THE FINER VISION
So far as Connie was concerned the trip South had been, to all outward
appearance at least, entirely successful. Adams had watched her bloom
back into something of her girlish prettiness, and day by day, in the
quiet little Florida village to which they had gone, the lines of
nervous exhaustion had faded slowly from her face. For the first two
weeks she had been content to lie motionless in the balmy air beneath
the pines, while she had yielded herself to the silence with a
resignation almost pathetic in its childish helplessness. But with her
returning vigour the old ache for excitement awoke within her, and to
stifle her craving for the drug which Adams had denied her, she had
turned at last to the immoderate use of wine. So, hopelessly but with
unfailing courage, he had brought her again to New York where he had
placed her in the charge of a specialist in obscure diseases of the
nerves.
Except for the hours which he spent in his office, he hardly left her
side for a minute day or night, and the strain of the close watching,
the sleepless responsibility, had produced in him that quivering
sensitiveness which made his self-control a bodily as well as a mental
effort. Yet through it all he had never relaxed in the fervour of his
compassion--had never paused even to question if the battle were not
useless--if Connie herself were worth the sacrifice--until, almost to
his surprise, there had come at last a result which, in the beginning,
he had neither expected nor desired. A closer reconciliation with life,
a stronger indifference to the mere outward show of possession, a deeper
consciousness of the reality that lay beyond, above and beneath the
manifold illusions--these things had become a part of his mental
attitude; and with this widening vision he had felt the flow in himself
of that vast, universal pity which has in it more than the sweetness,
and something of the anguish of mortal love. In looking at Connie he saw
not her alone, but all humanity--saw the little griefs and the little
joys of living creatures as they were reflected in the mirror of her
small bared soul. Though he had schooled himself for sacrifice he found
presently that he had entertained unawares the angel of peace--for it
was during these terrible weeks that the happiness at which Gerty
Bridewell had wondered possessed his heart.
On the afternoon of Trent's visit, Adams left his office a little
earlier than usual, for he had promised Connie that he would take her to
see a new ballet at her favourite music hall. When he reached his house
she was already dressed, and while he changed his clothes in his
dressing-room, she fluttered restlessly about the upper floor, looking
remarkably fresh and pretty in a gown of delicate blossom pink. From a
little distance the faint discolour of her skin, the withered lines
about her mouth and temples were lost in a general impression of rosy
fairness; and as he watched her hurried movements, through the door of
her bedroom, Adams found it almost impossible to associate this
sparkling beauty with the half-frenzied creature he had nursed two weeks
ago. One of her "spells of joy," as she called them was evidently upon
her; and even as he accepted thankfully the startling change in her
appearance, there shot into his mind an acute suspicion as to the
immediate cause.
"Connie," he said, standing in front of her with his hair brush in his
hand, "will you give me your word of honour that you have taken nothing
to-day except your proper medicine?"
A quick resentment showed in her eyes, but she veiled it a moment
afterward by a cunning expression of injured innocence. "Why, how could
I?" she asked, in a hurt voice, "the nurse was with me."
It was true, he knew--the nurse had been with her all day, and yet as he
looked more closely at her animated face and brilliant eyes the
suspicion hardened to absolute conviction in his mind. The change from
the fragile weakness of the morning to this palpitating eagerness could
mean only the one thing, he knew--Connie had found some secret way to
gratify her craving and the inevitable reaction would set in before many
hours.
Turning away again he finished his dressing to the accompaniment of her
high-pitched ceaseless prattle. Her conversation was empty and almost
inconsequent, filled with rambling descriptions of the newest gowns,
with broken bits of intimate personal gossip, but the very rush of words
which came from her served to create an atmosphere of merriment at
dinner. A little later at the music hall she insisted upon talking to
Adams in exaggerated whispers, until the pointless jokes she made about
the arms or the legs of the dancers, sent her into convulsions of
noiseless hysterical laughter. Through it all Adams sat patiently
wondering whether he suffered more from the boredom of the ballet or
from the neuralgia caused by a draught which blew directly on the back
of his neck. That the show amused Connie was sufficient reason for
sticking it out until the end, but there were moments during the long
evening, when he felt, as he sat with his blank gaze fixed upon the
glancing red legs on the stage, that every stifled yawn was but an
unuttered exclamation of profanity.
"Now really and truly was it worth it?" he asked, with a laugh, when
they stood again at their own door.
"But didn't you think it lovely?" enquired Connie, irritably, as she
entered the hall and paused a moment under the electric light. The
excitement had faded from her face, leaving it parched and wan as from a
burned out fire, and the sinister blue shadows had leaped out in the
hollows beneath her eyes.
"I think you were," he answered merrily, following her as she turned
away and went slowly up the staircase.
A smile at the compliment flickered for an instant upon her lips; then
as she reached her bedroom, her strength failed her utterly, and with a
little moaning cry she swayed forward and fell in a huddled pink heap
upon the floor. As he lifted her she begged piteously for
wine--brandy--for anything which would drive away the terrible
faintness.
"It is like falling into a gulf," she cried, "I am slipping away and I
can't hold myself--"
He measured a dose of cognac and gave it to her with a little water, but
when, after swallowing it eagerly, she begged for more, he shook his
head and began undressing her as he would have undressed a child. A
touch at the bell, he knew, would bring her maid, but a powerful
delicacy constrained him as he was about to ring; these were scenes
whose very hideousness made them sacred, and with Connie's distracted
raving in his ears, he became suddenly thankful for the absolute
loneliness, for the empty house around him. As she lay upon the bed
where he had placed her, looking, he thought even then, like a crushed
blossom in her gown of pale pink chiffon, he bent over her in an anguish
of pity which oppressed him like a physical weight. The very hatred in
her eyes as she looked up at him made the burden of his sympathy the
heavier to bear. Had she loved him it might have been easier for her,
but he knew now that in her sanest days she felt no stronger sentiment
for him than tolerant gratitude. And during her frantic nights the
violence of her detestation was but an added torture. There were times
even, and this was so now, when she sought by bodily force to gain
possession of the drug which she had hidden under the carpet or beneath
the pillows of the couch, and in order to control her struggles, he was
obliged to resort to his greater physical strength. After this she
looked up and cursed him with a wonderful florid, almost oriental
splendour of language, while throwing off his coat, he brushed from him
the hanging shreds of the torn pink chiffon gown.
At seven o'clock in the morning when the nurse came to relieve him, he
was still sitting, as he had sat all night, in a chair beside Connie's
bed.
"So she has had one of her bad attacks, I feared it," said the nurse,
with a sympathetic glance directed less at Connie than at her husband.
"Yes, it was bad," repeated Adams quietly; and then rising to his feet
he staggered like a drunken man into his bedroom across the hall. Still
wearing his evening clothes he flung himself heavily upon the sofa and
fell at once into the profound sleep of acute bodily exhaustion. Two
hours later when he awoke to take the coffee which the kindly nurse
brought to him, he found that his slumber, instead of refreshing him,
had left him sunk in a sluggish melancholy with a clogged and inactive
brain.
"She is very quiet now," said the woman, a tall, strong person of middle
age, "and strangely enough the spell has hardly weakened her at all--she
has had her breakfast and speaks of going out for a little shopping
after luncheon."
"Well, that's good news!" exclaimed Adams heartily, as he hastily
swallowed his black coffee. Then, holding out his cup to be refilled, he
shook his head with the winning humorous smile which was his solitary
beauty. "This coffee will have to write two pages in my magazine," he
said, "so pour abundantly, if you please."
Sitting there in his dishevelled evening clothes, with his thin, sallow
face under his rumpled hair, he made hardly an impressive figure even
when viewed in the effulgent light of romance as a devoted husband.
There was nothing of the heroic in his appearance; and yet as the nurse
looked down upon him she felt something of the curious attraction he had
for men like Arnold Kemper or Perry Bridewell--men whose innate
principles of life differed so widely from his own. It was impossible to
build a sentimental fiction about him, she thought--he had no place
among the broad shouldered, athletic gentlemen who bewitched her in the
pages of the modern novel--but she recognised, for the first time, as
she stood gravely regarding him, that there could be a love founded upon
other attributes than these. To be loved as he loved Connie seemed to
her at the instant a very beautiful and perfect thing.
"I think you have suffered more from it than your wife has," she
observed, as she replaced the cup upon the tray.
Adams broke into his whimsical laugh. "You don't judge fair," he
retorted, "wait until I'm washed and in my right clothes again. If
there's anything on earth that turns a man into a corpse, it is an
evening suit by daylight."
Then, as she went out with the tray, he endeavoured, while he changed
his clothes, to pull himself, by an effort of will, into proper shape to
meet the day's work before him.
An hour afterward, as he walked through the morning sunlight to his
office, he found that his unusual melancholy had vanished before the
first breath of fresh air. A sense of detachment--of world-loneliness
came over him as he looked at the passing crowd of strangers, but there
was no sadness in the feeling, for he felt within himself the source as
well as the renewal of his peace. He had never regarded himself as what
is called a religious man--it was more than ten years since he had
entered a church or heard a sermon--yet in this very relinquishment of
self, was there not something of the vital principle, of the quickening
germ of all great religions? Though he had never said in his thoughts "I
believe this" or "I hold by this creed or that commandment," his nature
was essentially one in which the intellect must be supreme either for
good or for evil; and in his soul, which had been for so long the
battlefield of a spiritual warfare, there had dawned at last that
cloudless sunrise of faith in which all lesser creeds are swallowed up
and lost. If he had ever attempted to put his religious belief into
words, he would probably have said with his unfailing humour that it
"sufficed to love his neighbour and to let his God alone."
Now, as he passed rapidly through the humming streets, his thoughts were
so anxiously engrossed by Connie's condition that, when his name was
uttered presently at his elbow, he started and looked up like one
awakening uneasily from a dream. The next moment the air swam before him
and he felt his blood rush in a torrent from his heart, for the voice
was Laura's, and he discovered when he turned that she was looking up
eagerly into his face.
"Nothing short of a meditation on the seven heavens can excuse such
absorption of mind," she said.
"You came like a spirit without my suspecting that you were near," he
answered, smiling.
She laughed softly, giving him her full face as she looked up with her
unfathomable eyes and tremulous red mouth. At the first glance he
noticed a change in her--an awakening he would have called it--and for a
minute he lost himself in a vague surmise as to the cause. Then all
other consciousness was swept away by pure delight in the mere physical
fact of her presence. For the instant, while they walked together
through the same sunshine over the same pavement, she was as much his
own as if they stood with each other upon a deserted star.
"It has been so long since I really saw you," she said, after a moment's
pause, "I wondered, at first, if you were ill, but had that been so I
was sure you would have written me."
Even her voice, he thought, had altered; it was fuller, deeper, more
exquisitely vibrant, as if some wonderful experience had enriched it.
"Connie was ill, not I," he answered quietly. "I took her South for a
fortnight, and since getting back I've hardly been able to go anywhere
except to the office."
She glanced at him with a sympathy in which he detected a slight
surprise--for so long as Connie had been well and happy he had rarely
mentioned her name even to his closest friends.
"I hope, at least, that she is better by now," responded Laura with
conventional courtesy.
"Oh, yes, very much better," he replied; "but tell me of yourself--I
want to hear of you. Is there other verse?"
For a minute she looked away to the rapidly moving vehicles in the
street; then turning quickly toward him, she spoke with one of the
impulsive gestures he had always found so charming and so
characteristic.
"There is no verse--there will never be any more," she said. "Shall I
tell you a secret?"
He bent his head. "A dozen if you like."
"Well, there's only one--it's this: I wasn't born to be a poet. It was
all a big mistake, and I've found it out in plenty of time to stop. I'd
rather do other things, you know; I'd rather live."
"Live," he repeated curiously; and the incidents of his own life flashed
quickly, one by one, across his mind. Marriage, birth, death, the
illusion of desire, the disenchantment of possession; to place one's
faith in the external object and to stake one's happiness on the
accident of events--did these things constitute living for such as she?
"When you say 'life' do you not mean action?" he asked slowly.
"Oh, I want to be, to know, to feel," she replied almost impatiently. "I
want to go through everything, to turn every page, to experience all
that can be experienced upon the earth."
A smile was in his eyes as he shook his head. "And when you have
accomplished all these interesting things," he said, "you will have
gained from them--what? The lesson, learned perhaps in great sorrow,
that the outward events in life are of no greater significance than the
falling of the rain on the growing corn. Nothing that can happen or that
cannot happen to one matters very much in the history of one's
experience, and the biggest incident that ever came since the beginning
of the world never brought happiness in itself alone. It may be," he
added, with a tenderness which he made no effort to keep from his voice,
"that you will arrive finally at the knowledge that all life is
forfeiture in one way or another, and that the biggest thing in it is
sometimes to go without."
His tone was not sad--the cheerful sound of it was what impressed her
most, and when she looked up at him she was almost surprised by the
smiling earnestness in his face.
"Do you mean that this is what you have learned?" she asked.
Her seriousness sent him off into his pleasant laugh. "Whatever I have
learned it has not been ingratitude for a meeting like this," he
responded gayly. "It is one of my unexpected joys."
"And yet it's a joy that you take small advantage of," she remarked.
"I'm almost always at home and I'm very often wishing that you would
come. As a last test, will you dine with me to-morrow night?"
While she spoke, for the briefest flicker of her eyelashes, she saw him
hesitate; then he shook his head.
"I fear I can't," he replied regretfully, "the nurse goes home, you see,
and there's no one left with Connie. When she's well again I'll come
gladly if you'll let me."
Her face flushed a little. "I'm sorry I asked you," she said; "I ought
to have thought--to have known."
He felt the wrench within him as if he had torn out a living nerve, for
it was the end between them and he had meant that it should be so. Life
would have no compromises with illusions, he knew--not even with the
last and the most beautiful of desires.
"On the other hand your wish made me very happy," he returned.
She had stopped when they reached a corner, and he realised, with a
pang, that the chance meeting was at an end. As she stood there in the
pale sunshine, his eyes hung upon her face with an intensity which
seemed to hold in it something of the tragedy of a last parting. At the
moment he told himself that so far as it lay in his power he would
henceforth separate his life from hers; and as he made the resolution he
knew that he would carry her memory like a white flame in his heart
forever.
An instant afterward he went from her with a smile; and as she turned to
look after him, moved by a sudden impulse, she felt a vague stir of pity
for the gaunt figure passing so rapidly along the crowded street. While
she watched him she remembered that there were worn places on the coat
he wore, and with one of the curious eccentricities of sentiment, this
trivial detail served to surround him with a peculiar pathos.