Dr. Renault's private office was a large, square room with a north window
that gave a broad view of the pointed Albany mountains. Along the walls
were rows of unpainted wooden shelves on which were stacked books and
pamphlets. One small piece of bronze on the shelf above the fireplace--a
copy of the seated Mercury in the Naples museum--was the sole ornament in
the room. A fire was dying on the hearth this gray March afternoon, and
flashes of light from a breaking log revealed the faces of Renault and
Isabelle, standing on opposite sides of his work table. They had stood like
this a long time while the gray day came to an end outside and the trees
lashed by the north wind bent and groaned. Isabelle was passing the office,
after dinner, on some errand, and the doctor had called her. Accident had
led to this long talk, the longest and the deepest she had had with
Renault. One thing had touched another until she had bared to him her
heart, had laid before his searching gaze the story of her restless, futile
life. And the words that he had spoken had dropped like hot metal upon her
wounds and burned until her hands trembled as they leaned upon his desk....
"The discipline of life!" he had said. The phrase was hateful to her. It
stirred within her all the antagonism of her generation to the creed of her
people, to the Puritan ideal, cold, narrow, repressive. And yet Renault was
far from being a Puritan. But he, too, believed in the "discipline of
life." And again when she had confessed her ambitions for "a broad life,"
"for experience," he had said: "Egotism is the pestilence of our day,--the
sort of base intellectual egotism that seeks to taste for the sake of
tasting. Egotism is rampant. And worst of all it has corrupted the women,
in whom should lie nature's great conservative element. So our body social
is rotten with intellectual egotism. Yes, I mean just what you have prided
yourself on,--Culture, Education, Individuality, Cleverness,--'leading your
own lives,' Refinement, Experience, Development, call it what you will,--it
is the same, the inturning of the spirit to cherish self. Not one of all
you women has a tenth of the experience my mother had, who, after bringing
up her family of eight, at fifty-seven went to the town school to learn
Latin, because before she had not had the time."...To some defence of her
ideal by Isabelle, he retorted with fine scorn:--
"Oh, I know the pretty impression our American women make in the eyes of
visiting foreigners,--so 'clever,' so 'fascinating,' so 'original,' so
'independent,' and such 'charm'! Those are the words, aren't they? While
their dull husbands are 'money-getters.' They at least are doers, not
talkers! ...
"Do you know what you are, women like you, who have money and freedom to
'live your own lives'? You are sexless; you haven't nature's great apology
for the animal,--desire. Such women sin, when they sin, with their minds.
Great God! I had rather those broad-hipped Italian peasant women of
Calabria, with solid red-brown flesh, bred bastards for the country than
have these thin, anaemic, nervous, sexless creatures, with their 'souls'
and their 'charm,' marry and become mothers! What have you done to the
race? The race of blond giants from the forests of the north? Watch the
avenue in New York!"
Again,--"So what have you made of marriage, 'leading your own lives'? You
make marriage a sort of intelligent and intellectual prostitution--and you
develop divorce. The best among you--those who will not marry unless the
man can arouse their 'best selves'--will not bear children even then. And
you think you have the right to choose again when your so-called souls have
played you false the first time.... And man, what of him? You leave him to
his two gross temptations,--Power and Lust. Man is given you to protect,
and you drive him into the market-place, where he fights for your ease, and
then relaxes in the refined sensualities you offer him as the reward for
his toil. With the fall of man into the beast's trough must come the
degradation of women. They cannot travel apart; they must pull together.
What have _you_ done for your husband?" He turned sharply on Isabelle.
"Where is he now? where has he been all these years? What is he doing this
hour? Have you nursed his spirit, sharpened his sword? ... I am not
speaking of the dumb ones far down in the mass, nor of the humdrum
philistines that still make homes, have traces of the nest-instinct left;
but of you, _you_,--the developed intelligences who flatter yourselves that
you lead because you are free to do as you like. By your minds you are
betrayed!"
Before the blast of his scorching words Isabelle saw her ambitions shrivel
into petty nothings,--all the desires from her first married days to find a
suitable expression of her individuality, her wish to escape Torso, her
contempt for St. Louis, her admiration for Cornelia Woodyard, her seeking
for "interesting" people and a cultivated and charming background for
herself, and last of all her dissatisfaction in her marriage because it
failed to evoke in her the passion she desired. It was a petty story, she
felt,--ashamed before Renault's irony.
He knew her life, more than she had told him, much more. He knew _her_. He
read below the surface and had known her from the first hour they had met.
It was all true,--she had wanted many things that now she saw were futile.
She had accepted her marriage as failure--almost with relief, as an excuse
for her restlessness. Yes, she had made mistakes; what was worse, was a
mistake herself! Crushed with this sense of futility, of failure, she
cried:--
"But we are caught in the stream when we are young and eager. The world
seems so big and rich if you but reach out your hand to take."
"And from its feast you took--what?"
She was silent, self-convicted; for she had taken chaff! ...Nevertheless,
it was not dead within her--the self. It cried out under Renault's pitiless
scorn for satisfaction, for life. The rebellious surge of desire still
suffocated her at times. There was beauty, the loveliness of the earth, the
magic wonder of music and art,--all the clamor of emotion for an expression
of self. And love? Ah, that was dead for her. But the life within, the
self, still hungered for possession at times more fiercely than ever. Why
should it be killed at her age? Why were they not good, these hungry
desires, this fierce self that beat in her blood for recognition? The
conquering, achieving SELF! That was the spirit of her race, to see and
take that which was good in their eyes, to feed the SELF with all that the
world contained of emotions, ideas, experience; to be big, and strong, and
rich,--to have Power! That was what life had meant for her ancestors ever
since the blond race emerged from their forests to conquer. All else was
death to the self, was merely sentimental deception, a playing at
resignation....
As if he traced her fast thoughts, Renault said:--
"A house divided against itself--"
"But even if I have failed--"
"Failed because you did not look deep enough within!"
Renault's voice insensibly softened from his tone of harsh invective as he
added:--
"And now you know what I meant when I said that a neurasthenic world needed
a new religion!"
So he had remembered her,--knew her all the time!
"But you can't get it because you need it--"
"Yes, because you feel the need! ... Not the old religion of abnegation,
the impossible myths that come to us out of the pessimistic East, created
for a relief, a soporific, a means of evasion,--I do not mean that as
religion. But another faith, which abides in each one of us, if we look for
it. We rise with it in the morning. It is a faith in life apart from our
own personal fate.... Because we live on the surface, we despair, we get
sick. Look below into the sustaining depths beyond desire, beyond self, to
the depths,--and you will find it. It will uplift you.... When you wake in
the morning, there will come to you some mysterious power that was not
there before, some belief, some hope, some faith. Grasp it! ... When the
clouds lift, the physical clouds and the mental clouds, then appears the
Vision and the knowledge. They are the truth from the depths within,--the
voice of the spirit that lives always. And by that voice man himself lives
or dies, as he wills,--by the voice of the spirit within."
So as the drear day of the dying winter drew to a close, as the ashes
powdered on the hearth and the face of Renault became obscure in the
twilight, the dim outlines of a great meaning rose before her, reconciling
all.... The Vision that abides within apart from the teasing phantasmagoria
of sense, the Vision that comes, now dim, now vivid, as the flash of white
light in the storm, the Vision towards which mankind blindly reaches, the
Vision by which he may learn to live and endure all!
And this Vision was all that really mattered,--to see it, to follow where
it pointed the way!
... "The waste in life, the wrong steps, the futile years!" she murmured.
"Rather the cost, the infinite cost of human souls--and their infinite
value once born," Renault corrected. "Do not distress yourself about what
to do, the claims of this or that. The thing to do will always be clear,
once you trust yourself, seek wholly the Vision. And as for beauty and
satisfaction and significance,--it is infinite in every moment of every
life--when the eyes are once open to see!"
There was the sound of footsteps outside, and Isabelle moved to the door.
"So," Renault concluded, putting his hands on her shoulders, "it is not the
End but the Beginning. And always so,--a mysterious journey, this life,
with countless beginnings.... We go out into the night. But the light
comes--when we forget to see ourselves."
The wind raged in the trees outside, sweeping across the earth, tearing the
forest, cleansing and breaking its repose, preparing for the renewal to
come. Like a mighty voice it shouted to man; like the whirlwind it shook
his earth.... For the first time since Vickers lay dead in the dawn of the
June morning Isabelle could bear to look at the past,--to accept it calmly
as part of herself out of which she had lived, in recognition of that
beginning within.