Charity pondered her whole history with Jim Dyckman, from their
childhood flirtations on. He had had other flings, and she had flung
herself into Peter Cheever's arms. Peter Cheever had flung her out
again. Jim Dyckman had opened his arms again.
He had told her that she was wasting herself. He had offered her love
and devotion. She had struck his hands away and rebuked him fiercely. A
little later she had felt a pang of jealousy because he looked at that
little Greek dancer so interestedly. She had tried to atone for this
appalling thought by interesting herself in the little dancer's welfare
and hunting a position for her with the moving-picture company. She had
told Jim Dyckman to look for the girl in the studio and find how she
was getting along. He had never reported on that, either. Charity smiled
bitterly.
Last night it had come over her that her love for Peter Cheever was
dead. Was love itself, then, dead for her? or was her heart already busy
down there in the dark of her bosom, busy like a seed germinating some
new lily or fennel to thrust up into the daylight?
The sublime and the ridiculous are as close together as the opposite
sides of a sheet of cloth. The sublime is the obverse of the tapestry
with the figures heroic, saintly or sensuous, in battle or temple or
bower, in conquest, love, martyrdom, adoration. The reverse of the
tapestry is a matter of knots and tufts, broken patterns, ludicrous
accidents of contour. The same threads make up both sides.
On one side of Charity's tapestry she saw herself as a pitiful figure,
a neglected wife returned from errands of mercy to find her husband
enamoured of a wanton. She spurned the proffered heart of a great knight
while her own heart bled openly in her breast.
On the other side she saw the same red threads that crimsoned her heart
running across the arras to and from the heart of Jim Dyckman. It
was the red thread of life and love, blood-color--blood-maker,
blood-spiller, heart-quickener, heart-sickener, the red thread of
romance, of motherhood and of lust, birth and murder, family and bawdry.
In the tapestry her heart was entire, her eyes upon her faithless
husband. On the other side her eyes faced the other knight; her
heartstrings ran out to his. She laughed harshly at the vision. Her
laugh ended in a fierce contempt of herself and of every body and thing
else in the world.
She was too weak to fight the law and the Church and the public in order
to divorce her husband. Would it be weakness or strength to sit at home
in the ashes and deny herself to life and love? She could always go to
Jim Dyckman and take him as her cavalier. But then she would become one
of those heartbroken, leash-broken women who are the Maenads of society,
more or less circumspect and shy, but none the less lawless. But wherein
were they better than the Zadas?
Charity was wrung with a nausea of love in all its activities; she
forswore them. Yet she was human. She was begotten and conceived in the
flesh of lovers. She was made for love and its immemorial usages. How
could she expect to destroy her own primeval impulse just because one
treacherous man had enjoyed her awhile and passed on to his next affair?
There was no child of hers to grow up and replace her in the eternal
armies of love and compel her aside among the veteran women who have
been mustered out. She was in a sense already widowed of her husband.
Certainly she would never love Cheever again or receive him into her
arms. He belonged to the mother of his child. Let that woman step aside
into the benches of the spectators, those who have served their
purpose and must become wet-nurses, child-dryers, infant-teachers,
perambulator-motors, question-answerers, nose-blowers,
mischief-punishers, cradleside-bards.
Charity laughed derisively at the vision of Zada as a mother. The
Madonna pose had fascinated this Magdalen, but she would find that
mothers have many, many other things to do for their infants than to sit
for portraits and give them picturesque nourishment--many, many other
things. If Zada's child inherited its father's and mother's wantonness,
laziness, wickedness, and violence of temper, there was going to be a
lively nursery in that apartment.
Zada had so wanted a baby as a reward of love that she was willing to
snatch it out of the vast waiting-room without pausing for a license.
She would find that she had bought punishment at a high price. The
poor baby was in for a hard life, but it would give its parents one in
exchange.
Charity was appalled at this unknown harshness of her soul; it sneered
at all things once held beautiful and sacred. Her soul was like a big
cathedral broken into by a pagan mob that ran about smashing images,
defiling fonts, burlesquing all the solemn rituals. Her quiet mind was
full of sunburnt nymphs and goatish fauns with shaggy fetlocks. She saw
the world as a Brocken and all the Sabbath there was was a Sabbath orgy
of despicably brutish fiends.
She tried to run away. She went to her piano; her fingers would play
no dirges; they grew flippant, profane in rhythm. She could think of no
tunes but dances--andantes turned scherzi, the Handelian largo became
a Castilian tango. She found herself playing a something strange--she
realized that it was a lullaby! She fled from the piano.
She went to her books for nepenthe. There were romances in French,
Italian, German, English, and American, new books, old books, all
repeating the same stencils of passion in different colors. She could
have spat at them and their silly ardors over the same old banality: I
love him; he loves me--beatitude! I love him; he loves her--tragedy!
The novelists were like stupid children parroting the ancient
monotony--_amo_, _amas_, _amat_; _amamus_, _amatis_, _amant_; _amo_,
_amas_, _amat_--away with such primer stuff! She had learned the grammar
of love and was graduated from the school-books. She was a postgraduate
of love and wedlock. She had had enough of them--too much; she would
read no more of love, dwell no more upon it; she would forget it.
She wanted some antiseptic book, something frigid, intellectual,
ascetic. At last she thought she had it. On her shelf she found an uncut
volume, a present from some one who had never read it, but had bought it
because it cost several dollars and would serve as a gift.
It was Gardner's biography of Saint Catherine of Siena, “a study in the
religion, literature, and history of the fourteenth century of Italy.”
That sounded heartless enough. The frontispiece portrait of the wan,
meager, despondent saint promised freedom from romantic balderdash.
Charity found a chair by a window and began to read. The preface
announced the book to be “history centered in the work and personality
of one of the most wonderful women that ever lived.” This was the
medicine Charity wanted--the story of a woman who had been wonderful
without love or marriage.
There followed a description of the evil times--and the wicked town in
which Caterina Benincasa was born--as long ago as 1347. A pestilence
swept away four-fifths of the populace. One man told how he had buried
five of his sons in one trench. People said that the end of the world
had come.
The word _trench_, the perishing of the people and the apparent end of
the world, gave the story a modern sound. It might concern the murderous
years of 1914-16.
Catherine was religious, as little girls are apt to be. She even
wanted to enter a monastery in the disguise of a boy. Later her sister
persuaded her to dye her hair and dress fashionably. Charity began to
fear for her saint, but was reassured to find that already at sixteen
she was a nun and had commenced that “life of almost incredible
austerity,” freeing herself from all dependence on food and sleep and
resting on a bare board.
Charity read with envy how Catherine had devoted herself for three whole
years to silence broken only by confessions. How good it would be not to
talk to anybody about anything for years and years! How blissful to live
a calm, gray life in a strait cell, doing no labor but the errands of
mercy and of prayer!
Charity read on, wondering a little at Catherine's idea of God, and her
morbid devotion to His blood as the essence of everything beautiful and
holy. Charity could not put herself back into that Middle Age when
the most concrete materialism was mingled inextricably with the most
fantastic symbolism.
Suddenly she was startled to find that appalling temptations found even
Catherine out even in her cloistral solitude. It frightened Charity to
read such a passage as this:
There came a time, towards the end of these three years, when these
assaults and temptations became horrible and unbearable. Aerial men and
women, with obscene words and still more obscene gestures, seemed to
invade her little cell, sweeping round her like the souls of the damned
in Dante's “Hell,” inviting her simple and chaste soul to the banquet of
lust. Their suggestions grew so hideous and persistent that she fled
in terror from the cell that had become like a circle of the infernal
regions, and took refuge in the church; but they pursued her thither,
though there their power seemed checked. And her Christ seemed far from
her. At last she cried out, remembering the words in the vision: “I have
chosen suffering for my consolation, and will gladly bear these and all
other torments, in the name of the Saviour, for as long as shall please
His Majesty.” When she said this, immediately all that assemblage of
demons departed in confusion, and a great light from above appeared that
illumined all the room, and in the light the Lord Jesus Christ Himself,
nailed to the Cross and stained with blood, as He was when by His own
blood He entered into the holy place; and from the Cross He called the
holy virgin, saying: “My daughter Catherine, seest thou how much I have
suffered for thee? Let it not then be hard to thee to endure for Me.”
This terrified Charity, and the further she read the less comfort she
gained. Her matter-of-fact Manhattan mind could vaguely understand Saint
Catherine's mystic nuptials with Christ; but that definite gold ring
He placed on her finger, that diamond with four pearls around it,
frustrated her comprehension.
When she read on and learned how Catherine's utter self-denial offended
the other churchmen and church-women; how her confessions of sinful
thought brought accusations of sinful deed; how the friars actually
threw her out of a church at noon and kicked her as she lay senseless in
the dust; how she was threatened with assassination and was turned
from the doors of the people; and in what torment she died--from these
strange events in the progress of a strange soul through a strange world
Charity found no parallel to guide her life along.
For hours she read; but all that remained to her was the vision of that
poor woman who could find no refuge from her flesh and from the demons
that played evil rhapsodies upon the harp-strings of her nerves.
Charity closed the book and understood fear. She was now not so much
sick of love as afraid of it. She was afraid of solitude, afraid of
religion and of the good works that cause ridicule or resentment.
Darkness gathered about her with the closing of the day. She dreaded the
night and the day, people and the absence of people. She knew no woman
she could take her anguish to for sympathy; it would provoke only rebuke
or laughter. The Church had rebuffed her. There remained only men, and
what could she hope from them? Even Jim Dyckman had not been a friend
merely. He had told her that she wasted herself as well as him.
Beyond this night there were years of nights, years on years of days.
She could not even be alone; for who was ever actually alone? Even in
the hush and the gloom of the deepening twilight there were figures
here, shadows that sighed, delicate insinuators. There were no satyrs
or bassarids, but gentlemen in polo garb, in evening dress, in yachting
flannels. There were moon-nights in Florida, electric floods on
dancing-floors, this dim corner of this room with some one leaning on
her chair, bending his head and whispering:
“Charity, it's Jim. I love you.”
She rose and thrust aside the arms that were not there. She could not
order him away, because he was not there. And yet he was there.
She was afraid that he still loved her and afraid that he did not. She
was afraid that she had always loved him and that she never could. She
was afraid that she would go to him or send for him, and afraid that she
would be afraid to. She thrust away the phantom, but her palms pleaded
against his departure. Softer than a whisper and noisier than a cry was
her thought:
“I don't want to be alone, I am afraid to be alone.”