After supper Margaret sat and talked with Mrs. Viney. The fisherman's wife
was a woman of fifty, with a dragging voice, a faint curiosity in her
manner. Her iron-gray hair smoothed flat was tied in a little knot behind.
Her husband, a good ten years older, had the vitality of a young man
compared with his wife. He was grizzled and squat, with thick red face and
powerful shoulders. His eyes twinkled sharply under their fleshy lids; but
he exhibited no outward curiosity over the two strangers who had dropped
down on his island.
"That woman!" Margaret exclaimed disgustedly to Falkner as they went back
to the camp.
"Our excellent hostess? What is the matter with her?"
"She's a whiner!" Margaret replied hotly. "The woman is always the
whiner,--it makes me despise my sex. What do you suppose she wants? She has
a sister in Lawrence, Mass., and Lawrence, Mass., is her Paris! She wants
her husband to give up this, all the life he's known since he was a boy,
and go to live in Lawrence, Mass., so that she can walk on brick sidewalks
and look into shop windows. There's an ideal for you, my dear!"
Falkner laughed at her outburst. After all an ambition for Lawrence, Mass.,
was not criminal.
"Oh, women! ... She wanted me to know that she had seen life,--knew a lady
who had rings like mine,--the social instinct in women,--phew! And he
smoked his pipe like an honest man and said not a word. He'll never die in
Lawrence, Mass."
"But it must be lonely for the poor thing here winters; their children have
all gone to the city."
"There are ten families at the other end of the island, if she must have
some one to clack with."
"Perhaps she doesn't find the island society congenial," Falkner suggested
slyly. He had heard Margaret inveigh against certain less restricted
societies.
"But the old man said, 'Winters are best of all--when it's fierce outside,
and there's nothing but yourself to amuse yourself with!' That's the man.
And he said: 'I like the blows, too. I've been on the sea all my life, and
I don't know nothing about it to speak on.' He has a sense of what it
means,--all this greatness about him."
"But her element, you forget, is Lawrence, Mass."
"The man has the imagination, if he is a man! If he is a man! Woman just
tails on,--as I cling to you, dearest!"
"And sometimes I think you would want to take the lead,--to have your own
little way."
"Yes, I like my way, too! But the women who think they can strike out
alone--live their own lives, as they say--are foolish. The wise women work
through men,--accomplish themselves in those they love. Isn't that bigger
than doing all the work yourself?"
"Women create the necessity for man's work."
"You know I don't mean that! ... What is bliss is to make the way clear for
the one you loved.... I could do that! I'd set my little brain working to
smooth away the immediate difficulties, those that hinder, the little
things that stick in the way. I'd clean the armor for my lord and bring him
nourishing food."
"And point out the particular castle you would like him to capture for your
dwelling?"
"Never! If the man were worth serving, he would mark his own game."...
They had walked to the eastern point of the island, where nothing was to be
seen but the wide sea. The wind had utterly fallen, leaving the surface of
the water mottled with currents from beneath. Far away on the horizon some
ships seemed to be sailing--they had wind out there--and their sails still
shone in the twilight. About the cliff at their feet the tide ran in black
circles. It was still, and the earth was warm and fragrant from the hot
day. Margaret rested her head upon his arm and closed her eyes.
"It has been too much for you," he said, concerned.
"No," she murmured, "I am not tired. This is content, at the day's end. It
is marvellous,"--she opened her eyes again upon him with a smile of wonder.
"I haven't had a moment of fatigue, and I have done so much since
yesterday,--more than I have done for years. I wonder what it is gives us
women strength or weakness."
"Joy gives strength!"
"Peace gives strength. Sometimes I think that all the weakness in
life--women's weakness--is merely wrong adjustment. It is never work that
kills--it isn't just living, no matter how hard it is. But it is trying to
live when you are dead.... Dearest, if we stayed here, I should be always
strong! I know it. All the weariness and the pain and the languor would go;
I should be what I was meant to be, what every human being is meant to
be,--strong to bear."
"It is a bitter thought."
"I suppose that is why men and women struggle so blindly to set themselves
right, why they run away and commit all sorts of follies. They feel within
them the capacity for health, for happiness, if they can only get right
somehow. And when they find the way--"
She made a little gesture with her hand that swept the troubles from the
road.
"If they can be sure, it is almost a duty--to put themselves right, isn't
it?"
Here they had come to the temptation which in all their intimate moments
they had avoided.... 'Others have remade the pattern of their lives,--why
not we?' The woman answered the thought in the man's mind.
"I should never take it, even knowing that it is my one chance for health
and all that I desire, not while my father lives, not while my
mother-in-law lives; it would add another sorrow to their graves. Nor while
my husband has a right to his children. We are all bound in criss-cross in
life. Nor would you, dearest, have me; you would hate me,--it would turn
our glory to gall!"
It was not her habit to put her hands before her eyes. She was clear with
herself, and without the sentimental fog. For the Bishop's creed she cared
nothing. For her mother-in-law's prejudices she cared as little. The
punishment of Society she would have met with gleeful contempt. People
could not take from her what she valued, for she had stripped so much that
there was little left in her heart to be deprived of. As for her husband,
he did not exist for her; towards him she was spiritually blind. Her
children were so much a part of her that she never thought of them as away
from her. Where she went, they would be, as a matter of course.
They had never laid all this on the table before them, so to speak, but
both had realized it from the beginning. They had walked beside the social
precipice serene, but aware of the depths--and the heights.
"I hate to be limited by the opinions, the prejudices, of other people, of
any one," the man protested. "There seems a cowardice in silently
acquiescing in social laws that I don't respect, because the majority so
wills it."
"Not because it is the will of the majority--not that; but because others
near you will be made wretched. That is the only morality I have!"
The law of pity in the place of the law of God! A fragile leash for passion
and egotism. They both shuddered.
The dusk gathered all about them. Her head still rested on his breast, and
her hand stole to his face. She whispered, "So we pay the forfeit--for our
blindness!"
"And if I stay--"
"Don't say it! Don't say that! Do you think that I could be here this
moment in your arms if _that_ were possible?"
Her voice trembled with scorn, disgust of the adulterous world.
"Hiding and corner lies for us? No, no, my lover,--not for _you!_ Not even
for _me_. That is the one price too great to pay for happiness. It would
kill it all. Kill it! Surely. I should become in your eyes--like one
of--_them_. It would be--oh, you understand!" She buried her head in his
coat.
Again she had saved them, kept the balance of their ideal. She would have
love, not hidden lust. What she had done this once could never be done
again without defilement. She had come to him as to a man condemned to die,
to leave the earth forever, and the one most precious thing he wanted and
the one most precious thing that she had to give,--that she had given
freely--to the man condemned to death.
"We have come all the hard way up the heights to infinite joy, to Peace!
Shall we throw ourselves down into the gulf?"...
* * * * *
In the night Falkner woke with a start, putting out his hand to fend off a
catastrophe. She was not there by his side! For one moment fear filled his
mind, and then as he sprang up he saw her in the faint moonlight, leaning
against the post of the veranda, looking out into the night. At his
movement she turned.
"The night was too beautiful to sleep through, dearest! I have so much to
think about."
She came back to his side and knelt above him, drawing her cloak around
her. "See! we are all alone here under the stars." The fog had stolen in
from the sea, risen as high as the trees, and lay close over land and
ocean. The heavens were cloudless, and the little moon was low. "Those
tranquil stars up there! They give us our benediction for the time to
come.... We have had our supreme joy--our desire of desires--and now Peace
shall enter our hearts and remain there. That is what the night says.... It
can never be as it was before for you or me. We shall carry away something
from our feast to feed on all our lives. We shall have enough to give
others. Love makes you rich--so rich! We must give it away, all our lives.
We shall, dearest, never fear."
For the soul has its own sensualities,--its self-delight in pain, in
humiliation,--its mood of generosity, too. The penetrating warmth of a
great passion irradiates life about it.
"My children, my children," she murmured, "I love them more--I can do for
them more. And for dear Mother Pole--and even for him. I shall be
gentler--I shall understand.... Love was set before me. I have taken it,
and it has made me strong. I will be glad and love the world, all of it,
for your sake, because you have blessed me.... Ours is not the fire that
turns inward and feeds upon itself!"
"Oh, Margaret, Margaret!--"
"Listen," she murmured, clasping his neck, "you are the Man! You must
spread the flame where I cannot. I kiss you. I have eaten of life with you.
Together we have understood. Forget me, cease to love me; but always you
must be stronger, greater, nobler because you have held me in your arms and
loved me. If you cannot carry us upwards, it has been base,--the mere
hunger of animals,--my lover! You have made of my weakness strength, and I
have given you peace! Pour it out for me in deeds that I may know I have
loved a Man, that my hero lives!"
Like a cry of the spirit it rang out into the night between the mist-hidden
earth and the silent stars. In the stillness there had come a revelation of
life,--the eternal battle of man between the spirit and the flesh, between
the seen and the unseen, the struggle infinite and always. Where life is,
that must be. And the vision of man's little, misshapen existence,--the
incomplete and infinitesimal unit he is,--and also the significance of
him,--this material atom, the symbol, the weapon of the spirit, shone forth
before them. This the woman had felt in giving herself to him, that the
spirit within was freed by the touch of flesh....
Already in the calm night desire and passion seemed to fade from them. Here
had ended their passion, and now must begin the accomplishment. When the
revelation comes, and the spirit thus speaks through the flesh, it is peace
with human beings....
They lay there awake but silent into the gray hours of dawn, and when the
mist had spread upwards to the sky, shutting out the stars, they slept.