all understood his mourning; but no one, not even
Kittredge, knew him well enough to intrude beyond gentler looks and
tones. Kittredge had written a successful novel and was going abroad for
two years of travel and writing. Howard took his rooms in the Royalton.
They dined together a few nights before he sailed.