She held him in the stern, untender clasp, her head drawn back from him,
while, slowly, seeking her words over the tumult she subdued, she said:
“It’s _you_ I want--not your unwilling longing, not your unwilling love.
I want you so that I can be really myself; I want you so that you can be
really yourself.”
He strained her to him, hiding his face on her breast.
“Can’t you live? Can’t you be--if I help you?” she asked him.
For a long time he was silent, only pressing closely to her as though
to hide himself from her questions--from his own thoughts.
He said at last: “I can’t think, Eppie. Your words go like birds over my
head. Your suffering, my longing, hurt me; but it’s like the memory of a
hurt. I am apart from it, even while I feel it. Even while I love
you--oh, Eppie! Eppie!--I don’t care. But when we are like this--at last
like this--I am caught back into it all, all that I thought I’d got over
forever, this afternoon,--all the dreadful dream--the beautiful dream.
It’s for this I’ve longed--you have known it: to hold you, to feel your
breath on me, to dream with you. How beautiful you are, how sweet! Kiss
me, Eppie,--darling, darling Eppie!”
“I will not kiss you. It would be real to me.”
He had raised his head and was seeing now the suffering of her shadowy
eyes, the shadowy lips she refused him tragically compressed lest they
should tremble. Behind her pale head and its heavy cloud of hair were
the white roses giving out--how his mind reeled with the memory of
it--the old, sweet, wine-like fragrance.
He closed his eyes to the vision, bending his lips to her hand, saying:
“Yes, that’s why I wanted to spare you--wanted to run away.”
In the little distance now of his drawing from her, even while he still
held her, his cheek on her hand, she could speak more easily.
“It is that that enrages me,--your mystic sickness. I am awake, but you
aren’t even dreaming. You are drugged--drugged with thought not strong
enough to find its real end. You have paralyzed yourself. No argument
could cure you. No thought could cure you. Only life could cure you. You
must get life, and to get it you must want it.”
“I don’t want it. I can’t want it. I only want you,” said Gavan, with
such a different echo.
She understood, more fully than he, perhaps, the helpless words.
Above his bowed head, her face set, she looked out into the night. Her
mind measured, coldly it seemed to her, the strength of her own faith
and of his negation.
Her love, including but so far transcending all natural cravings, had
its proud recoil from the abasement--oh, she saw it all!--that his
limitation would bring to it. Yet, like the mother again, adapting truth
to the child’s dim apprehension, leading it on by symbols, she brooded
over her deep thoughts of redemption and looked clearly at all dangers
and all hopes. Faith must face even his unspiritual seeing. Faith must
endure his worse than pagan love. Bound to her by every natural tie, her
strength must lift him, through them, to their spiritual aspect, to
their reality. Life was her ally. She must put her trust in life. She
consecrated herself to it anew. Let it lead her where it would.
The long moment of steady forecast had, after its agony of shame and
fear, its triumph over both.
He felt the deep sigh that lifted her breast--it was almost a sob; but
now her arms took him closely, gently, to her and her voice had the
steadfastness, no longer of rejection, but of acceptance.
“Gavan, dream with me, then; that’s better than being drugged. Perhaps
you will wake some day. There, I kiss you.”
She said it, and with the words his lips were on hers.
In the long moment of their embrace he had a strange intuition.
Something was accomplished; some destiny that had led them to this hour
was satisfied and would have no more to do with them. He seemed almost
to hear this thought of finality, like the far, distant throbbing of a
funeral bell, though the tolling only shut them the more closely into
the silence of the wonderful moment.
Drugged? No, he was not drugged. But was she really dragging him down
again, poor child, into her own place of dreams?
After the ecstasy, in the darkness of her breast and arms, he knew again
the horrible surge of suffering that life had always meant to him. He
saw, as though through deep waters, the love, the strife, the clinging
to all that went; he saw the withering of dreams, and death, and the
implacable, devouring thought that underlay all life and found its joy
in the rending sorrow of the tragedy it triumphed over.
It was like a wave catching him, sucking him down into a gulf of
blackness. The dizziness of the whirlpool reeled its descending spiral
through his brain. Eppie was the sweet, the magical, the sinister
mermaid; she held him, triumphing, and he clung to her, helpless; while,
like the music of rushing waters, the horror and enchantment of life
rang in his ears. But the horror grew and grew. The music rang on to a
multitudinous world-cry of despair,--the cry of all the torments of the
world turning on their rack of consciousness,--and, in a crash of
unendurable anguish, came the thought of what it all would mean; what it
all might mean now--now--unless he could save her; for he guessed that
her faith, put to the test, might accept any risk, might pay any price,
to keep him. And the anguish was for her.
He started from her, putting away her arms, yet pinioning her, holding
her from him with a fierceness of final challenge and looking in the
darkness into her darker eyes.
“Suppose I do,” he said. “Suppose I marry you,”--for he must show her
that some tests she should not be put to. “Suppose I take you and
reëenter the dream. Look at it, Eppie. Look at your life with me. It
won’t stay like this, you know. Look far, far ahead.”
“I do,” she said.
“No, no. You don’t. You can’t. It would, for a year, perhaps, perhaps
only for a day, be dream and ecstasy,--ah, Eppie, don’t imagine that I
don’t know what it would be,--the beauty, the joy, the forgetfulness, a
radiant mist hanging over an abyss. Your will could keep me in it--for a
year, perhaps. But then, the inevitable fading. See what comes. Eppie,
don’t you know, don’t you feel, that I’m dead--dead?”
“No; not while you suffer. You are suffering now--for me.”
“The shadow of a shadow. It will pass. No, don’t speak; wait; as you
said, we can’t argue, we can’t, now, go into the reasons of it. As you
said, thought can’t cure me; it’s probably something far deeper than our
little thought: it’s probably the aspect we are fated to be by that one
reality that makes and unmakes our dreams. And I’m not of the robust
Western stuff that can work in its dream,--create more dream, and find
it worth while. I’ve not enough life in me to create the illusion of
realities to strive for. Action, to me, brings no proof of life’s
reality; it’s merely a symptom of life, its result, not its cause or its
sanction. And the power of action is dead in me because the desire of
life is dead,--unless you are there to infect me with it.”
“I am here, Gavan.”
“Yes, you are,--can I forget it? And I’m yours--while you want me. But,
Eppie, look at it; look at it straight. See the death that I will bring
into the very heart of your life. See the children we may have; see what
they would mean to you, and what they would mean to me: Transient
appearances; creatures lovely and pathetic, perhaps, but empty of all
the significance that you would find in them. I would have no love for
our children, Eppie, as you understand love. We will grow old, and all
the glamour will go--all the passion that holds us together now. I will
be kind--and sorry; but you will know that, beside you, I watch you
fading into listlessness, indifference, death, and know that even if I
am to weep over you, dead, I will feel only that you have escaped
forever, from me, from consciousness, from life. Eppie, don’t delude
yourself with one ray of hope. To me your faith is a mirage. And it all
comes to that. Have you faith enough to foresee all the horror of
emptiness that you’ll find in me for the sake of one year of ecstasy?”
She had not moved while he spoke--spoke with a passion, a vehemence,
that was like a sudden rushing into flame of a forest fire. There was
something lurid and terrible in such passion, such vehemence, from him.
It shook him as the forest is shaken and was like the ruinous force of
the flames. She sat, while he held her, looking at it, as he had told
her, “straight.” She knew that she looked at everything. Her eyes went
back to his eyes as she gave him her answer.
“Not for the sake of the year of ecstasy; in spite of it.”
“For what, then?” he asked, stammering suddenly.
Her eyes, with their look of dedication, held him fast.
“For the sake of life--the long life--together; the life without the
glamour, when my faith may altogether infect you.”
“You believe, Eppie, that you are so much stronger than I?”
“It’s not that I’m strong; but life is stronger than anything; life is
the only reality. I am on the winning side.”
“So you will hope?”
“Hope! Of course I hope. You could never make me stop hoping--not even
if you broke my heart. You may call it a mirage if you like--that’s
only a word. I’ll fill your trance with my mirage, I’ll flood your
whiteness with my color, and, God grant, you will feel life and know
that you are at last awake. You are right--life _is_ endless contest,
endless pain; it’s only at that price that we can have it; but you will
know that it’s worth the price. I see it all, Gavan, and I accept. I
accept not only the certainty of my own suffering, but the certainty of
yours.”
Through the night they gazed at each other, his infinite sadness, her
infinite valor. Their faces were like strange, beautiful dreams--dreams
holding in their dimness such deep, such vivid significance. They more
saw the significance--that sadness, that valor--than its embodiment in
eyes and lips.
It was finally with a sense of realization so keen that it trembled on
the border of oblivion, of the fainting from over-consciousness, that
Gavan once more laid his head upon her breast. He, too, accepting, held
her close,--held her and all that she signified, while, leaning above
him, her cheek against his hair, she said in a voice that over its depth
upon depth of steadiness trembled at last a little: “I see it all.
Imagine what a faith it is that is willing to make the thing it loves
most in the whole world suffer--suffer horribly--so that it may live.”
He gave a long sigh. At its height emotion dissolved into a rapt
contemplation. “How beautiful,” he said.
“Beautiful?” she repeated, with almost a gentle mockery for the word.
“Well, begin with beauty if you will. You will find that--and more
besides--as an end of it all.”
VII
She left him in the garden. They had talked quietly, of the past, of
their childhood, and, as quietly, of the future--their immediate
marriage and departure for long, wonderful voyages together. His head
lay on her breast, and often, while they spoke of that life together, of
the homecoming to Cheylesford Lodge and when he heard her voice tremble
a little, he kissed the dear hand he held.
When she rose at last and stood before him, he said, still holding her
hands, that he would sit on there in the darkness and think of her.
She felt the languor of his voice and told him that he was very tired
and would do much better to go to bed and forget about her till morning;
but, looking up at her, he shook his head, smiling: “I couldn’t sleep.”
So she left him; but, before she went, after the last gazing pause in
which there seemed now no discord, no strife, nothing to hide or to
threaten, she had suddenly put her arms around his neck, bending to him
and murmuring, “Oh, I love you.”
“I seem to have loved you forever, Eppie,” he said.
But, once more, in all the strange oblivion of his acceptance, there had
been for him in their kiss and their embrace the undertone of anguish,
the distant tolling--as if for something accomplished, over forever--of
a funeral bell.
He watched her figure--white was not the word for it in this midnight
world--pass away into the darkness. And, as she disappeared, the bell
seemed still to toll, “Gone. Gone. Gone.”
So he was alone.
He was alone. The hours went by and he still sat there. The white roses
near him, they, too, only a strange blossoming of darkness, symbolized,
in their almost aching sweetness, the departed presence. He breathed in
their fragrance; and, as he listened to his own quiet breaths, they
seemed those of the night made conscious in him. The roses remembered
for him; the night breathed through him; it was an interchange, a
mingling. Above were the deep vaults of heaven, the profundities of
distance, the appalling vastness, strewn with its dust of stars. And it,
too, was with him, in him, as the roses were, as his own breath came and
went.
The veils had now lifted from the night and it was radiant, all its
stars visible; and veil after veil seemed drifting from before his soul.
A cool, light breeze stirred his hair.
Closing his eyes, at last, his thought plunged, as his sight had
plunged, into gulf under gulf of vacancy.
After the unutterable fatigue, like the sinking under anæsthesia, of his
final yielding, he could not know what was happening to him, nor care.
It had often happened before, only never quite like this. It was, once
more, the great peace, lapping wave after wave, slow, sliding,
immeasurable waves, through and through him; dissolving thought and
feeling; dissolving all discord, all pain, all joy and beauty.
The hours went by, and, as they went, Eppie’s face, like a drift of
stars, sank, sank into the gulf. What had he said to her? what promised?
Only the fragrance of the roses seemed to remember, nothing in himself.
For what had he wanted? He wanted nothing now. Her will, her life, had
seized him; but no, no, no,--the hours quietly, in their passing seemed
to say it,--they had not kept him. He had at last, after a lifelong
resistance, abandoned himself to her, and the abandonment had been the
final step toward complete enfranchisement. For, with no effort now of
his own at escape, no will at all to be free, he had left her far behind
him, as if through the waters of the whirlpool his soul, like a light
bubble, had softly, surely, risen to the air. It had lost itself, and
her.
He thought of her, but now with no fear, no anguish. A vast indifference
filled him. It was no longer a question of tearing himself from her, no
longer a question of saving himself and her. There was no question, nor
any one to save. He was gone away, from her, from everything.
When the dawn slowly stole into the garden, so that the ghosts of day
began to take shape and color, Gavan rose among them. The earth was damp
with dew; his hair and clothes were damp. Overhead the sky was white,
and the hills upon it showed a flat, shadowless green. Between the
night’s enchantments of stillness, starriness, veiled, dreaming beauty
and the sunlit, voluble enchantments of the day,--songs and flights of
birds, ripple and shine of water, the fugitive, changing color of land
and sky,--this hour was poor, bare, monotonous. There wasn’t a ray of
enchantment in it. It was like bleak canvas scenery waiting for the
footlights and a decorated stage.
Gavan looked before him, down the garden path, shivering a little. He
was cold, and the sensation brought him back to the old fact of life,
that, after all, was there as long as one saw it. The coming of the
light seemed to retwist once more his own palely tinted prism of
personality, and with the cold, with the conscious looking back at the
night and forward to the day, came a long, dull ache of sadness. It was
more physical than mental; hunger and chill played their part in it, he
knew, while, as the prism twined its colors, the fatiguing faculty of
analysis once more built up the world of change and diversity. He looked
up at the pale walls of the old house, laced with their pattern of
creepers. The pine-tree lay like an inky shadow across it, and, among
the branches, were the windows of Eppie’s room, the window where he and
she had stood together on the morning of Robbie’s death--a white,
dew-drenched morning like this. There she slept, dear, beautiful, the
shadow of life. And here he stood, still living, after all, in their
mutual mirage; still to hurt her. He didn’t think of her face, her
voice, her aspect. The only image that came was of a shadow--something
darkly beautiful that entranced and suffocated, something that,
enveloping one, shut out peace and vacancy.
His cold hands thrust into his pockets, he stood thinking for a moment,
of how he would have to hurt her, and of how much less it was to be than
if what they had seen in the night’s glamour had been possible.
He wondered why the mere fact of the night’s revelation--all those
passing-bell hours--had made it so impossible for him to go on, by sheer
force of will, with the play. Why couldn’t he, for her sake, act the
lifelong part? In her arms he would know again the moments of glamour.
But, at the mere question, a sickness shuddered through him. He saw now,
clearly, what stood in the way: suffering, hideous suffering, for both
of them--permanent, all-pervading suffering. The night had proved too
irrevocably that any union between them was only momentary, only a
seeming, and with her, feeling her faith, her hope, her love, he could
know nothing but the undurable discord of their united and warring
notes.
Could life and death be made one flesh?
The horror of the thought spurred him from his rigor of contemplation.
That, at least, had been spared her. Destiny, then, had not meant for
them that final, tragic consummation.
He threaded his way rapidly among the paths, the flower-beds, under the
low boughs of the old fruit-trees. She had left the little door near
the morning-room open for him, and through it he entered the still
house.
It wasn’t escape, now, from her, but from that pressing horror, as of
something, that, unless he hastened, might still overtake them both. Yet
outside her door he paused, bent his head, listened with a strange
curiosity, helpless before the nearness of that loved, that dreaded
being, the warring note that he sought yet fled from.
She slept. Not a sound stirred in the room.
He closed his eyes, seeing, with a vividness that was almost a
hallucination, her face, her wonderful face, asleep, with the dark
rivers of her hair flowing about it.
And, fixed as he was in his frozen certainty of truth, he felt, once
more like the striking of a hand across a harp, a longing, wild and
passionate, to enter, to take her, sleeping, in his arms, to see her
eyes open on him; to hide himself in life, as in the darkness of her
breast and arms, and to forget forever the piercing of inexorable
thought.
He found that his hand was on the lock and that he was violently
trembling.
It was inexorable thought, the knowledge of the horror that would await
them, that conquered the leap of blind instinct.
Half an hour later a thin, intense light rimmed all the eastern hills,
and a cold, clear cheerfulness spread over the earth. The moors were
purple and the sky overhead palely, immaculately blue. About the tall
lime-trees the rooks circled, cawing, and a skylark sang far and high,
a floating atom of ecstasy.
And in the clearness Gavan’s figure showed, walking rapidly away from
the white house, down the road that led through the heather and past the
birch-woods, walking away from it forever.
VIII
Grainger stood in Eppie’s little sitting-room, confronting, as Gavan had
confronted the spring before, Miss Allen’s placidly sewing figure.
The flowers against which her uneventful head now bent were autumnal.
Thickly growing Michaelmas daisies, white and purple, screened the lower
section of the square outside. Above were the shabby tree-tops, that
seemed heavily painted upon an equally solid sky. The square was dusty,
the trees were dusty, the very blue of the sky looked grimed with dust.
The hot air; the still flowers, not stirred by a breath of breeze; Miss
Allen’s figure, motionless but for its monotonously moving hand, were
harmonious in their quiet, and in contrast to them Grainger’s pervasive,
restless, irritable presence was like a loud, incessant jangling.
He walked back and forth; he picked up the photographs on the
mantel-shelf, the books on the table, flinging them down in a succession
of impatient claps. He threw himself heavily into chairs,--so heavily
that Miss Allen glanced round, alarmed for the security of the
furniture,--and he asked her half a dozen times if Miss Gifford would be
in at five.
“She is seldom late,” or, “I expect her then,” Miss Allen would answer
in the tone of mild severity that one might employ toward an unseemly
child over whom one had no authority.
But though there was severity in Miss Allen’s voice, the acute glances
that she stole at the clamorous guest were not unsympathetic. She placed
him. She pitied and she rather admired him. Even while emphasizing the
dismay of her involuntary starts when the table rattled and the chairs
groaned, she felt a satisfaction in these symptoms of passion; for that
she was in the presence of a passion, a hopeless and rather magnificent
passion, she made no doubt. She associated such passions with Eppie,--it
was trailing such clouds of glory that she descended upon the arid life
of the little square,--and none had so demonstrated itself, none had so
performed its part for her benefit. She was sorry that it was hopeless;
but she was glad that it was there, in all its Promethean wrathfulness,
for her to observe. Miss Allen felt pretty sure that this was the
nearest experience of passion she would ever know.
“In at five, as a rule, you say?” Grainger repeated for the fourth time,
springing from the chair where, with folded arms, he had sat for a few
moments scowling unseeingly at the pansies.
He stationed himself now beside her and, over her head, stared out at
the square. It was at once alarming and delightful,--as if the Titan
with his attendant vulture had risen from his rock to join her.
“You’ve no idea from which direction she is coming?”
“None,” said Miss Allen, decisively but not unkindly. “It’s really no
good for you to think of going out to meet her. She is doing a lot of
different things this afternoon and might come from any direction. You
would almost certainly miss her.” And she went on, unemphatically, but,
for all the colorless quality of her voice, so significantly that
Grainger, realizing for the first time the presence of an understanding
sympathy, darted a quick look at her. “She gets in at five, just as I go
out. She knows that I depend on her to be here by then.”
So she would not be in the way, this little individual. She made him
think, now that he looked at her more attentively, as she sat there with
her trimly, accurately moving hand, of a beaver he had once seen swiftly
and automatically feeding itself; her sleek head, her large, smooth
front teeth, were like a beaver’s. It was really very decent of her to
see that he wanted her out of the way; so decent that, conscious of the
link it had made between them, he said presently, abruptly and rather
roughly, “How is she?”
“Well, of course she has not recovered,” said Miss Allen.
“Recovered? But she wasn’t actually ill.” Grainger had a retorting air.
“No; I suppose not. It was nervous prostration, I suppose--if that’s not
an illness.”
“This isn’t the place for her to recover from nervous prostration in.”
He seemed to fasten an accusation, but Miss Allen understood perfectly.
“Of course not. I’ve tried to make her see that. But,”--she was making
now quite a chain of links,--“she feels she must work, must lose herself
in something. Of course she overdoes it. She overdoes everything.”
“Overwork, do you think? The cause, I mean?”
Grainger jerked this out, keeping his eyes on the square.
Miss Allen, not in any discreet hesitation, but in sincere uncertainty,
paused over her answer.
“It couldn’t be, quite. She was well enough when she went away in the
summer, though she really isn’t at all strong,--not nearly so strong as
she looks. She broke down, you know, at her uncle’s, in Scotland”; and
Miss Allen added, in a low-pitched and obviously confidential voice, “I
think it was some shock that nobody knows anything about.”
Grainger stood still for some moments, and then plunging back into the
little room, he crossed and re-crossed it with rapid strides. Her
guessing and his knowledge came too near.
Only after a long pause did Miss Allen say, “She’s really frightfully
changed.” The clock was on the stroke. Rising, gathering up her work,
dropping, with neat little clicks, her scissors, her thimble, into her
work-box, she added, and she fixed her eyes on him for a moment as she
spoke, “Do, if you can, make her--“
“Well, what? Go away?” he demanded. “I’ve no authority--none. Her people
ought to kidnap her. That’s what I’d do. Lift her out of this hole.”
Miss Allen’s eyes dwelt on his while she nerved herself to a height of
adventurous courage that, in looking back at it, amazed her. “Here she
is,” she said, and almost whispering, “Well, kidnap her, then. That’s
what she needs--some one stronger than herself to kidnap her.”
She slid her hand through his, a panic of shyness overtaking her, and
darted out, followed by the flutter of a long, white strip of muslin.
Grainger stood looking at the open door, through which in a moment Eppie
entered.
His first feeling was one of relief. He did not, in that first moment,
see that she was “frightfully changed.” Even her voice seemed the same,
as she said with all the frank kindness of her welcome and surprise,
“Why, Jim, this is good of you,” and all her tact was there, too, giving
him an impression of the resource and flexibility of happy vitality, in
her ignoring by glance or tone of their parting.
She wore, on the hot autumn day, a white linen frock, the loose bodice
belted with green, a knot of green at her throat, and, under the white
and green of her little hat, her face showed color and its dear smile.
Relief was so great, indeed, that Grainger found himself almost clinging
to her hand in his sudden thankfulness.
“You’re not so ill, then,” he brought out. “I heard it--that you had
broken down--and I came back. I was in the Dolomites. I hadn’t had news
of you since I left.”
“So ill! Nonsense,” said Eppie, giving his hand a reassuring shake and
releasing her own to pull off her soft, loose gloves. “It was a
breakdown I had, but nothing serious. I believe it to have been an
attack of biliousness, myself. People don’t like to own to liver when
they can claim graceful maladies like nervous prostration,--so it was
called. But liver, only, I fear it was. And I’m all right now, thank
goodness, for I loathe being ill and am a horrid patient.”
She had taken off her hat, pushing back her hair from her forehead and
sinking into a chair that was against the light. The Michaelmas daisies
made a background for the bronze and white of her head, for, as she
rested, the color that her surprise and her swift walking had given her
died. She was glad to rest, her smile said that, and he saw, indeed,
that she was utterly tired.
Suddenly, as he looked at her, seeing the great fatigue, seeing the
pallor, seeing the smile only stay as if with determination, the truth
of Miss Allen’s description was revealed to him. She was frightfully
changed. Her smile, her courage, made him think of a _danse macabre_.
The rhythm, the gaiety of life were there, but life itself was gone.
The revelation came to him, but he felt himself clutch it silently, and
he let her go on talking.
She went on, indeed, very volubly, talking of her breakdown, of how good
the general and her aunt had been to her, and of how getting back to her
work had picked her up directly.
“I think I’ll finally pitch my tent here,” she went on. “The interest
grows all the time,--and the ties, the responsibility. One can’t do
things by half measures; you know that, thorough person that you are. I
mustn’t waste my mite of income by gadding about. I’m going to chuck all
the rest and give myself altogether to this.”
“You used to think that the rest helped you in this,” said Grainger.
“To a certain extent it did, and will, for I’ve had so much that it will
last me for a long time.”
“You intend to live permanently down here?”
“I shall have my holidays, and I shall run up to civilization for a
dinner or two now and then. It’s not that I’ve any illusions about my
usefulness or importance. It’s that all this is so useful to me. It’s
something I can do with all my might and main, and I’ve such masses of
energy you know, Jim, that need employment. And then, though of course
one works at the wrong side of the tapestry and has to trust that the
pattern is coming right, I do believe that, to a certain extent, it does
need me.”
He leaned back in his chair opposite her, listening to the voice that
rattled on so cheerfully. With his head bent, he kept that old gaze upon
her and clutched the clearer and clearer revelation: Eppie--Eppie in
torment; Eppie shattered;--Eppie--why, it was as if she sat there before
him smiling and rattling over a huge hole in her chest. And, finally,
the consciousness of the falsity in her own tone made her falter a
little. She couldn’t continue so glibly while his eyes were saying to
her: “Yes; I see, I see. You are wounded to death.” But if she faltered
it was only, in the pause, to look about for another shield.
“And you?” she said. “Have you done a great deal of climbing? Tell me
about yourself, dear Jim.”
It was a dangerous note to strike and the “dear Jim” gave away her sense
of insecurity. It was almost an appeal to him not to see, or, at all
events, not to tell her that he saw.
“Don’t talk about me,” he said very rudely. She knew the significance of
his rudeness.
“Let us talk of whatever you will.”
“Of you, then. Don’t try to shut me out, Eppie.”
“Am I shutting you out?”
“You are trying to. You have succeeded with the rest, I suppose; but, as
of course you know, you can’t succeed with me. I know too much. I care
too much.”
His rough, tense voice beat down her barriers. She sat silent, oddly
smiling.
He rose and came to her and stood above her, pressing the tips of his
fingers heavily down upon her shoulder.
“You must tell me. I must know. I won’t stand not knowing.”
Motionless, without looking up at him, she still smiled before her.
“That--that coward has broken your heart,” he said. There were tears in
his voice, and, looking up now, the smile stiffened to a resolute
grimace, she saw them running down his cheeks. But her own face did not
soften. With a glib dryness she answered:
“Yes, Jim; that’s it.”
“Oh--“ It was a long growl over her head.
She had looked away again, and continued in the same crisp voice: “I’d
lie if I could, you may be sure. But you put it so, you look so, that I
can’t. I’m at your mercy. You know what I feel, so I can’t hide it from
you. I hate any one, even you, to know what I feel. Help me to hide it.”
“What has he done?” Grainger asked on the muffled, growling note.
“Gavan? Done? He’s done nothing.”
“But something happened. You aren’t where you were when I left you. You
weren’t breaking down then.”
“Hope deferred, Jim--“
“It’s not that. Don’t fence, to shield him. It’s not hope deferred. It’s
hope dead. Something happened. What was it?”
“All that happened was that he went, when I thought that he was going to
stay, forever.”
“He went, knowing--“
“That I loved him? Yes; I told him.”
“And he told you that he didn’t love you?”
“No, there you were wrong. He told me that he did. But he saw what you
saw. So what would you have asked of him?”
“Saw what I saw? What do you mean?”
“That he would suffocate me. That he was the negation of everything I
believed in.”
“You mean to tell me,” said Grainger, his fingers still pressing down
upon her shoulder, “that it all came out,--that you had it there between
you,--and then that he ran away?”
“From the fear of hurting my life. Yes.”
“From the fear of life itself, you mean.”
“If that was it, wasn’t it enough?”
“The coward. The mean, bloodless coward,” said Jim Grainger.
“I let you say it because I understand; it’s your relief. But he is not
a coward. He is only--a saint. A saint without a saint’s perquisites. A
Spinoza without a God. An imitator of Christ without a Christ. I have
been thinking, thinking it all out, seeing it all, ever since.”
“Spinoza! What has he to do with it! Don’t talk rot, dear child, to
comfort yourself.”
“Be patient, Jim. Perhaps I can help you. It calms one when one
understands. I have been reading up all the symptoms. Listen to this, if
you think that Spinoza has nothing to do with it. On the contrary, he
knew all about it and would have seen very much as Gavan does.”
She took up one of the books that had been so frequently flung down by
Grainger in his waiting and turned its pages while he watched her with
the enduring look of a mother who humors a sick child’s foolish fancies.
“Listen to Spinoza, Jim,” she said, and he obediently bent his lowering
gaze to the task. “‘When a thing is not loved, no strife arises about
it; there is no pang if it perishes, no envy if another bears it away,
no fear, no hate; yes, in a word, no tumult of soul. These things all
come from loving that which perishes.’ And now the Imitation: ‘What
canst thou see anywhere which can continue long under the sun? Thou
believest, perchance, that thou shalt be satisfied, but thou wilt never
be able to attain unto this. If thou shouldst see all things before thee
at once, what would it be but a vain vision?’ And this: ‘Trust not thy
feeling, for that which is now will be quickly changed into somewhat
else.’”
Her voice, as she read on to him,--and from page to page she went,
plucking for him, it seemed, their cold, white blossoms, fit flowers to
lay on the grave of love,--had lost the light dryness as of withered
leaves rustling. It seemed now gravely to understand, to acquiesce. A
chill went over the man, as though, under his hand, he felt her, too,
sliding from warm life into that place of shadows where she must be to
be near the one she loved.
“Shut the books, for God’s sake, Eppie,” he said. “Don’t tell me that
you’ve come to see as he has.”
She looked up at him, and now, in the dear, deep eyes, he saw all the
old Eppie, the Eppie of life and battle.
“Can you think it, Jim? It’s because I see so clearly what he sees that
I hate it and repudiate it and fight it with every atom of my being.
It’s that hatred, that repudiation, that fight, that is life. I believe
in it, I’m for it, as I never believed before, as I never was before.”
He was answering her look, seeing her as life’s wounded champion,
standing, shot through, on the ramparts of her beleaguered city. She
would shake her banner high in the air as she fell. The pity, the fury,
the love of his eyes dwelt on her.
And suddenly, under that look, her eyes closed. She shrank together in
her chair; she bowed down her head upon her knees, covering her face.
“Oh, Jim,” she said, “my heart is broken.”
He knew that he had brought her to this, that never before an onlooker
had she so fallen into her own misery. He had forced her to show the
final truth that, though she held the banner, she was shot through and
through. And he could do nothing but stand on above her, his face set to
a flintier, sharper endurance, as he heard the great sobs shake her.
He left her presently and walked up and down the room while she wept,
crouched over upon her knees. It was not for long. The tempest passed,
and, when she sat in quiet, her head in her hands, her face still
hidden, he said, “You must set about mending now, Eppie.”
“I can’t mend. I’ll live; but I can’t mend.”
“Don’t say it, Eppie. This may pass as--well--other things in your life
have passed.”
“Do you, too, talk Spinoza to me, Jim?”
“Damn Spinoza! I’m talking life to you--the life we both believe in. I’m
not telling you to turn your back on it because it has crippled you. You
won’t, I know it. I know that you are brave. Eppie, Eppie,”--before her,
now, he bent to her, then knelt beside her chair,--“let me be the
crutch. Let me have the fragments. Let’s try, together, to mend them. I
ask nothing of you but that trying, with my help, to mend. He isn’t for
you. He’s never for you. I’ll say no more brutalities of him. I’ll use
your own words and say that he can’t,--that his saintship can’t. So
won’t you, simply, let me take you? Even if you’re broken for life, let
me have the broken Eppie.”
She had never, except in the moment of the kiss, seen this deepest thing
in him, this gentleness, this reverent tenderness that, under the
bullying, threatening, angry aspects of his love, now supplicated with a
beauty that revealed all the angel in humanity. Strange--she could think
it in all her sorrow--that the thing that held him to her was the thing
that held her to Gavan, the deep, the mysterious, the unchangeable
affinity. For him, as for her, there could be but one, and for that one
alone could these depths and heights of the heart open themselves.
“Jim, dear, dear Jim, never, never,” she said. “I am his, only his,
fragments, all of me, for as long as I am I.”
Grainger hid his face on the arm of her chair.
“And he is mine,” said Eppie. “He knows it, and that is why he fears me.
He is mine forever.”
“I am glad for your sake that you can believe that,” Grainger muttered,
“and glad, for my own, that I don’t.”
“Why, Jim?”
“I could hardly live if I thought that you were going to love him in
eternity and that I was, forever, to be shut away. Thank goodness that
it’s only for a lifetime that my tragedy lasts.”
She closed her eyes to these perplexities, laying her hand on his.
“I don’t know. We can only think and act for this life. It’s this we
have to shape. Perhaps in eternity, really in eternity, whatever that
may mean, I won’t need to shut you out. Dear, dear Jim, it’s hard that
it must seem that to you now. You know what I feel about you. And who
could feel it as I do? We are in the same boat.”
“No, for he, at least, loves no one else. You haven’t that to bear. As
far as he goes,--and it isn’t far,--he is yours. We are not at all in
the same boat. But that’s enough of me. I suppose I am done for, as you
say, forever.”
He had got upon his feet, and, as if at their mutual wreckage, looked
down with a face that had found again its old shield of grimness.
“As for you,” he went on, “I sha’n’t, at all events, see you
suffocating. You must mend alone, then, as best you can. Really, you’re
not as tragic as you might have been.”
Then, after this salutary harshness, and before he turned from her to
go, he added, as once before, “Poor darling.”
IX
Grainger hardly knew why he had come and, as he walked up the deep
Surrey lane from the drowsy village station, his common-sense warred
with the instinct, almost the obsession, that was taking him to
Cheylesford Lodge. Eppie had been persistently in his thoughts since
their meeting of the week before, and from his own hopelessness had
sprung the haunting of a hope for her. Turn from it as he would, accuse
himself angrily of madness, morbidity, or a mere tendency to outrageous
meddling,--symptomatic of shattered nerves,--he couldn’t escape it. By
day and night it was with him, until he saw himself, in a lurid vision,
as responsible for Eppie’s very life if he didn’t test its validity. For
where she had failed might not a man armed with the strength of his
selfless love succeed?
He had said, in his old anger, that as Gavan’s wife Gavan would kill
her; but he hadn’t really meant that literally; now, literally, the new
fear had come that she might die of Gavan’s loss. Her will hadn’t
snapped, but her vitality was like the flare of the candle in its
socket. To love, the eremite of Cheylesford Lodge wouldn’t
yield--perhaps for very pity’s sake; but if he were made to see the
other side of it?--Grainger found a grim amusement in the paradox--the
lover, in spite of love, might yield to pity. Couldn’t his own manliness
strike some spark of manliness from Gavan? Couldn’t he and Eppie between
them, with their so different appeals,--she to what was soft, he to what
was tough,--hoist his tragically absurd head above water, as it were,
into the air of real life, that might, who knew? fill and sustain his
aquatic lungs? It gave him a vindictive pleasure to see the drowning
simile in the most ludicrous aspects--Gavan, draped in the dramatic
robes of his twopenny-halfpenny philosophies, holding his head in a
basin of water, there resolved to die. Grainger felt that as far as his
own inclinations were concerned it would have given him some pleasure to
help to hold him under, to see that, while he was about it, he did it
thoroughly; but the question wasn’t one of his own inclinations: it was
for Eppie’s sake that he must try to drag out the enraptured suicide. It
was Eppie, bereft and dying,--so it seemed to him in moments of deep
fear,--whose very life depended on the submerged life. And to see if he
could fish it up for her he had come on this undignified, this
ridiculous errand.
Very undignified and very ridiculous he felt the errand to be, as he
strode on through the lane, its high hedge-rows all dusty with the
autumn drought; but he was indifferent enough to that side of it. He
felt no confusion. He was completely prepared to speak his mind.
Coming to a turning of the lane, where he stood for a moment,
uncertain, at branching paths, he was joined by an alert little parson
who asked him courteously if he could direct him on his way. They were
both, it then appeared, going to Cheylesford Lodge; and the Reverend
John Best, after introducing himself as the rector of Dittleworth
parish, and receiving Grainger’s name, which had its reverberations,
with affable interest, surmised that it was to another friend of Mr.
Palairet’s that he spoke.
“Yes. No. That is to say, I’ve known him after a fashion for years, but
seen little of him. Has he been here all summer?” Grainger asked, as
they walked on.
It seemed that Gavan had only returned from the Continent the week
before, but Mr. Best went on to say, with an evidently temperamental
loquacity, that he was there for most of the time as a rule and was
found a very charming neighbor and a very excellent parishioner.
This last was a rôle in which Gavan seemed extremely incongruous, and
Grainger looked his perplexity, murmuring, “Parishioner?”
“Not, I fear, that we can claim him as an altogether orthodox one,” Mr.
Best said, smiling tolerantly upon his companion’s probable narrowness.
“We ask for the spirit, rather than the letter, nowadays, Mr. Grainger;
and Mr. Palairet is, at heart, as good a Christian as any of us, of that
I am assured: better than many of us, as far as living the Christian
life goes. Christianity, in its essence, is a life. Ah, if only you
statesmen, you active men of the world, would realize that; would look
past the symbols to the reality. We, who see life as a spiritual
organization, are able to break down the limitations of the dry,
self-centered individualism that, for so many years, has obscured the
glorious features of our faith. And it is the spirit of the Church that
Mr. Palairet has grasped. Time only is needed, I am convinced, to make
him a partaker of her gifts.”
Grainger walked on in a sardonic silence, and Mr. Best, all
unsuspecting, continued to embroider his congenial theme with
illustrations: the village poor, to whom Mr. Palairet was so devoted;
the village hospital, of which he was to talk over the plans to-day; the
neighborly thoughtfulness and unfailing kindness and charity he showed
toward high and low.
“Palairet always seemed to me very ineffectual,” said Grainger when, in
a genial pause, he felt that something in the way of response was
expected of him.
“Ah, I fear you judge by the worldly standard of outward attainment, Mr.
Grainger.”
“What other is there for us human beings to judge by?”
“The standard of our unhappy modern plutocratic society is not that by
which to measure the contemplative type of character.”
Grainger felt a slight stress of severity in the good little parson’s
affability.
“Oh, I think its standards aren’t at all unwholesome,” he made reply. He
could have justified anything, any standard, against Gavan and his
standards.
“Unwholesome, my dear Mr. Grainger? That is just what they are. See the
beauty of a life like our friend’s here. It judges your barbarous
Christless civilization. He lives laborious, simple days. He does his
work, he has his friends. His influence upon them counts for more than
an outside observer could compute. Great men are among them. I met Lord
Taunton at his house last Sunday. A most impressive personality. Even
though Mr. Palairet has abandoned the political career, one can’t call
him ineffectual when such a man is among his intimates.”
“The monkish type doesn’t appeal to me, I own.”
“Ah, there you touch the point that has troubled me. It is not good for
a man to live alone. My chief wish for him is that he may marry. I often
urge it on him.”
“Well done.”
“One did hear,” Mr. Best went on, his small, ruddy face taking on a look
of retrospective reprobation, “that there was an attachment to a certain
young woman--the tale was public property--only as such do I allude to
it--a very fashionable, very worldly young woman. I was relieved indeed
when the rumor came to nothing. He escaped finally, I can’t help
fancying it, this summer. I was much relieved.”
“Why so, pray?”
“I am rural, old-fashioned, my dear young man, and that type of young
woman is one toward which, I own it, I find it difficult to feel
charitably. She represents the pagan, the Christless element that I
spoke of in our modern world. Her charm could not have been a noble
one. Had our friend here succumbed to it, she could only have meant
disaster in his life. She would have urged him into ambition,
pleasure-seeking, dissipation. Of course I only cite what I have heard
in my quiet corner, though I have had glimpses of her, passing with a
friend, a very frivolous person, in a motor-car. She looked completely
what I had imagined.”
“If you mean Miss Gifford,” said Grainger, trying for temperateness, “I
happen to know her. She is anything but a pleasure-seeker, anything but
frivolous, anything, above all, but a pagan. If Palairet had been lucky
enough to marry her it would have been the best thing that ever happened
to him in his life, and a very dubious thing for her. She is a thousand
times too good for him.”
“My dear Mr. Grainger, pardon me; I had no idea that you knew the lady.
But,” Mr. Best had flushed a little under this onslaught, “I cannot but
think you a partisan.”
“Do you call a woman frivolous who spends half of her time working in
the slums?”
“That is a phase, I hear, of the ultra-smart young woman. But no doubt
rumor has been unjust. I must beg you to pardon me.”
“Oh, don’t mind that. You heard, no doubt, the surface things. But no
one who knows Miss Gifford can think of them, that’s all.”
“And if I have been betrayed into injustice, I hope that you will
reconsider a little more charitably your impression of Mr. Palairet,”
said Mr. Best, in whom, evidently, Grainger’s roughness rankled.
Grainger laughed grimly. “I can’t consider him anything but a thousand
times too bad for Miss Gifford.”
They had reached the entrance to Cheylesford Lodge on this final and
discordant phrase. Mr. Best kept a grieved silence and Grainger’s
thoughts passed from him.
He had had in his life no training in appreciation and was indifferent
to things of the eye, but even to his insensible nature the whole aspect
of the house that they approached between high yew hedges, its dreaming
quiet, the tones of its dim old bricks, the shadowed white of paneled
walls within, spoke of pensive beauty, of a secure content in things of
the mind. He felt it suddenly as oppressive and ominous in its assured
quietness. It had some secret against the probes of feeling. Its magic
softly shut away suffering and encircled safely a treasure of
tranquillity.
That was the secret, that the magic; it flashed vaguely for
Grainger--though by its light he saw more vividly his own errand as
ridiculous--that a life of thought, pure thought, if one could only
achieve it, was the only _safe_ life. Where, in this adjusted system of
beauty and contemplation, would his appeals find foothold?
He dashed back the crowding doubts, summoning his own crude forces.
The man who admitted them said that Mr. Palairet was in the garden, and
stepping from opened windows at the back of the house, they found
themselves on the sunny spaces of the lawn with its encompassing trees
and its wandering border of flowers.
Gavan was sitting with a book in the shade of the great yew-tree. In
summer flannels, a panama hat tilted over his eyes, he was very white,
very tenuous, very exquisite. And he was the center of it all, the
secret securely his, the magic all at his disposal.
Seeing them he rose, dropping his book into his chair, strolling over
the miraculous green to meet them, showing no haste, no hesitation, no
surprise.
“I’ve come on particular business,” Grainger said, “and I’ll stroll
about until you and Mr. Best are done with the hospital.”
Mr. Best, still with sadness in his manner, promised not to keep Mr.
Palairet long and they went inside.
Grainger was left standing under the yew-tree. He took up Gavan’s book,
while the sense of frustration, and of rebellion against it, rose in
him. The book was French and dealt with an obscure phase of Byzantine
history. Gavan’s neat notes marked passages concerning some contemporary
religious phenomena.
Grainger flung down the book, careless of crumpled leaves, and wandered
off abruptly, among the hedges and into the garden. It was a very
different garden from the old Scotch one where a sweet pensiveness
seemed always to hover and where romance whispered and beckoned. This
garden, steeped in sunlight, and where plums and pears on the hot rosy
walls shone like jewels among their crisp green leaves, was unshadowed,
unhaunted, smiling and decorous--the garden of placid wisdom and
Epicurean calm. Grainger, as he walked, felt at his heart a tug of
strange homesickness and yearning for that Northern garden, its dim
gray walls and its disheveled nooks and corners. Were they all done with
it forever?
By the time he had returned to the lawn Gavan was just emerging from the
house. They met in the shadow of the yew.
“I’m glad to see you, Grainger,” Gavan said, with a smile that struck
Grainger as faded in quality. “This place is a sort of harbor for tired
workers, you know. You should have looked me up before, or are you never
tired enough for that?”
“I don’t feel the need of harbors, yet. One never sees you in London.”
“No, the lounging life down here suits me.”
“Your little parson doesn’t see it in that light. He has been telling me
how you live up to your duties as neighbor and parishioner.”
“It doesn’t require much effort. Nice little fellow, isn’t he, Best? He
tells me that you walked up together.”
“We did,” said Grainger, with his own inner sense of grim humor at the
memory. “I should think you would find him rather limited.”
“But I’m limited, too,” said Gavan, mildly. “I like being with people so
neatly adapted to their functions. There are no loose ends about Best;
nothing unfulfilled or uncomfortable. He’s all there--all that there is
of him to be there.”
“Not a very lively companion.”
“I’m not a lively companion, either,” Gavan once more, with his mild
gaiety, retorted.
Grainger at this gave a harsh laugh. “No, you certainly aren’t,” he
agreed.
They had twice paced the length of the yew-tree shadow and Gavan had
asked no question; and Grainger felt, as the pause grew, that Gavan
never would ask questions. Any onus for a disturbance of the atmosphere
must rest entirely on himself, and to disturb it he would have to be
brutal.
He jerked aside the veils of the placid dialogue with sudden violence.
“I’ve seen Eppie,” he said.
He had intended to use her formal name only, but the nearer word rushed
out and seemed to shatter the magic that held him off.
Gavan’s face grew a shade paler. “Have you?” he said.
“You knew that she had been ill?”
“I heard of it, recently, from General Carmichael. It was nothing
serious, I think.”
“It will be serious.” Grainger stood still and gazed into his eyes. “Do
you want to kill her?”
It struck him, when he had said it, and while Gavan received the words
and seemed to reflect on them, that however artificial his atmosphere
might be he would never evade any reality brought forcibly into it. He
contemplated this one and did not pretend not to understand.
“I want Eppie to be happy,” he said presently.
“Happy, yes. So do I,” broke from Grainger with a groan.
They stood now near the great trunk of the yew-tree, and turning away,
striking the steel-gray bark monotonously with his fist, he went on: “I
love her, as you know. And she loves you. She told me--I made her tell
me. But any one with eyes could see it; even your gossiping little fool
of a parson here had heard of it--was relieved for your escape. But who
cares for the cackling? And you have crippled her, broken her. You have
tossed aside that woman whose little finger is worth more to the world
than your whole being. I wish to God she’d never seen you.”
“So do I,” Gavan said.
“I’d kill you with the greatest pleasure--if it could do her any good.”
There was relief for Grainger in getting out these fundamental things.
“Yes,--I quite understand that. So would I,” Gavan acquiesced,--“kill
myself, I mean,--if it would do her any good.”
“Don’t try that. It wouldn’t. She’s beyond all help but one. So I am
here to put it to you.”
The still, hot day encompassed their shadow and with its quiet made more
intense Grainger’s sense of his own passion--passion and its negation,
the stress between the two. Their words, though they spoke so quietly,
seemed to fill the world.
“I am sorry,” Gavan said; “I can do nothing.”
Grainger beat at the tree.
“You love her.”
“Not as she must be loved. I only want her, when I am selfish. When I
think for her I have no want at all.”
“Give her your selfishness.”
“Ah, even that fades. That’s what I found out. I can’t count on my
selfishness. I’ve tried to do it. It didn’t work.”
Grainger turned his bloodshot eyes upon him; these moments under the
yew-tree, that white figure with its pale smile, its comprehending
gravity confronting him, would count in his life, he knew, among its
most racking memories.
“I consider you a madman,” he now said.
“Perhaps I am one. You don’t think it for Eppie’s happiness to marry a
madman?”
“My God, I don’t know what to think! I want to save her.”
“But so do I,” Gavan’s voice had its first note of eagerness. “_I_ want
to save her. And I want her to marry you. That’s her chance, and
yours--and mine, though mine really doesn’t count. That’s what I hope
for.”
“There’s no hope there.”
“Have patience. Wait. She will, perhaps, get over me.”
Grainger’s eyes, with their hot, jaded look of baffled purpose, so
selfless that it transcended jealousy and hatred, were still on him, and
he thought now that he detected on the other’s face the strain of some
inner tension. He wasn’t so dead, then. He was suffering. No, more yet,
and the final insight came in another vague flash that darkly showed the
trouble at the heart of all the magic, the beauty, he, too, more really
than Eppie, perhaps, was dying for love. Madman, devoted madman that he
was, he was dying for love of the woman from whom he must always flee.
It was strange to feel one’s sane, straightforward mind forced along
this labyrinth of dazed comprehension, turning in the cruelly knotted
paradox of this impossible love-story. Yet, against his very will, he
was so forced to follow and almost to understand.
There wasn’t much more to say. And he had his own paradoxical
satisfaction in the sight of the canker at the core of thought. So, at
all events, one wasn’t safe even so.
“She won’t get over you,” he said. “It isn’t a mere love-affair. It’s
her life. She may not die of it; that’s a figure of speech that I had no
right, I suppose, to use. At all events, she’ll try her best not to die.
But she won’t get over you.”
“Not even if I get out of the way forever?”
Gavan put the final proposition before him, but Grainger, staring at the
sunlight, shook his head.
“The very fact that you’re alive makes her hold the tighter. No, you
can’t save her in that way. I wish you could.”
X
Grainger had had his insight, but, outwardly, in the year that followed,
Gavan’s life was one of peace, of achieved escape.
The world soon ceased to pull at him, to plead or protest. With a kindly
shrug of the shoulders the larger life passed him by as one more proved
ineffectual. The little circle that clung about him, as the flotsam and
jetsam of a river drift from the hurrying current around the stability
and stillness of a green islet, was, in the main, composed of the
defeated or the indifferent. One or two cynical fighters moored their
boats, for a week-end, at his tranquil shores, and the powerful old
statesman who believed nothing, hoped nothing, felt very little, and
who, behind his show-life of patriotic and hard-working nobleman, smiled
patiently at the whole foolish comedy, was his most intimate companion.
To the world at large, Lord Taunton was the witty Tory, the devoted
churchman, the wise upholder of all the hard-won props of civilization;
to Gavan, he was the skeptical and pessimistic metaphysician; together
they watched the wheels go round.
Mayburn came down once or twice to see his poor, queer, dear old
Palairet, and in London boasted much of the experience. “He’s too, too
wonderful,” he said. “He has achieved a most delicate, recondite
harmony. One never heard anything just like it before, and can’t, for
the life of one, tell just what the notes are. Effort, constant effort,
amidst constant quiet and austerity. Work is his passion, and yet never
was any creature so passionless. He’s like a rower, rowing easily,
indefatigably, down a long river, among lilies, while he looks up at the
sky.”
But Mayburn felt the quiet and austerity a little disturbing. He didn’t,
after all, come to look at quiet and austerity unless some one were
there to hear him talk about them; and his host, all affability, never
seemed quite there.
So a year, more than a year, went by.
It was on an early spring morning that Gavan found on his
breakfast-table a letter written in a faltering hand,--a hand that
faltered with the weeping that shook it,--Miss Barbara’s old, faint
hand.
He read, at first, hardly comprehending.
It was of Eppie she wrote: of her overwork--they thought it must be
that--in the winter, of the resultant fragility that had made her
succumb suddenly to an illness contracted in some hotbed of epidemic in
the slums. They had all thought that she would come through it. People
had been very kind. Eppie had so many, many friends. Every one loved
her. She had been moved to Lady Alicia’s house in Grosvenor Street. She,
Aunt Barbara, had come up to town at once, and the general was with
her.
It was with a fierce impatience that he went on through the phrases that
were like the slow trickling of tear after tear, as if he knew, yet
refused to know, the tragedy that the trivial tears flowed for, knew
what was coming, resented its insufferable delay, yet spurned its bare
possibility. At the end, and only then, it came. Her strength had
suddenly failed. There was no hope. Eppie was dying and had asked to see
him--at once.
A bird, above the window open to the dew and sunlight, sang and whistled
while he read, a phrase, not joyous, not happy, yet strangely full of
triumph, of the innocent praise of life. Gavan, standing still, with the
letter in his hand, listened, while again and again, monotonously,
freshly, the bird repeated its song.
He seemed at first to listen quietly, with pleasure, appreciative of
this heraldry of spring; then memory, blind, numbed from some dark
shock, stirred, stole out to meet it--the memory of Eppie’s morning
voice on the hillside, the voice monotonous yet triumphant with its
sense of life; and at each reiteration, the phrase seemed a dagger
plunged into his heart.
Oh, memory! Oh, cruel thought! Cruel life!
After he had ordered the trap, and while waiting for it, he walked out
into the freshness and back and forth, over and over across the lawn,
with the patient, steady swiftness of an animal caged and knowing that
the bars are about it. So this was to be the end. But, though already he
acquiesced, it seemed in some way a strange, inapt ending. He couldn’t
think of Eppie and death. He couldn’t see her dead. He could only see
her looking at death.
* * * * *
The early train he caught got him to London by eleven, and in twenty
minutes he was in Grosvenor Street. He had wired from the country, and
Miss Barbara met him in the drawing-room of the house, hushed in its
springtime gaiety. She was the frail ghost of her shadowy old self, her
voice tremulous, her face blurred with tears and sleepless nights. Yet
he saw, under the woe, the essential listlessness of age, the placidity
beneath the half-mechanical tears. “Oh, Gavan,” she said, taking his
hand and holding it in both her own--“Oh, Gavan, we couldn’t have
thought of this, could we, that she would go first.” And that his own
face showed some sharp fixity of woe he felt from its reflection on
hers--like a sword-flash reflected in a shallow pool.
She told him that it was now an affair of hours only. “I would have sent
for you long ago, Gavan; I knew--I knew that you would want it. But she
wouldn’t--not while there was hope. I think she was afraid of hurting
you. You know she had never been the same since--since--“
“Since what?” he asked, knowing.
“Since you went away. She was so ill then. Poor child! She never found
herself, you see, Gavan. She did not know what she wanted. She has worn
herself out in looking for it.”
Miss Barbara was very ignorant. He himself could not know, probably
Eppie herself didn’t know, what had killed her, though she had so well
known what she wanted; but he suspected that Grainger had been right,
and that it was on him that Eppie’s life had shattered itself.
Her will, evidently, still ruled those about her, for when Miss Barbara
had led him up-stairs she said, pausing in the passage, that Eppie would
see him alone; the nurse would leave them. She had insisted on that, and
there was now no reason why she should not have her way. The nurse came
out to them, telling him that Miss Gifford waited; and, just before she
let him go, Miss Barbara drew his head down to hers and kissed him,
murmuring to him to be brave. He really didn’t know whether he were more
the felon, or more the victim that she thought him. Then the door closed
behind him and he was alone with Eppie.
Eppie was propped high on pillows, her hair twisted up from her brows
and neck and folded in heavy masses on her head.
In the wide, white room, among her pillows, so white herself, and
strange with a curious thinness, he had never received a more prodigious
impression of life than in meeting her eyes, where all the forces of her
soul looked out. So motionless, she was like music, like all that moves,
that strives and is restless; so white, she was like skies at dawn, like
deep seas under sunlight. In the stillness, the whiteness, the emptiness
of the room she was illusion itself, life and beauty, a wonderful
rainbow thing staining “the white radiance of eternity.” And as if,
before its final shattering, every color flamed, her whole being was
concentrated in the mere fact of its existence--its existence that
defied death. A deep, quiet excitement, almost a gaiety, breathed from
her. In the tangled rivers of her hair, the intertwined currents of dark
and gold winding in a lovely disorder,--in the white folds of lawn that
lay so delicately about her; in the emerald slipping far down her
finger, the emeralds in her ears, shaking faintly with her ebbing
heart-beats, there was even a sort of wilful and heroic coquetry. She
was, in her dying, triumphantly beautiful, yet, as always, through her
beauty went the strength of her reliance on deeper significances.
She lay motionless as Gavan approached her, and he guessed that she
saved all her strength. Only as he took the chair beside her, horror at
his heart, the old familiar horror, she put out her hand to him.
He took it silently, looking up, after a little while, from its
marvelous lightness and whiteness to her eyes, her smile. Then, at last,
she spoke to him.
“So you think that you have got the better of me at last, don’t you,
Gavan dear?” she said. Her voice was strange, as though familiar notes
were played on some far-away flute, sweet and melancholy among the
hills. The voice was strange and sad, but the words were not. In them
was a caress, as though she pitied his pity for her; but the old
antagonism, too, was there--a defiance, a willingness to be cruel to
him. “I did play fair, you see,” she went on. “I wouldn’t have you come
till there was no danger, for you, any more. And now this is the end of
it all, you think. You will soon be able to say of me, Gavan,
“her words to Scorn
Are scattered, and her mouth is stopt with Dust!”
His hand shut involuntarily, painfully, on hers, and as though his
breath cut him, he said, “Don’t--don’t, Eppie.”
But with her gaiety she insisted: “Oh, but let us have the truth. You
must think it. What else could you think?” and, again with the note of
pity that would atone for the cruel lightness, “Poor Gavan! My poor,
darling Gavan! And I must leave you with your thoughts--your empty
thoughts, alone.”
He had taken a long breath over the physical pang her words had
inflicted, and now he looked down at her hand, gently, one after the
other, as though unseeingly, smoothing her fingers.
“While I go on,” she said.
“Yes, dear,” he assented.
“You humor me with that. You are so glad, for me, that I go with all my
illusions about me. Aren’t you afraid that, because of them, I’ll be
caught in the mill again and ground round and round in incarnations
until, only after such a long time, I come out all clean and white and
selfless, not a scrap of dangerous life about me--Alone with the Alone.”
He felt now the fever in her clearness, the hovering on the border of
hallucination. The colors flamed indeed, and her thoughts seemed to
shoot up in strange flickerings, a medley of inconsequent memories and
fancies strung on their chain of unnatural lucidity.
He answered with patient gentleness, “I’m not afraid for you, Eppie. I
don’t think all that.”
“Nor I for myself,” she retorted. “I love the mill and its grindings.
But what you think,--I know perfectly what you think. You can’t keep it
from me, Gavan. You can’t keep anything from me. And I found something
that said it all. I can remember it. Shall I say it to you?”
He bowed his head, smoothing her hand, not looking up at her while, in
that voice of defiance, of fever, yet of such melancholy and echoing
sweetness, she repeated:
“Ne suis-je pas un faux accord
Dans la divine symphonie,
Grâce à la vorace Ironie
Qui me secoue et qui me mord?
“Elle est dans ma voix, la criarde!
C’est tout mon sang, ce poison noir!
Je suis le sinistre miroir
Où la mégère se regarde!
“Je suis la plaie et le couteau!
Je suis le soufflet et la joue!
Je suis les membres et la roue,
Et le victime et le bourreau!”
She paused after it, smiling intently upon him, and he met the smile to
say:
“That’s only one side of it, dear.”
“Ah, it’s a side I know about, too! Didn’t I see it, feel it? Haven’t I
been all through it--with you, for you, because of you? Ah, when you
left me--when you left me, Gavan--“
Still she smiled, with brilliant eyes, repeating,
“Qui me secoue et qui me mord.”
He was silent, sitting with his pallid, drooping head; and suddenly she
put her other hand on his, on the hand that gently, mechanically,
smoothed her fingers.
“You caress me, you try to comfort me,--while I am tormenting you. It’s
strange that I should want to torment you. Is it that I’m so afraid you
sha’n’t feel? I want you to feel. I want you to suffer. It is so
horrible to leave you. It is so horrible to be afraid--sometimes
afraid--that I shall never, never see you again. When you feel, when you
suffer, I am not so lonely. But you feel nothing, do you?”
He did not answer her.
“Will you ever miss me, Gavan?”
He did not answer.
“Won’t you even remember me?” she asked.
And still he did not answer, sitting with downcast eyes. And she saw
that he could not, and in his silence, of a dumb torture, was his reply.
He looked the stricken saint, pierced through with arrows. And which of
them was the victim, which the executioner?
With her question a clearness, quieter, deeper, came to her, as though
in the recoil of its engulfing anguish she pushed her way from among
vibrating discords to a sudden harmony that, in holy peace, resolved
them all in unison. Her eyelids fluttered down while, for an instant,
she listened. Yes, under it all, above it all, holding them all about,
there it was. She seemed to see the pain mounting, circling, flowing
from its knotted root into strength and splendor. But though he was with
her in it he was also far away,--he was blind, and deaf,--held fast by
cruel bonds.
“Look at me,” she commanded him gently.
And now, reluctantly, he looked up into her eyes.
They held him, they drew him, they flooded him. With the keenness of
life they cut into his heart, and like the surging up of blood his love
answered hers. As helpless as he had ever been before her, he laid his
head on her breast, his arms encircling her, while, with closed eyes, he
said: “Don’t think that I don’t feel. Don’t think that I don’t suffer.
It’s only that;--I have only to see you;--something grasps me, and
tortures me--“
“Something,” she said, her voice like the far flute echo of the voice
that had spoken on that night in the old Scotch garden, “that brings you
to life--to God.”
“Oh, Eppie, what can I say to you?” he murmured.
“You can say nothing. But you will have to wake. It will have to
come,--the sorrow, the joy of reality,--God--and me.”
It was his face, with closed eyes, with its stricken, ashen agony, that
seemed the dying face. Hers, turned gently toward him, had all the
beneficence, the radiance of life. But when she spoke again there was in
her voice a tranced stillness as though already it spoke from another
world.
“You love me, Gavan.”
“I love you. You have that. That is yours, forever. I long for you,
always, always,--even when I think that I am at peace. You are in
everything: I hear a bird, and I think of your voice; I see a flower,
or the sky, and it’s of your face I think. I am yours, Eppie--yours
forever.”
“You make me happy,” she said.
“Eppie, my darling Eppie, die now, die in my arms, dearest--in your
happiness.”
“No, not yet; I can’t go yet--though I wish it, too,” she said. “There
are still horrid bits--dreadful dark places--like the dreadful poem--the
poem of you, Gavan--where I lose myself; burning places, edges of pain,
where I fight to find myself again; long, dim places where I
dream--dream--. I won’t have you see me like that; you might think that
you watched the scattering of the real me. I won’t have you remember me
all dim and broken.”
Her voice was sinking from her into an abyss of languor, and she felt
the swirl of phantom thoughts blurring her mind even while she spoke.
As on that far-away night when he held her hand and they stood together
under the stars, she said, speaking now her prayer, “O God! God!”; and
seeming in the effort of her will to lift a weight that softly,
inexorably, like the lid of a tomb, pressed down upon her, “I am here,”
she said. “You are mine. I will not be afraid. Remember me. So good-by,
Gavan.”
“I will remember,” he said.
His arms still held her. And through his mind an army seemed to rush,
galloping, with banners, with cries of lamentations, agony, regret,
passionate rebellion. It crashed in conflict, blood beneath it, and
above it tempests and torn banners. And the banners were desperate
hopes riddled with bullets; and the blood was love poured out and the
tempest was his heart. It was, he thought, even while he saw, listened,
felt, the last onslaught upon his soul. She was going--the shadow of
life was sliding from her--and from him, for she was life and its terror
and beauty. Above the turmoil was the fated peace. He had won it,
unwillingly. He could not be kept from it even by the memory that would
stay.
But though he knew, and, in knowing, saw his contemplative soul far from
this scene of suffocating misery, Eppie, his dear, his beautiful, was in
his arms, her eyes, her lips, her heart. He would never see her again.
He raised his head to look his last, and, like a faint yet piercing
perfume, her soul’s smile still dwelt on him as she lay there
speechless. For the moment--and was not the moment eternity?--the
triumph was all hers. The moment, when long, long past, would still be
part of him and her triumph in it eternal. To spare her the sight of his
anguish would be to rob her. Anguish had been and was the only offering
he could make her. He felt--felt unendurably, she would see that; he
suffered, he loved her, unspeakably; she had that, too, while, in their
last long silence, he held her hands against his heart. And her eyes,
still smiling on him with their transcendent faith, showed that her
triumph was shadowless.
* * * * *
He heard next day that she had died during the night.
Peace did not come to him for long; the wounds of the warring interlude
of life had been too deep. He forgot himself at last in the treadmill
quiet of days all serene laboriousness, knowing that it could not be for
many years that he should watch the drama. She had shattered herself on
him; but he, too, had felt that in himself something had broken. And he
forgot the wounds, except when some sight or sound, the song of a bird
in Spring, a spray of heather, a sky of stars, startled them to deep
throbbing. And then a hand, stretched out from the past, would seize
him, a shudder, a pang, would shake him, and he would know that he was
alone and that he remembered.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Shadow of Life, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick