Outside, in the autumn rain, the leaves were falling.
For twenty years, every autumn since her marriage, Margaret Fleming had
watched the leaves from this window; and always it had seemed to her
that they were a part of her life which she held precious. As they fell
she had known that they carried away something she could never
recover—youth, beauty, pleasure, or only memories that she wanted to
keep. Something gracious, desirable and fleeting; but never until this
afternoon had she felt that the wind was sweeping away the illusion of
happiness by which she lived. Beyond the panes, against which the rain
was beating in gray sheets, she looked out on the naked outlines of the
city: bleak houses, drenched grass in squares, and boughs of trees where
a few brown or yellow leaves were clinging.
On the hearth rug the letter lay where it had fallen a few minutes—or
was it a few hours ago? The flames from the wood fire cast a glow on the
white pages; and she imagined that the ugly words leaped out to sting
her like scorpions as she moved by them. Not for worlds, she told
herself, would she stoop and touch them again. Yet what need had she to
touch them when each slanting black line was etched in her memory with
acid? Never, though she lived a hundred years, could she forget the way
the letters fell on the white paper!
Once, twice, three times, she walked from window to door and back again
from door to window. The wood fire burned cheerfully with a whispering
sound. As the lights and shadows stirred over the familiar objects she
had once loved, her gaze followed them hungrily. She had called this
upstairs library George’s room, and she realized now that every piece of
furniture, every book it contained, had been chosen to please him. He
liked the golden brown of the walls, the warm colours in the Persian
rugs, the soft depth of the cushioned chairs. He liked, too, the
flamboyant red lilies beneath the little Chippendale mirror.
After twenty years of happiness, of comradeship, of mutual dependence,
after all that marriage could mean to two equal spirits, was there
nothing left except ashes? Could twenty years of happiness be destroyed
in an afternoon, in an hour? Stopping abruptly, with a jerk which ran
like a spasm through her slender figure, she gazed with hard searching
eyes over the red lilies into the mirror. The grave beauty of her face,
a beauty less of flesh than of spirit, floated there in the shadows like
a flower in a pond.
“I am younger than he is by a year,” she thought, “and yet he can begin
over again to love, while a new love for me would be desecration.”
There was the sound of his step on the stair. An instant later his hand
fell on the door, and he entered the room.
Stooping swiftly, she picked up the letter from the rug and hid it in
her bosom. Then turning toward him, she received his kiss with a smile.
“I didn’t wait lunch for you,” she said.
“I got it at the club.” After kissing her cheek, he moved to the fire
and stood warming his hands. “Beastly day. No chance of golf, so I’ve
arranged to see that man from Washington. You won’t get out, I suppose?”
She shook her head. “No, I sha’n’t get out.”
Did he know, she wondered, that this woman had written to her? Did he
suspect that the letter lay now in her bosom? He had brought the smell
of rain, the taste of dampness, with him into the room; and this air of
the outer world enveloped him while he stood there, genial, robust,
superbly vital, clothed in his sanguine temperament as in the healthy
red and white of his flesh. Still boyish at forty-five, he had that look
of perennial innocence which some men carry untarnished through the most
enlightening experiences. Even his moustache and his sharply jutting
chin could not disguise the softness that hovered always about his
mouth, where she noticed now, with her piercing scrutiny, the muscles
were growing lax. Strange that she had never seen this until she
discovered that George loved another woman! The thought dashed into her
mind that she knew him in reality no better than if she had lived with a
stranger for twenty years. Yet, until a few hours ago, she would have
said, had any one asked her, that their marriage was as perfect as any
mating between a man and a woman could be in this imperfect world.
“You’re wise. The wind’s still in the east, and there is no chance, I’m
afraid, of a change.” He hesitated an instant, stared approvingly at the
red lilies, and remarked abruptly, “Nice colour.”
“You always liked red.” Her mouth lost its softness. “And I was pale
even as a girl.”
His genial gaze swept her face. “Oh, well, there’s red and red, you
know. Some cheeks look best pale.”
Without replying to his words, she sat looking up at him while her
thoughts, escaping her control, flew from the warm room out into the
rough autumn weather. It was as if she felt the beating of the rain in
her soul, as if she were torn from her security and whirled downward and
onward in the violence of the storm. On the surface of her life nothing
had changed. The fire still burned; the lights and shadows still
flickered over the Persian rugs; her husband still stood there, looking
down on her through the cloudless blue of his eyes. But the real
Margaret, the vital part of her, was hidden far away in that deep place
where the seeds of mysterious impulses and formless desires lie buried.
She knew that there were secrets within herself which she had never
acknowledged in her own thoughts; that there were unexpressed longings
which had never taken shape even in her imagination. Somewhere beneath
the civilization of the ages there was the skeleton of the savage.
The letter in her bosom scorched her as if it were fire. “That was why
you used to call me magnolia blossom,” she said in a colourless voice,
and knew it was only the superficial self that was speaking.
His face softened; yet so perfectly had the note of sentiment come to be
understood rather than expressed in their lives that she could feel his
embarrassment. The glow lingered in his eyes, but he answered only,
“Yes, you were always like that.”
An irrepressible laugh broke from her. Oh, the irony, the bitterness!
“Perhaps you like them pale!” she tossed back mockingly, and wondered if
this Rose Morrison who had written to her was coloured like her name?
He looked puzzled but solicitous. “I’m afraid I must be off. If you are
not tired, could you manage to go over these galleys this afternoon? I’d
like to read the last chapter aloud to you after the corrections are
made.” He had written a book on the history of law; and while he drew
the roll of proof sheets from his pocket, she remembered, with a pang as
sharp as the stab of a knife, all the work of last summer when they had
gathered material together. He needed her for his work, she realized, if
not for his pleasure. She stood, as she had always done, for the serious
things of his life. This book could not have been written without her.
Even his success in his profession had been the result of her efforts as
well as his own.
“I’m never too tired for that,” she responded, and though she smiled up
at him, it was a smile that hurt her with its irony.
“Well, my time’s up,” he said. “By the way. I’ll need my heavier golf
things if it is fine to-morrow.” To-morrow was Sunday, and he played
golf with a group of men at the Country Club every Sunday morning.
“They are in the cedar closet. I’ll get them out.”
“The medium ones, you know. That English tweed.”
“Yes, I know. I’ll have them ready,” Did Rose Morrison play golf, she
wondered.
“I’ll try to get back early to dinner. There was a button loose on the
waistcoat I wore last evening. I forgot to mention it this morning.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I left it to the servants, but I’ll look after it
myself.” Again this perverse humour seized her. Had he ever asked Rose
Morrison to sew on a button?
At the door he turned back. “And I forgot to ask you this morning to
order flowers for Morton’s funeral. It is to be Monday.”
The expression on her face felt as stiff as a wax mask, and though she
struggled to relax her muscles, they persisted in that smile of inane
cheerfulness. “I’ll order them at once, before I begin the galleys,” she
answered.
Rising from the couch on which she had thrown herself at his entrance,
she began again her restless pacing from door to window. The library was
quiet except for the whispering flames. Outside in the rain the leaves
were falling thickly, driven hither and thither by the wind which rocked
the dappled boughs of the sycamores. In the gloom of the room the red
lilies blazed.
The terror, which had clutched her like a living thing, had its fangs in
her heart. Terror of loss, of futility. Terror of the past because it
tortured her. Terror of the future because it might be empty even of
torture. “He is mine, and I will never give him up,” she thought wildly.
“I will fight to the end for what is mine.”
There was a sound at the door and Winters, the butler, entered. “Mrs.
Chambers, Madam. She was quite sure you would be at home.”
“Yes, I am at home.” She was always at home, even in illness, to Dorothy
Chambers. Though they were so different in temperament, they had been
friends from girlhood; and much of the gaiety of Margaret’s life had
been supplied by Dorothy. Now, as her friend entered, she held out her
arms. “You come whenever it rains, dear,” she said. “It is so good of
you.” Yet her welcome was hollow, and at the very instant when she
returned her friend’s kiss she was wishing that she could send her away.
That was one of the worst things about suffering; it made one
indifferent and insincere.
Dorothy drew off her gloves, unfastened her furs, and after raising her
veil over the tip of her small inquisitive nose, held out her hand with
a beseeching gesture.
“I’ve come straight from a committee luncheon. Give me a cigarette.”
Reaching for the Florentine box on the desk, Margaret handed it to her.
A minute later, while the thin blue flame shot up between them, she
asked herself if Dorothy could look into her face and not see the
difference?
Small, plain, vivacious, with hair of ashen gold, thin intelligent
features, and a smile of mocking brilliance, Dorothy was the kind of
woman whom men admire without loving and women love without admiring. As
a girl she had been a social success without possessing a single one of
the qualities upon which social success is supposed to depend.
Sinking back in her chair, she blew several rings of smoke from her lips
and watched them float slowly upward.
“We have decided to give a bridge party. There’s simply no other way to
raise money. Will you take a table?”
Margaret nodded. “Of course.” Suffering outside of herself made no
difference to her. Her throbbing wound was the only reality.
“Janet is going to lend us her house.” A new note had come into
Dorothy’s voice. “I haven’t seen her since last spring. She had on a new
hat, and was looking awfully well. You know Herbert has come back.”
Margaret started. At last her wandering attention was fixed on her
visitor. “Herbert? And she let him?” There was deep disgust in her tone.
Dorothy paused to inhale placidly before she answered. “Well, what else
could she do? He tried to make her get a divorce, and she wouldn’t.”
A flush stained Margaret’s delicate features. “I never understood why
she didn’t. He made no secret of what he wanted. He showed her plainly
that he loved the other woman.”
Dorothy’s only reply was a shrug; but after a moment, in which she
smoked with a luxurious air, she commented briefly, “But man’s love
isn’t one of the eternal verities.”
“Well, indifference is, and he proved that he was indifferent to Janet.
Yet she has let him come back to her. I can’t see what she is to get out
of it.”
Dorothy laughed cynically. “Oh, she enjoys immensely the attitude of
forgiveness, and at last he has permitted her to forgive him. There is a
spiritual vanity as well as a physical one, you know, and Janet’s
weakness is spiritual.”
“But to live with a man who doesn’t love her? To remember every minute
of the day and night that it is another woman he loves?”
“And every time that she remembers it she has the luxury of forgiving
again.” Keenness flickered like a blade in Dorothy’s gray eyes. “You are
very lovely, Margaret,” she said abruptly. “The years seem only to leave
you rarer and finer, but you know nothing about life.”
A smile quivered and died on Margaret’s lips. “I might retort that you
know nothing about love.”
With an impatient birdlike gesture Dorothy tossed her burned-out
cigarette into the fire. “Whose love?” she inquired as she opened the
Florentine box, “Herbert’s or yours?”
“It’s all the same, isn’t it?”
By the flame of the match she had struck Dorothy’s expression appeared
almost malign. “There, my dear, is where you are wrong,” she replied.
“When a man and a woman talk of love they speak two different languages.
They can never understand each other because women love with their
imagination and men with their senses. To you love is a thing in itself,
a kind of abstract power like religion; to Herbert it is simply the way
he feels.”
“But if he loves the other woman, he doesn’t love Janet; and yet he
wants to return to her.” Leaning back in her chair, Dorothy surveyed her
with a look which was at once sympathetic and mocking. Her gaze swept
the pure grave features; the shining dusk of the hair; the narrow nose
with its slight arch in the middle; the straight red lips with their
resolute pressure; the skin so like a fading rose-leaf. Yes, there was
beauty in Margaret’s face if one were only artist or saint enough to
perceive it.
“There is so much more in marriage than either love or indifference,”
she remarked casually. “There is, for instance, comfort.”
“Comfort?” repeated Margaret scornfully. She rose, in her clinging
draperies of chiff on, to place a fresh log on the fire. “If he really
loves the other woman, Janet ought to give him up,” she said.
At this Dorothy turned on her. “Would you, if it were George?” she
demanded.
For an instant, while she stood there in front of the fire, it seemed to
Margaret that the room whirled before her gaze like the changing colours
in a kaleidoscope. Then a gray cloud fell over the brightness, and out
of this cloud there emerged only the blaze of the red lilies. A pain
struck her in the breast, and she remembered the letter she had hidden
there.
“Yes,” she answered presently. “I should do it if it were George.”
A minute afterward she became conscious that while she spoke, a miracle
occurred within her soul.
The tumult of sorrow, of anger, of bitterness, of despair, was drifting
farther and farther away. Even the terror, which was worse than any
tumult, had vanished. In that instant of renunciation she had reached
some spiritual haven. What she had found, she understood presently, was
the knowledge that there is no support so strong as the strength that
enables one to stand alone.
“I should do it if it were George,” she said again, very slowly.
“Well, I think you would be very foolish.” Dorothy had risen and was
lowering her veil. “For when George ceases to be desirable for
sentimental reasons, he will still have his value as a good provider.”
Her mocking laugh grated on Margaret’s ears. “Now, I must run away. I
only looked in for an instant. I’ve a tea on hand, and I must go home
and dress.”
When she had gone, Margaret stood for a minute, thinking deeply. For a
minute only, but in that space of time her decision was made. Crossing
to the desk, she telephoned for the flowers. Then she left the library
and went into the cedar closet at the end of the hall. When she had
found the golf clothes George wanted, she looked over them carefully and
hung them in his dressing room. Her next task was to lay out his dinner
clothes and to sew the loose button on the waistcoat he had worn last
evening. She did these things deliberately, automatically, repeating as
if it were a forumla, “I must forget nothing”; and when at last she had
finished, she stood upright, with a sigh of relief, as if a burden had
rolled from her shoulders. Now that she had attended to the details of
existence, she would have time for the problem of living.
Slipping out of her gray dress, she changed into a walking suit of blue
homespun. Then, searching among the shoes in her closet, she selected a
pair of heavy boots she had worn in Maine last summer. As she put on a
close little hat and tied a veil of blue chiffon over her face, she
reflected, with bitter mirth, that only in novels could one hide one’s
identity behind a veil.
In the hall downstairs she met Winters, who stared at her discreetly but
disapprovingly.
“Shall I order the car, madam?”
She shook her head, reading his thoughts as plainly as if he had uttered
them. “No, it has stopped raining. I want to walk.”
The door closed sharply on her life of happiness, and she passed out
into the rain-soaked world where the mist caught her like damp smoke. So
this was what it meant to be deserted, to be alone on the earth! The
smell of rain, the smell that George had brought with him into the warm
room upstairs, oppressed her as if it were the odour of melancholy.
As the chill pierced her coat, she drew her furs closely about her neck,
and walked briskly in the direction of the street car. The address on
the letter she carried was burned into her memory not in numbers, but in
the thought that it was a villa George owned in an unfashionable suburb
named Locust Park. Though she had never been there, she knew that, with
the uncertain trolley service she must expect, it would take at least
two hours to make the trip and return. Half an hour for Rose Morrison;
and even then it would be night, and Winters at least would be anxious,
before she reached home. Well, that was the best she could do.
The street car came, and she got in and found a seat behind a man who
had been shooting and carried a string of partridges. All the other
seats were filled with the usual afternoon crowd for the suburbs—women
holding bundles or baskets and workmen returning from the factories. A
sense of isolation like spiritual darkness descended upon her; and she
closed her eyes and tried to bring back the serenity she had felt in the
thought of relinquishment. But she could remember only a phrase of
Dorothy’s which floated like a wisp of thistledown through her thoughts,
“Spiritual vanity. With some women it is stronger than physical vanity.”
Was that her weakness, vanity, not of the body, but of the spirit?
Thoughts blew in and out of her mind like dead leaves, now whirling, now
drifting, now stirring faintly in her consciousness with a moaning
sound. Twenty years. Nothing but that. Love and nothing else in her
whole life.... The summer of their engagement. A rose garden in bloom.
The way he looked. The smell of roses. Or was it only the smell of dead
leaves rotting to earth?... All the long, long years of their marriage.
Little things that one never forgot. The way he laughed. The way he
smiled. The look of his hair when it was damp on his forehead. The smell
of cigars in his clothes. The three lumps of sugar in his coffee. The
sleepy look in his face when he stood ready to put out the lights while
she went up the stairs. Oh, the little things that tore at one’s heart!
The street car stopped with a jerk, and she got out and walked through
the drenched grass in the direction one of the women had pointed out to
her.
“The Laurels? That low yellow house at the end of this lane, farther on
where the piles of dead leaves are. You can’t see the house now, the
lane turns, but it’s just a stone’s throw farther on.”
Thanking her, Margaret walked on steadily toward the turn in the lane.
Outside of the city the wind blew stronger, and the coloured leaves,
bronze, yellow, crimson, lay in a thick carpet over the muddy road. In
the west a thin line of gold shone beneath a range of heavy,
smoke-coloured clouds. From the trees rain still dripped slowly; and
between the road and the line of gold in the west there stretched the
desolate autumn landscape.
“Oh, the little things!” her heart cried in despair. “The little things
that make happiness!”
Entering the sagging gate of The Laurels, she passed among mounds of
sodden leaves which reminded her of graves, and followed the neglected
walk between rows of leafless shrubs which must have looked gay in
summer. The house was one of many cheap suburban villas (George had
bought it, she remembered, at an auction) and she surmised that, until
this newest tenant came, it must have stood long unoccupied. The whole
place wore, she reflected as she rang the loosened bell, a furtive and
insecure appearance.
After the third ring the door was hurriedly opened by a dishevelled
maid, who replied that her mistress was not at home.
“Then I shall wait,” said Margaret firmly. “Tell your mistress, when she
comes in, that Mrs. Fleming is waiting to see her.” With a step as
resolute as her words, she entered the house and crossed the hall to the
living room where a bright coal fire was burning.
The room was empty, but a canary in a gilded cage at the window broke
into song as she entered. On a table stood a tray containing the remains
of tea; and beside it there was a half-burned cigarette in a bronze
Turkish bowl. A book—she saw instantly that it was a volume of the
newest plays—lay face downward beneath a pair of eyeglasses, and a rug,
which had fallen from the couch, was in a crumpled pile on the floor.
“So she isn’t out,” Margaret reflected; and turning at a sound, she
confronted Rose Morrison.
For an instant it seemed to the older woman that beauty like a lamp
blinded her eyes. Then, as the cloud passed, she realized that it was
only a blaze, that it was the loveliness of dead leaves when they are
burning.
“So you came?” said Rose Morrison, while she gazed at her with the clear
and competent eyes of youth. Her voice, though it was low and clear, had
no softness; it rang like a bell. Yes, she had youth, she had her
flamboyant loveliness; but stronger than youth and loveliness, it seemed
to Margaret, surveying her over the reserves and discriminations of the
centuries, was the security of one who had never doubted her own
judgment. Her power lay where power usually lies in an infallible
self-esteem.
“I came to talk it over with you,” began Margaret quietly; and though
she tried to make her voice insolent, the deep instinct of good manners
was greater than her effort. “You tell me that my husband loves you.”
The glow, the flame, in Rose Morrison’s face made Margaret think again
of leaves burning. There was no embarrassment, there was no evasion
even, in the girl’s look. Candid and unashamed, she appeared to glory in
this infatuation, which Margaret regarded as worse than sinful, since it
was vulgar.
“Oh, I am so glad that you did,” Rose Morrison’s sincerity was
disarming. “I hated to hurt you. You can never know what it cost me to
write that letter; but I felt that I owed it to you to tell you the
truth. I believe that we always owe people the truth.”
“And did George feel this way also?”
“George?” The flame mounted until it enveloped her. “Oh, he doesn’t
know. I tried to spare him. He would rather do anything than hurt you,
and I thought it would be so much better if we could talk it over and
find a solution just between ourselves. I knew if you cared for George,
you would feel as I do about sparing him.”
About sparing him! As if she had done anything for the last twenty
years, Margaret reflected, except think out new and different ways of
sparing George!
“I don’t know,” she answered, as she sat down in obedience to the
other’s persuasive gesture. “I shall have to think a minute. You see
this has been—well, rather—sudden.”
“I know, I know.” The girl looked as if she did. “May I give you a cup
of tea? You must be chilled.”
“No, thank you. I am quite comfortable.”
“Not even a cigarette? Oh, I wonder what you Victorian women did for a
solace when you weren’t allowed even a cigarette!”
You Victorian women! In spite of her tragic mood, a smile hovered on
Margaret’s lips. So that was how this girl classified her. Yet Rose
Morrison had fallen in love with a Victorian man.
“Then I may?” said the younger woman with her full-throated laugh. From
her bright red hair, which was brushed straight back from her forehead,
to her splendid figure, where her hips swung free like a boy’s, she was
a picture of barbaric beauty. There was a glittering hardness about her,
as if she had been washed in some indestructible glaze; but it was the
glaze of youth, not of experience. She reminded Margaret of a gilded
statue she had seen once in a museum; and the girl’s eyes, like the eyes
of the statue, were gleaming, remote and impassive—eyes that had never
looked on reality. The dress she wore was made of some strange “art
cloth,” dyed in brilliant hues, fashioned like a kimono, and girdled at
the hips with what Margaret mistook for a queer piece of rope. Nothing,
not even her crude and confident youth, revealed Rose Morrison to her
visitor so completely as this end of rope.
“You are an artist?” she asked, for she was sure of her ground. Only an
artist, she decided, could be at once so arrogant with destiny and so
ignorant of life.
“How did you know? Has George spoken of me?”
Margaret shook her head. “Oh, I knew without any one’s telling me.”
“I have a studio in Greenwich Village, but George and I met last summer
at Ogunquit. I go there every summer to paint.”
“I didn’t know.” How easily, how possessively, this other woman spoke
her husband’s name.
“It began at once.” To Margaret, with her inherited delicacy and
reticence, there was something repellent in this barbaric simplicity of
emotion.
“But you must have known that he was married,” she observed coldly.
“Yes, I knew, but I could see, of course, that you did not understand
him.”
“And you think that you do?” If it were not tragic, how amusing it would
be to think of her simple George as a problem!
“Oh, I realize that it appears very sudden to you; but in the emotions
time counts for so little. Just living with a person for twenty years
doesn’t enable one to understand him, do you think?”
“I suppose not. But do you really imagine,” she asked in what struck her
as a singularly impersonal tone for so intimate a question, “that George
is complex?”
The flame, which was revealed now as the illumination of some secret
happiness, flooded Rose Morrison’s features. As she leaned forward, with
clasped hands, Margaret noticed that the girl was careless about those
feminine details by which George declared so often that he judged a
woman. Her hair was carelessly arranged; her finger nails needed
attention; and beneath the kimonolike garment, a frayed place showed at
the back of her stocking. Even her red morocco slippers were run down at
the heels; and it seemed to Margaret that this physical negligence had
extended to the girl’s habit of thought.
“He is so big, so strong and silent, that it would take an artist to
understand him,” answered Rose Morrison passionately. Was this really,
Margaret wondered, the way George appeared to the romantic vision?
“Yes, he is not a great talker,” she admitted. “Perhaps if he talked
more, you might find him less difficult.” Then before the other could
reply, she inquired sharply, “Did George tell you that he was
misunderstood?”
“How you misjudge him!” The girl had flown to his defense; and though
Margaret had been, as she would have said “a devoted wife,” she felt
that all this vehemence was wasted. After all, George, with his easy,
prosaic temperament, was only made uncomfortable by vehemence. “He never
speaks of you except in the most beautiful way,” Rose Morrison was
insisting “He realizes perfectly what you have been to him, and he would
rather suffer in silence all his life than make you unhappy.”
“Then what is all this about?” Though she felt that it was unfair,
Margaret could not help putting the question.
Actually there were tears in Rose Morrison’s eyes. “I could not bear to
see his life ruined,” she answered. “I hated to write to you; but how
else could I make you realize that you were standing in the way of his
happiness? If it were just myself, I could have borne it in silence. I
would never have hurt you just for my own sake; but, the subterfuge, the
dishonesty, is spoiling his life. He does not say so, but, oh, I see it
every day because I love him!” As she bent over, the firelight caught
her hair, and it blazed out triumphantly like the red lilies in
Margaret’s library.
“What is it that you want me to do?” asked Margaret in her dispassionate
voice.
“I felt that we owed you the truth,” responded the girl, “and I hoped
that you would take what I wrote you in the right spirit.”
“You are sure that my husband loves you?”
“Shall I show you his letters?” The girl smiled as she answered, and her
full red lips reminded Margaret suddenly of raw flesh. Was raw flesh,
after all, what men wanted?
“No!” The single word was spoken indignantly.
“I thought perhaps they would make you see what it means,” explained
Rose Morrison simply. “Oh, I wish I could do this without causing you
pain!”
“Pain doesn’t matter. I can stand pain.”
“Well, I’m glad you aren’t resentful. After all, why should we be
enemies? George’s happiness means more than anything else to us both.”
“And you are sure you know best what is for George’s happiness?”
“I know that subterfuge and lies and dishonesty cannot bring happiness.”
Rose Morrison flung out her arms with a superb gesture. “Oh, I realize
that it is a big thing, a great thing, I am asking of you. But in your
place, if I stood in his way, I should so gladly sacrifice myself for
his sake I should give him his freedom. I should acknowledge his right
to happiness, to self-development.”
A bitter laugh broke from Margaret’s lips. What a jumble of sounds these
catchwords of the new freedom made! What was this self-development which
could develop only through the sacrifice of others? How would these
immature theories survive the compromises and concessions and
adjustments which made marriage permanent?
“I cannot feel that our marriage has interfered with his development,”
she rejoined presently.
“You may be right,” Rose Morrison conceded the point. “But to-day he
needs new inspiration, new opportunities. He needs the companionship of
a modern mind.”
“Yes, he has kept young at my cost,” thought the older woman. “I have
helped by a thousand little sacrifices, by a thousand little cares and
worries, to preserve this unnatural youth which is destroying me. I have
taken over the burden of details in order that he might be free for the
larger interests of life. If he is young to-day, it is at the cost of my
youth.”
For the second time that day, as she sat there in silence, with her eyes
on the blooming face of Rose Morrison, a wave of peace, the peace of one
who has been shipwrecked and then swept far off into some serene haven,
enveloped her. Something to hold by, that at least she had found. The
law of sacrifice, the ideal of self-surrender, which she had learned in
the past. For twenty years she had given freely, abundantly, of her
best; and to-day she could still prove to him that she was not beggared.
She could still give the supreme gift of her happiness. “How he must
love you!” she exclaimed. “How he must love you to have hurt me so much
for your sake! Nothing but a great love could make him so cruel.”
“He does love me,” answered Rose Morrison, and her voice was like the
song of a bird.
“He must.” Margaret’s eyes were burning, but no tears came. Her lips
felt cracked with the effort she made to keep them from trembling. “I
think if he had done this thing with any other motive than a great love,
I should hate him until I died.” Then she rose and held out her hand. “I
shall not stand in your way,” she added.
Joy flashed into the girl’s eyes. “You are very noble,” she answered. “I
am sorry if I have hurt you. I am sorry, too, that I called you
old-fashioned.”
Margaret laughed. “Oh, I am old-fashioned. I am so old-fashioned that I
should have died rather than ruin the happiness of another woman.” The
joy faded from Rose Morrison’s face. “It was not I,” she answered. “It
was life. We cannot stand in the way of life.”
“Life to-day, God yesterday, what does it matter? It is a generation
that has grasped everything except personal responsibility.” Oh, if one
could only keep the humour! A thought struck her, and she asked
abruptly, “When your turn comes, if it ever does, will you give way as I
do?”
“That will be understood. We shall not hold each other back.”
“But you are young. You will tire first. Then he must give way?” Why, in
twenty years George would be sixty-five and Rose Morrison still a young
woman!
Calm, resolute, uncompromising. Rose Morrison held open the door.
“Whatever happens, he would never wish to hold me back.”
Then Margaret passed out, the door closed behind her, and she stood
breathing deep draughts of the chill, invigorating air. Well, that was
over.
The lawn, with its grave-like mounds of leaves, looked as mournful as a
cemetery. Beyond the bare shrubs the road glimmered; the wind still blew
in gusts, now rising, now dying away with a plaintive sound; in the west
the thread of gold had faded to a pale greenish light. Veiled in the
monotonous fall of the leaves, it seemed to Margaret that the desolate
evening awaited her.
“How he must love her,” she thought, not resentfully, but with tragic
resignation. “How he must love her to have sacrificed me as he has
done.”
This idea, she found as she walked on presently in the direction of the
street car, had taken complete possession of her point of view. Through
its crystal lucidity she was able to attain some sympathy with her
husband’s suffering. What agony of mind he must have endured in these
past months, these months when they had worked so quietly side by side
on his book! What days of gnawing remorse! What nights of devastating
anguish! How this newer love must have rent his heart asunder before he
could stoop to the baseness of such a betrayal! Tears, which had not
come for her own pain, stung her eyelids. She knew that he must have
fought it hour by hour, day by day, night by night. Conventional as he
was, how violent this emotion must have been to have conquered him so
completely. “Terrible as an army with banners,” she repeated softly,
while a pang of jealousy shot through her heart. Was there in George,
she asked now, profounder depths of feeling than she had ever reached;
was there some secret garden of romance where she had never entered? Was
George larger, wilder, more adventurous in imagination, than she had
dreamed? Had the perfect lover lain hidden in his nature, awaiting only
the call of youth?
The street car returned almost empty; and she found restfulness in the
monotonous jolting, as if it were swinging her into some world beyond
space and time, where mental pain yielded to the sense of physical
discomfort. After the agony of mind, the aching of body was strangely
soothing.
Here and there, the lights of a house flashed among the trees, and she
thought, with an impersonal interest, of the neglected villa, surrounded
by mounds of rotting leaves, where that girl waited alone for happiness.
Other standards. This was how the newer generation appeared to
Margaret—other standards, other morals. Facing life stripped bare of
every safeguard, of every restraining tradition, with only the courage
of ignorance, of defiant inexperience, to protect one. That girl was not
wilfully cruel. She was simply greedy for emotion; she was gasping at
the pretense of happiness like all the rest of her undisciplined
generation. She was caught by life because she had never learned to give
up, to do without, to stand alone.
Her corner had come, and she stepped with a sensation of relief on the
wet pavement. The rain was dripping steadily in a monotonous drizzle.
While she walked the few blocks to her door, she forced herself by an
effort of will to go on, step by step, not to drop down in the street
and lose consciousness.
The tinkle of the bell and the sight of Winters’s face restored her to
her senses.
“Shall I bring you tea, madam?”
“No, it is too late.”
Going upstairs to her bedroom, she took off her wet clothes and slipped
into her prettiest tea gown, a trailing thing of blue satin and chiffon.
While she ran the comb through her damp hair and touched her pale lips
with colour, she reflected that even renunciation was easier when one
looked desirable. “But it is like painting the cheeks of the dead,” she
thought, as she turned away from the mirror and walked with a dragging
step to the library. Never, she realized suddenly, had she loved George
so much as in this hour when she had discovered him only to lose him.
As she entered, George hurried to meet her with an anxious air. “I
didn’t hear you come in, Margaret. I have been very uneasy. Has anything
happened?”
By artificial light he looked younger even than he had seemed in the
afternoon; and this boyishness of aspect struck her as strangely
pathetic. It was all a part, she told herself, of that fulfilment which
had come too late, of that perilous second blooming, not of youth, but
of Indian Summer. The longing to spare him, to save him from the
suffering she had endured, pervaded her heart.
“Yes, something has happened,” she answered gently. “I have been to see
Rose Morrison.”
As she spoke the name, she turned away from him, and walking with
unsteady steps across the room, stood looking down into the fire. The
knowledge of all that she must see when she turned, of the humiliation,
the anguish, the remorse in his eyes, oppressed her heart with a passion
of shame and pity. How could she turn and look on his wounded soul which
she had stripped bare?
“Rose Morrison?” he repeated in an expressionless voice. “What do you
know of Rose Morrison?”
At his question she turned quickly, and faced not anguish, not
humiliation, but emptiness. There was nothing in his look except the
blankness of complete surprise. For an instant the shock made her dizzy;
and in the midst of the dizziness there flashed through her mind the
memory of an evening in her childhood, when she had run bravely into a
dark room where they told her an ogre was hiding, and had found that it
was empty.
“She wrote to me.” Her legs gave way as she replied, and, sinking into
the nearest chair, she sat gazing up at him with an immobile face.
A frown gathered his eyebrows, and a purplish flush (he flushed so
easily of late) mounted slowly to the smooth line of his hair. She
watched the quiver that ran through his under lip (strange that she had
not noticed how it had thickened) while his teeth pressed it sharply.
Everything about him was acutely vivid to her, as if she were looking at
him closely for the first time. She saw the furrow between his eyebrows,
the bloodshot stain on one eyeball, the folds of flesh beneath his
jutting chin, the crease in his black tie, the place where his shirt
gave a little because it had grown too tight—all these insignificant
details would exist indelibly in her brain.
“She wrote to you?” His voice sounded strained and husky, and he coughed
abruptly as if he were trying to hide his embarrassment. “What the
devil! But you don’t know her.”
“I saw her this afternoon. She told me everything.”
“Everything?” Never had she imagined that he could appear so helpless,
so lacking in the support of any conventional theory. A hysterical laugh
broke from her, a laugh as utterly beyond her control as a spasm, and at
the sound he flushed as if she had struck him. While she sat there she
realized that she had no part or place in the scene before her. Never
could she speak the words that she longed to utter. Never could she make
him understand the real self behind the marionette at which he was
looking. She longed with all her heart to say: “There were possibilities
in me that you never suspected. I also am capable of a great love. In my
heart I also am a creature of romance, of adventure. If you had only
known it, you might have found in marriage all that you have sought
elsewhere....” This was what she longed to cry out, but instead she said
merely,
“She told me of your love. She asked me to give you up.”
“She asked you to give me up?” His mouth fell open as he finished, and
while he stared at her he forgot to shut it. It occurred to her that he
had lost the power of inventing a phrase, that he could only echo the
ones she had spoken. How like a foolish boy he looked as he stood there,
in front of the sinking fire, trying to hide behind that hollow echo!
“She said that I stood in your way.” The phrase sounded so grotesque as
she uttered it that she found herself laughing again. She had not wished
to speak these ugly things. Her heart was filled with noble words, with
beautiful sentiments, but she could not make her lips pronounce them in
spite of all the efforts she made. And she recalled suddenly the
princess in the fairy tale who, when she opened her mouth, found that
toads and lizards escaped from it instead of pearls and rubies.
At first he did not reply, and it seemed to her that only mechanical
force could jerk his jaw back into place and close the eyelids over his
vacant blue eyes. When at last he made a sound it was only the empty
echo again, “stood in my way!”
“She is desperately in earnest.” Justice wrung this admission from her.
“She feels that this subterfuge is unfair to us all. Your happiness, she
thinks, is what we should consider first, and she is convinced that I
should be sacrificed to your future. She was perfectly frank. She
suppressed nothing.”
For the first time George Fleming uttered an original sound. “O Lord!”
he exclaimed devoutly.
“I told her that I did not wish to stand in your way,” resumed Margaret,
as if the exclamation had not interrupted the flow of her thoughts. “I
told her I would give you up.”
Suddenly, without warning, he exploded. “What, in the name of heaven,
has it got to do with you?” he demanded.
“To do with me?” It was her turn to echo. “But isn’t that girl—” she
corrected herself painfully—“isn’t she living in your house at this
minute?”
He cast about helplessly for an argument. When at last he discovered
one, he advanced it with a sheepish air, as if he recognized its
weakness. “Well, nobody else would take it, would they?”
“She says that you love her.”
He shifted his ground nervously. “I can’t help what she says, can I?”
“She offered to show me your letters.”
“Compliments, nothing more.”
“But you must love her, or you couldn’t—you wouldn’t—” A burning flush
scorched Margaret’s body.
“I never said that I....” Even with her he had always treated the word
love as if it were a dangerous explosive, and he avoided touching it
now, “that I cared for her in that way.”
“Then you do in another way?”
He glanced about like a trapped animal. “I am not a fool, am I? Why, I
am old enough to be her father! Besides, I am not the only one anyway.
She was living with a man when I met her, and he wasn’t the first. She
isn’t bad, you know. It’s a kind of philosophy with her. She calls it
self....”
“I know.” Margaret cut the phrase short. “I have heard what she calls
it.” So it was all wasted! Nothing that she could do could lift the
situation above the level of the commonplace, the merely vulgar. She was
defrauded not only of happiness, but even of the opportunity to be
generous. Her sacrifice was as futile as that girl’s passion. “But she
is in love with you now,” she said.
“I suppose she is.” His tone had grown stubborn. “But how long would it
last? In six months she would be leaving me for somebody else. Of
course, I won’t see her again,” he added, with the manner of one who is
conceding a reasonable point. Then, after a pause in which she made no
response, his stubbornness changed into resentment. “Anybody would think
that you are angry because I am not in love with her!” he exclaimed.
“Anybody would think—but I don’t understand women!”
“Then you will not—you do not mean to leave me?” she asked; and her
manner was as impersonal, she was aware, as if Winters had just given
her notice.
“Leave you?” He glanced appreciatively round the room. “Where on earth
could I go?”
For an instant Margaret looked at him in silence. Then she insisted
coldly, “To her, perhaps. She thinks that you are in love with her.”
“Well, I suppose I’ve been a fool,” he confessed, after a struggle, “but
you are making too much of it.”
Yes, she was making too much of it; she realized this more poignantly
than he would ever be able to do. She felt like an actress who has
endowed a comic part with the gesture of high tragedy. It was not, she
saw clearly now, that she had misunderstood George, but that she had
overplayed life.
“We met last summer at Ogunquit.” She became aware presently that he was
still making excuses and explanations about nothing. “You couldn’t go
about much, you know, and we went swimming and played golf together. I
liked her, and I could see that she liked me. When we came away I
thought we’d break it off, but somehow we didn’t. I saw her several
times in New York. Then she came here unexpectedly, and I offered her
that old villa nobody would rent. You don’t understand such things,
Margaret. It hadn’t any more to do with you than—than—” He hesitated,
fished in the stagnant waters of his mind, and flung out abruptly, “than
golf has. It was just a sort of—well, sort of—recreation.”
Recreation! The memory of Rose Morrison’s extravagant passion smote her
sharply. How glorified the incident had appeared in the girl’s
imagination, how cheap and tawdry it was in reality. A continual
compromise with the second best, an inevitable surrender to the average,
was this the history of all romantic emotion? For an instant, such is
the perversity of fate, it seemed to the wife that she and this strange
girl were united by some secret bond which George could not share—by the
bond of woman’s immemorial disillusionment.
“I wouldn’t have had you hurt for worlds, Margaret,” said George,
bending over her. The old gentle voice, the old possessive and
complacent look in his sleepy blue eyes, recalled her wandering senses.
“If I could only make you see that there wasn’t anything in it.”
She gazed up at him wearily. The excitement of discovery, the
exaltation, the anguish, had ebbed away, leaving only gray emptiness.
She had lost more than love, more than happiness, for she had lost her
belief in life.
“If there had been anything in it, I might be able to understand,” she
replied.
He surveyed her with gloomy severity. “Hang it all! You act as if you
wanted me to be in love with her.” Then his face cleared as if by magic.
“You’re tired out, Margaret and you’re nervous. There’s Winters now. You
must try to eat a good dinner.”
Anxious, caressing, impatient to have the discussion end and dinner
begin, he stooped and lifted her in his arms. For an instant she lay
there without moving, and in that instant her gaze passed from his face
to the red lilies and the uncurtained window beyond.
Outside the leaves were falling.