Inga had lied to him, and he had understood the reasons of her
denial. Yet the fact remained that the first lie lay between them,
the blade that cut ruthlessly through the veils of the summer’s
illusion. Until then, he had lived in an unreal paradise. The
world had been exiled, or, rather, from morning to night, in every
mood of nature he had dominated where he had walked. There was a
primitive directness, a savage charm about Inga that had carried
him back to the healing savagery of the solitary world. Absorbed
in the fulness of his artistic regeneration, falling into pleasant
mental languor, an ease of the body and all the senses, he had
forgotten in the quiet reveries of fire-lit evenings, that beyond
the threshold there waited those irreconcilable enemies of the
present--the haunted past and the inscrutable future. So completely
did she blend into the roaming moods of his mind, so keenly
intuitive of the moment to listen and the moment to dream that,
at times, stretched indolently and gracefully before the roaring
logs, she seemed to wait his pleasure with the mute loyalty of some
friendly animal. Now, all at once, the spell had vanished.
He was a man alive to fierce, disturbing emotions, aware that,
side by side with the blinding figure of passionate love, was that
relentless, inevitable companion--primeval jealousy--exacting its
ruthless toll for every narcotic moment of oblivion. She, too,
was different, no longer the companion whose every word and every
thought he possessed, but something that drew back from him before
the clutching hunger of his soul, and veiled herself in the
obscurity of the past--the eternal stranger--Woman.
He did not blame her--the crueler thing would have been to have
told the truth. He felt this, and yet his whole nature rebelled
against the intruder, which had crept in like weeds among the
flowers. He could not speak to her; he could not meet her eyes.
His own self seemed to have run away from him. He was incapable of
rest or activity, and when she returned, he marveled at the calm
in which she moved. The next day and the day after, something hot
and red stood between his eyes and his canvas. He tried desperately
to paint and remained bewildered by the void within him. He began
a dozen sketches, swore, and scraped them out, and, after long,
racking hours, remained with his head in his hands, staring at
the terrifying white depth of his canvas that seemed to him to be
something without end or beginning, a vast emptiness into which he
had sunk all his hope.
The first day when she returned over the dripping rocks to join him
for the long tramp home, she asked as usual:
“Good day?”
“No--nothing,” he said shortly.
The following morning when she appeared, she looked into his face
once and asked no questions. They were silent during the walk, each
curious of the other, keeping a little apart as though a thousand
miles intervened between them. The evening had gone down in angry
squalls and, across the white-lipped sea, the wind went scurrying
in frantic flights. At their sides, the wakened sand-grasses
writhed in fitful temper, hissing like disturbed serpents.
Occasionally a whirlwind, turning along the beach, flung stinging
pellets against their eyes. A great restlessness, a rebellion
against indistinct things filled their breasts and made them ache,
and persistently their eyes avoided the other’s.
When they had gained the shack and barred the groaning door against
the assaults of the storm, she took the easel from his back, stood
a moment looking solemnly into his clouded face, and turned without
a smile. A moment later, as he sat sunk in a chair before the fire
to which he had given fiery wings, she came with his slippers and
knelt at his feet. Before he realized what she was doing, she had
started to unlace his boots. He drew back angrily, crying:
“Why do you do that!”
But, without changing her pose, she remained kneeling, and
suddenly, clutching his knees, she cried passionately:
“Oh, please--please let me!”
Then, with a rise of tears, he understood the longing and the
misery she expressed in this instinctive submission, and, leaning
suddenly, drew her up into his arms, where she lay with a catch of
her breath.
“Mr. Dan, Mr. Dan, you are so unhappy!” she said at the last.
He did not answer, though his arms tightened about her as though he
would have crushed the thing he loved.
“You are unhappy--and I have made you so!”
“It can’t be helped,” he said bitterly.
She did not say anything more and, after a moment, drew herself
up and out of his arms. Not for a long while did they speak to
each other, until the supper was over and the fire had been built
for the night. Instead of stretching out on the rug in feline
languor, she began to move restlessly about the room, with an
indecision that was strange to her. He watched her through the
sheltering clouds of tobacco smoke as she went from window to
window, listening to something that cried in the soughing chorus of
the tempestuous night without, and, as he watched her, he wondered
if the day would close thus in this aching unease, this numbed
suffering that wrapped them around and yet held them remorselessly
from each other. She came to the fireplace and abruptly faced him,
her hands behind her back, pain and wistfulness in the anxious
searching glance she laid upon him.
“I told you a lie,” she said, all at once. He raised his eyes and
looked at her. “About that letter,” she said hastily.
“Yes; I know.”
“You knew, of course,” she said thoughtfully.
“Of course.”
“Are you sure you would rather I told you?” she said earnestly.
Then as he frowned and gripped his hands nervously, “It has
nothing--it can have nothing to do with us now,” she said
desperately, and, as he still hesitated, she added: “It will only
hurt you. That is why I did what I did--not to hurt you.”
“I know that, too,” he said. “You were right. Don’t tell me.”
“But I will if you wish,” she said, her eyes growing rounder and
larger in the intensity of her gaze, while her lips trembled a
little.
“No, no; I don’t want you to!”
He drew a great sigh, rose, and stretched out his arms. But
immediately he had refused to hear her explanation, a revulsion
came to him. It seemed to him that anything were better than not
to know. The mystery that enveloped them had a hundred monstrous
figures of doubt and jealousy in it. The one thing he could not
combat was the unknown.
“It was a man--a man who loved you?” he cried, before he had
realized it.
She caught her breath, startled, collected herself angrily, and at
last, looking him directly in the eyes, nodded slowly.
He came closer and stood staring in her averted face.
“And whom you once loved?”
She drew back, turned, looked into his eyes, and turned away again.
“Yes; since you would know.”
He hesitated. Should he go on or should he draw back now while
it was yet time, before the self-infliction of pain, before the
visualizing of a shadow which meant nothing to them now, which was
of the past, as other things had been in his own memory? All at
once he stopped, aghast. Tears were in her eyes, and her hands were
at her throat.
“Why do you do that?” he said abruptly.
“Because it will hurt you,” she said, shaking her head.
“Yes, yes--horribly!”
“What good does it do?” she said, shaking her head.
“None, none at all--I shan’t ask to know any more,” he said firmly,
and he took up his pipe from the table where he had flung it and
began to fill it, humming to himself.
She came and stood beside him until he was ready for a light. Then
she struck a match and held it to him.
“Very becoming,” he said, with an effort, smiling at the sudden
glow that suffused her soft face and gave points of fire to the
depths of her eyes.
“I wish you understood me,” she said, with a wistful arching of her
brows and a sudden downward slant of her eyes away from his.
“Wish I did!”
“I am different--different from you, I suppose. I don’t let shadows
make me sad.”
“No; you are never jealous,” he said bitterly. “In fact, I wonder
if you are capable of such an emotion.”
She appeared to consider this question.
“I suppose not,” she said, at length.
“What!” he exclaimed. “Not even--not even if you saw another woman
coming into my life--really?”
“If that happened, I should go away--quietly,” she said
thoughtfully.
“And you would not suffer?”
“Oh, yes--of course--I should suffer, but I should disappear just
the same, for the world would be empty to me.” She looked at him
a moment, hesitated, and said: “That would be something real, not
something that is ended or something that might happen. You see,
it’s this. You have something in you that I haven’t got.”
“What?”
“Sentiment.”
“I believe that is so,” he said suddenly, yet he continued to look
at her, mystified.
“I mean it this way,” she said pensively. “You don’t see me at all
as I am. You see me as you wish to see me. It is very beautiful,
but it is not always me, and so sometimes I feel that it’s not me
you love and, and I wonder----”
“You’d rather I didn’t idealize you?” he said, greatly astonished.
She smiled with a smile that changed the sadness prophetic in her
eyes to a glow of happiness.
“No; I want you to feel as you do just now,” she said shyly,
“even----”
“Well, even what?”
“Even if you wake up after,” she said solemnly.
“Inga!” he cried, in a furious protest. But she avoided the arms
which sought to sweep her down to him.
“That’s what I mean by sentiment,” she said hastily. “Do you
understand?”
He paused, his curiosity returning.
“And you?”
“I? Oh, I see you and love you for what you are.”
“Even for my weaknesses?”
She looked at him, her eyes deep in his eyes.
“Above all for that,” she said, and, though her lips turned slowly
into a smile, her eyes remained sad. “I wish----”
“What?” he asked as she stopped.
She shook her head.
“That I should always remain what I was--a derelict worth saving?”
She looked at him suddenly and so fiercely that he laughed, and
caught her in a passionate embrace.
“Look out! If I get to behaving too well, you’ll lose interest in
me, Inga,” he said, laughing.
To this she made no reply.
He was astonished at the things she had shown him she had divined.
He recognized their truth. He even felt that in her eyes was some
strange intuition that made them see, beyond his view, down the
long lanes of the future. But, above all, he understood that in
their love the first phase had ended and another begun--a phase
where the bitter and the sweet, sorrow and sadness, possession and
denial would forevermore go hand in hand. She knew it, too, for
that night they lay wakefully in each other’s arms and though they
lay clasped in the oblivion of the night they spoke no word, for
what lay in their minds they could not say to each other.
* * * * *
Yet this knowledge that life in all its aspects could not be
avoided, that the thoughts which he cried out against could not be
stilled, and that, even as he loved her, the woman of the present,
he must suffer fiercely and weakly for what she had been, entered
into that inner consciousness of the artist and illuminated it with
a new, miraculous sense of power.
When he returned to his work, the test of sorrow brought him
a deep comprehension. In the completeness of his dream he had
forgotten what no artist should forget--that life is tragedy. He
put before him a canvas which a week before had thrilled him with
its mastery. He looked now and saw that it was only half truth,
that he had done it in an ecstasy of sentimentalism. He threw it
aside and began swiftly to paint in another. And as he looked
upon the immemorial rocks with their head-dresses of sand-grasses
turning with the first colorful touches of the autumn, he perceived
beneath the surface pleasure to the eyes something grim and tragic
in this spectacle of summer stifling in the arms of autumn, in
these scarred and rocky sentinels, waiting the momentary flurry
of the bitter time; the soul of those things which cannot die,
inscrutable, contemplative and majestic, amid the poignant sadness
of the green world which must die and die again, endlessly
returning to its pain.
He painted breathlessly, seized by something poignant and
illuminating that drove him on, and when he had ended, he covered
the canvas hastily, afraid to look at it. For a week he worked in
this frenzy, without pause for self-analysis, warned only by the
fever of work which possessed him that what he had done was true,
feeling in himself immense, clarifying changes, a detachment of
vision he had never had--a new, stern independence of the intellect
which he had purchased at the price of the intoxication of the
senses.
At the end of this period, a certain heaviness of the spirit
succeeded. He felt that he had worked beyond his capacity, aware of
profound weariness and dejection. The next morning he postponed the
morning’s sketching.
“No work to-day,” he said, “I feel like looking over what I’ve
done. Let’s get out the canvases and sit in judgment.”
“First fall exhibition?” she said, laughing.
“Exactly.”
Together they brought out the voluminous records of the summer and
ranged them about the walls. As he studied them, group by group,
in their historical progress, he nodded, surprised himself at the
richness of the record, its sincerity and grasp. At the end, he
brought out the dozen sketches of the past fortnight, which he had
put away each evening without an appraising glance, reserving them
even from Inga. He placed them in a row and stood back to watch the
girl. She stood before them, making no comment, but so accustomed
was he to her moods, that he comprehended at once the depth of her
tribute. In truth, she was overwhelmed by the revelation of a new
note, something which she would not have been able to define, but
which held her transfixed by a penetrating sense of mastery, as
sometimes, in the moment of lightest teasing, she had felt herself
breathlessly impotent in the sudden closing-about her of his
compelling arms.
“So this is what you have been doing,” she said, in a reverie. Then
she turned and looked at him, seeing a new self in the man. “What
made you do this?”
“You.”
“I? How so?”
“Things you’ve done--things you’ve said, about sentiment, you
know,” he said rather incoherently.
His glance returned to his work, and he felt a sudden thrill,
even an astonishment, transcending all earthly happiness at the
recognition of what had come to him.
“You said I’ve done this?” she said, frowning.
“By making me suffer,” he said quietly. “Oh, I needed it! It was
right. It came, I suppose, with that letter. If it hadn’t,” he
added, smiling, “I suppose I should have gone on dreaming--for the
dreaming was sweet--with you, Inga.”
“Yes, I see,” she said, nodding.
“What do you see, I wonder?” he said curiously.
“You don’t need me any more,” she said, looking not at him but at
the work.
“I have gotten above myself,” he said pensively. “I am not afraid
of life--in its completeness now. The bitter as well as the
sweet--they are both good, both vital.”
“You see in a way that makes one feel strange things--even to a
sense of time.”
“It’s impersonal, isn’t it?”
“Very.”
“For the first time?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder if I will keep it,” he said moodily.
She turned, laying her hand on his arm, nodding her head, with
conviction.
“You won’t lose it now.”
“And yet,” he said, laying his hand on her head, “there are times
when I wonder if it had not been better--not to wake up.”
“You feel differently--about me, don’t you?” she said slowly.
“No.”
“Yes, yes--oh, it’s not that you love me less, I think, but--but if
I went away, you would stand by yourself now! I mean it would not
crush you.”
“Inga--you _will_ go away some day,” he said, looking at her
profoundly, speaking as one sometimes does in inspired moments--a
thought which flashes across the lips before the will can check it.
For a moment they stood staring at each other, equally amazed.
“Why did you say that?” she said, at last, of the two the most
visibly astounded.
“I don’t know--I hardly knew I’d said it. And yet I believe what I
said is true. More, I believe you believe so, too. Isn’t that the
truth?”
“Some day--yes; I’m sure,” she said, looking at him solemnly.
“When, I wonder?”
He felt as though something uncanny was in this conversation,
a moment of rare and absolute truth had brought a flash of the
future. Indeed, the words he had spoken astonished him as much as
they had Inga. Yet he felt a sense of conviction, as though, before
the verity of his work which faced them, they, too, had faced the
truth.
“Are you--sorry?” she said, at length, timidly.
“That the dreaming is over?” He shook his head. “I don’t think so,”
he said slowly. “I feel as though now we can talk to each other.”
“That is true,” she said, moving nearer, and she added, “Mr. Dan.”
“Trying to tease me?” he asked, smiling.
She shook her head. He was looking into his canvases hungrily; he
did not see her eyes or comprehend the significance of her return
to the old deference, but, for a moment, while they stood gazing at
the victory on the canvas, she swayed against him slightly, and her
hand slipped under his arm as though clinging to its protection.
An hour later, when he remembered the suddenness with which he
had prophesied that the day would come when she would go her own
way out of his life, he was amazed and puzzled to comprehend the
impulse he had obeyed. At the bottom, he believed in no such
possibility. What he had said must have been said in some sudden
cruelty of love to test her, to know that, if she could quiver
before such a possibility, the intensity of her devotion was
constant. A little conscience-stricken, he referred to it that
evening.
“That was a crazy thing I said about your leaving,” he began
lightly. “Queer mood I was in.”
“We can’t help having queer thoughts. That’s natural,” she said
quietly, looking down at the floor.
He laughed a full-throated, confident laugh.
“Well, you know, Inga--I did feel that about you--at first.”
“And now?”
“Just try, little viking!”
“And yet you are very”--she stopped and slowly accentuated the
word--“very different.”
“How so?” he asked, a little uneasily.
She hesitated and perhaps changed the intention of her answer.
“It’s the way you look at me. I think you see me as I am now.”
“That happens always when you love,” he said pensively. “And it
means something deeper, surer--something quieter. Don’t you think
so?”
“Yes.”
He could not divine from her manner any special regret or that any
serious consideration remained from his thoughtless remark. In
fact, he felt in her a new sense of closeness, an almost Oriental
solicitude of his slightest desire or comfort. When he went out
now in the sharp chill of the autumn mornings, she no longer went
roaming away over the rocks, or played over the sand reaches,
tantalizing the waves with sudden rushes. Instead, she camped down
at his side on a great rug, her hands propping up the tanned oval
face, her eyes dreaming into the distance. At times, he felt their
gaze turned on him for long, unvarying moments. He remembered a
favorite pointer of his college days, who had adored him as no one
else had worshiped him, and the strange sense of the summer’s end
which had possessed the animal to lie in mute staring wonder at his
side, by some canine intuition of change. The dog had died years
ago. He had never replaced him.
A certain calm content came into his soul in these soaring days. A
change had operated in him; a gust of divine madness had passed,
and with it all the rebellion against the progress of life. He
had loved as youth loves, blindly, fiercely, flinging all his
self in impulsive sacrifice, longing to be convinced that with
love he had found the ardent, fiery youth which he had renounced.
Now, in the awakened sense of power, he faced middle age with a
confident triumph. He saw ahead clear regions of light that opened
immeasurable horizons of life. He had found himself, and, as he
looked at her from time to time, with eyes satisfied with the charm
of life and color, he said to himself that he would never again
be capable of the fierce, gripping ache of jealousy which had
possessed him. Yet it was good to have her close to his side, to
listen to the low music of her voice, and yield to the enveloping
charm of her ministering devotion. The first obsessing spell had
given place to this--it was good to be so loved. She was the
companion above all others he needed for what lay ahead. It was
even providential. He felt a deep and tender sense of gratitude
that softened the almost cruel confidence which had come to him in
his new self-sufficiency.
By the middle of November, the weather had become so stormy and
chill that work was only a question of haphazard moments. He began
to feel a new longing--an impulse back to that world of conflict
and multitudes, of strife and jealousy and competition, which he
had left behind him in loathing and renunciation. When the fog and
the rain hung outside, he would spend long days in contemplating
his sketches, making notes of future compositions to be arranged.
He had gone far and he knew it. Yet one thing was lacking. He
wanted the tribute of others, of the old associates who had given
him up in despair, written him off the ledger of life. At times,
thinking of how they would stare and stand amazed before this
triumphant renaissance, he felt restless impulses to go rushing
back, a need of the sensations of happiness and triumph in every
form, a boyish craving for applause. Inga read these signs only
too clearly, and as the thought of return was to her a dread one,
woman-like she went ahead to meet the inevitable.
“Well, Mr. Dan, when are you going back?” she said, one night, when
she had watched him in long reverie.
“How do you know we’re going back?” he said, surprised.
“It is time,” she said seriously.
“Really?” He looked at her curiously, comprehended what lay in
her mind, and said, with an accusing smile: “I’m afraid I’m still
mostly a boy, I want to be patted on the back for what I’ve done.”
“That’s only right,” she said quietly. “It is what you need, too.
When shall we go?”
“Say next week.”
She shook her head.
“Sooner.”
“Day after to-morrow?”
“To-morrow,” she said, with a firm little bob of her head. “When
things must be done, it’s better to have them over.”
He felt a leap within him at the thought of the great city which
was his again. Then he looked at her and laid his hands on her
shoulders.
“We will come back--next summer,” he said, smiling.
She smiled back at him, meeting his eyes steadily.