Now, she decided, was the moment for her revelation; or rather, it
couldn't very well be further deferred, for it promised to be halting.
But, with her lips forming the words, he abruptly spoke:
“I have lived so long with your spirit, it has become so familiar--I
mean the ability of completely making you out of my heart--that when you
are here the difference isn't staggering. You see, you are never away.
I have that ability; it came out of the other wreck. But you know about
it--from years back. Time has only managed a greater power. Lately, and
I have nothing to do with it, I have been seeing you again as a girl;
as young as at Markue's party; younger. Not more than ten. I don't
mean that there is anything--isn't the present fashionable word
subliminal?--esoteric. God forbid. You'll remember my hatred of that
brutal deception.
“No, it's only a part of my ability to create the shape of feeling, of
Simon's hope. I see things as realities capable of exact statement; and,
naturally, more than all the rest, you come to me that way. But as a
child--who knows why?” he relinquished the answer with an opened
palm. “And young like that, perhaps ten, I love you more sharply, more
unutterably, than at any other age. What is it I love? Not your adorable
plastic body, not that. It isn't necessary to understand.
“You have, as a child, a quality of blinding loveliness in a world I
absolutely distrust. An Elysian flower. Is it possible, do you suppose,
to worship an abstract idea? It's not important to insist on my sanity.”
The question of that had occurred independently to Linda; his hurried
voice and lost gaze filled her with apprehension. A dull reddish patch,
she saw, burned in either thin cheek; and she told herself that the
fever had revived in him. Pleydon continued:
“Yet it is a timeless vision, because you never get old. I see Hallet
failing year by year, and your children, only yesterday dabs of soft
flesh, grow up and pass through college and marry. I hear myself in the
studio with an old man's cough; the chisels slip under the mall and I
can't move the clay about without help--all fading, decaying, but you.
Candles burn out, hundreds of them, while your whiteness, your flame--
“Strange, too, how you light a world, a sky, eternity. A word we have no
business with; a high-sounding word for a penny purpose. Look, we try
to keep alive because it's necessary to life, to nature; and the effort,
the struggle, breeds the dream. You can understand that. Men who ought
to know say that love is nothing more.” He rose and stood over her,
towering and portentous against the curtained light. “I don't pretend to
guess. I'm a creative artist--Simon Downige at Cottarsport--I have you.
If it's God so much the better.”
What principally swept over Linda was the knowledge that his possession
of her must keep them always apart. The reality, all realities, were
veils to Pleydon. Her momentary vision of things beyond brick and earth
was magnified in him until everything else was obliterated. The fever!
Oh, yes, that and his passion for work merged in his passion for her.
She could bring him nothing; and she had a curious picture of two Lindas
visible to him here--the Linda that was actual and the other, the child.
And of them it was the latter he cared most for, recreated out of his
desire to defraud his loneliness, to repay the damage to his spirit
realized in bronze.
She was, suddenly, too weary to stir or lift her hand; a depression
as absolute as her flare of rage enveloped her. Now the reason for her
coming seemed inexplicable, as if, for the while, her mind had failed.
She repressed a shudder at the thought of being, through the long nights
of his restlessness and wandering voice, alone with Pleydon. She hadn't,
Linda discovered, any of the transmuting feeling for him which alone
made surrender possible. She calculated mentally how long it would take
her to reach the station, what train would be available.
Linda accepted dumbly the fatality to her own hope; for a few hours she
had thought it possible to break out of the prison of circumstance, to
walk free from all hindrance; but it had been vain. She gazed at Dodge
Pleydon intensely--a comprehensive view of the man she had so nearly
married, and who, more than any other force, dominated her being. It was
already too late for anything but memory; she saw--filled with pity for
them both--hardly more than a strange old man with deadened hair and a
yellow parchment-like skin. His suit of loose gray flannel gave her a
feeling that it had been borrowed from some one she lovingly knew. The
gesture of his hand, too, had been copied from a brilliant personage
with a consuming impatience at all impotence.
“Remember me to Arnaud,” he said, holding her gloves and the short fur
cape. “Wait!” he cried sharply, turning to the bookcase against the
wall. Pleydon fumbled in a box of lacquered gilt with a silk cord and
produced a glove once white but now brown and fragile with age. “You
never missed it,” he proceeded in a gleeful triumph; “but then you had
so many pairs. Once I sent you nine dozen together from Grenoble. They
were nothing, but this you had worn. For a long while it kept the shape
of your hand.”
“Dodge,” she tried without success to steady her voice, “it stayed with
you anyhow, my--my hand.”
“But yes,” he answered impatiently. He returned the glove to its box,
carefully tying the tasselled cord. Then, after clumsily helping her
with the cape, he accompanied her to the elevator. “There were other
things,” he told her. “Did you see the letters about the Hesperia
affair? Heaps of them. Rodin.... But what can you expect in a world
where there is no safety--” The stopping cage cut off his remark. She
held out the hand that was less real to him than the dream.
“Good-by, Dodge.”
“Yes, Linda. But watch that door, your skirt might easily be caught in
it.” He fussed over her safety until, abruptly, he seemed to rise in
space, shut out from her by the limitations of her faith.
The evening overshadowed her in the train, as though she were whirling
in the swiftest passage possible, through an indeterminate grayness,
from day to night. The latter descended on her as she reached the steps
of her home. It was still that; now it would continue to be until
death. Nothing could ever again offer her change, release, vindication;
nothing, that was, which might give her, for a day, what even her mother
had plentifully experienced--the igniting exultation of the body.
It was inevitable, she thought, for Arnaud to be in the library. He rose
unsteadily as she stood in the doorway. “Linda,” he articulated with
difficulty. A book had rested open on the table beside him and, closing
it, he put it back in its place. His arm trembled so that it took a
painfully long while. Then he moved forward, still confused.
“What a confounded time you were gone. I had the most idiotic fancy. You
see, it was so unlike you; none more exact in habit. All day. I didn't
get to the Historical Society, it seemed so devilish far off. I'd never
blame you for leaving an old man without any gumption.” He must never
think that again, she replied. Wasn't she, too, middle-aged?