"THE SMALL OLD PATH"
"Her letters of course gave her away," observed Gerty thoughtfully, as
she smoothed her long glove over her arm and looked at Laura with the
brilliant cynicism which belonged to her conspicuous loveliness, "Arnold
says it is always the woman's letters, and I'm sure he ought to know."
"Why ought he to know?" asked Laura, turning with an impatient movement
from the desk at which she sat. Her gaze hung on the soft white creases
of kid that encircled Gerty's arm, but there was an abstraction in her
look which put her friend at a chilling distance.
Gerty laughed. "Oh, I mean he's a man of the world and they always know
things."
For an instant Laura did not respond, and during the brief silence her
eyes were lifted from Gerty's arm to Gerty's face. "I sometimes think
his worldliness is only a big bluff," she said at last.
"Well, I wouldn't trust his bluff too much, that's all," retorted Gerty.
A smothered indignation showed for a moment in Laura's glance. "But how
do you know so much about him?" she demanded.
"I?--oh, I've had my fancy for him, who hasn't? He's like one of those
éclair vanille one gets at Sherry's--they look substantial enough on
the surface, but when one sticks in the fork there's nothing there but
froth. He's really quite all right, you know, so long as you don't stick
in the fork."
"But I thought you liked him!" protested Laura, pushing back her chair
and rising angrily to her feet.
"I do--I love him--but that's for myself, darling, not for you."
"Do you mean me to think," persisted Laura in a voice that was tense
with horrified amazement, "that you are jealous of _me_?"
A long pause followed her words, for Gerty, instead of replying to the
question had turned to the window and was staring out upon the bared
trees in Gramercy Park. The quiet of it for the moment was almost like
the quiet of the country, and the two women who loved each other seemed
suddenly divided by miles of silent misunderstanding. Then, with a
resolute movement, Gerty looked full into Laura's face, while the light
flashed upon a mist of tears that hung over her reproachful eyes.
"Oh, Laura, Laura!" she said softly.
With a cry of remorse Laura threw herself upon her knees beside the
window, kissing the gloved hands in Gerty's lap.
But Gerty had wiped her tears away and sat smiling her little worldly
smile of knowledge. "I am jealous of you, but not in the way you meant,"
she answered. "I am jealous for myself, for the one little bit of me
that is really alive--the part of myself that is in you. I am afraid to
go over again with you the old road that I went over with myself--the
old wanting, wanting, wanting that ends in nothing."
"But why should I go over it?" asked Laura, from her knees, and the
flush in her face coloured all her manner with a fine deception.
Gerty's mocking gayety rang back into her voice. "You might as well ask
me why I am still fool enough to be in love with Perry," she returned
with her flippant laugh, "it's a part of what Arnold calls 'the damnable
contradiction of life.' You might as well ask Connie Adams why she was
born bad?"
"Was she--and how do you know it?" demanded Laura.
"I don't know." Gerty's shrug was exquisitely indifferent. "But it's
more charitable, I fancy, to suppose so. Have you seen Roger, by the
bye?"
Laura shook her head. "I would rather not. There is nothing one could
say."
"Oh, I don't know--one might congratulate him on his liberation, and
that's something. I dare say he'll have to get a divorce now, though
Perry says he hates them."
"Then I don't believe he'll do it, he doesn't live by the ordinary
ethics of the rest of us, you know. Will she marry Brady, do you think?"
"Marry Brady? My blessed innocent, Brady wouldn't marry her. He has
about as much moral responsibility as a fig tree that puts forth
thistles--and besides who could blame him? She's half crazy already from
cocaine, and no man on earth could stand her for a month."
No man on earth! Laura leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes, for
she remembered the figure of Roger Adams as he moved away from her
through the sunlight in the crowded street. She saw his worn clothes,
his resolute walk, and the patience which belonged to the infinite
stillness in his face; and, for one breathless moment, she seemed to
feel the approach of the spirit which worked silently amid the humming
material things that made up life.
Gerty had risen and was fastening her white furs at her throat. "I must
go to Camille's," she said, "for she has just got in some new French
gowns and she has promised to give me the first look. Of course, one
can't really trust her," she added suspiciously, "and I shouldn't be in
the least surprised to find that she'd let Ada Lawley get ahead of me.
It is simply marvellous how that woman always manages to produce a
striking effect. She was at the opera last night in peacock blue when
every other woman was wearing that dead, lustreless white. Do you know I
sometimes wonder if I follow the fashion almost too closely."
"You could never look like any one else so it doesn't matter."
"And yet I spend two-thirds of my time trying to extinguish the little
individuality I possess," laughed Gerty, as she turned upon the
threshold. "I wear the same wave in my hair, the same colour in my gown,
the same length to my gloves. Oh, you fortunate dear, thank heaven you
have never kept a fashion!"
She went out with her softened merriment, while Laura, throwing herself
into the chair beside the window, looked down upon the carriage which
was waiting before the door. After a moment she saw Gerty come out and
cross the sidewalk, lifting her velvet skirt until she showed a
beautifully shod foot and a glimpse of black embroidered stocking. She
gave a few careless directions to the footman who arranged her rugs, and
then as the carriage door closed, she leaned out with her brilliant
smile and waved her hand to Laura at the window above. The winter
sunlight seemed to pass away with her when at last she turned the
corner.
With a sigh Laura's thoughts followed the carriage, envying the beauty
and the fashion of her friend for the first time in her life. A strange
fascination enveloped the world in which Gerty lived, and the old
familiar atmosphere through which she herself had moved so tranquilly
was troubled suddenly as if by an approaching storm. The things which
she had once loved now showed stale and profitless to her eyes, while
those external objects of fortune, to which she had always believed
herself to be indifferent, were endowed at the moment with an
extraordinary and unreal value. It was as if her whole nature had
undergone some powerful physical convulsion, which had altered not only
her outward sensibilities but the obscure temperamental forces which
controlled in her the laws of attraction and repulsion. What she had
liked yesterday she was frankly wearied of to-day. What she had formerly
hated she now found to be full of a mysterious charm. Books bored her,
and her mind, in spite of her effort at restraint, dwelt longingly upon
the trivial details which made up Gerty's life--upon those bodily
adornments on which her friend had staked her chance of married
happiness. The endless round of dressmakers, shops, and feverish
emulation appeared strangely full of interest; and her own quiet life
showed to her as utterly destitute of that illusory colour of romance
which she found in her vision of Gerty's and of every other existence
except her own. She beheld her friend moving in a whirl of colour,
through perpetual laughter, and the picture fascinated her, though she
knew that in the naked reality of things Gerty was far more unhappy than
she herself. Yet Gerty's unhappiness appeared to her to be distinguished
by the element of poetry in which her own was lacking.
A terrible _ennui_ possessed her, the restless desire for a change that
would obliterate not only the circumstances in which she was placed, but
even the personal fact of her own identity. She wanted an experience so
fresh that it would be like a new birth--a resurrection--and yet she
could tell neither what this experience would be nor why she wanted it.
All that she was clearly aware of was that her surroundings, her family,
her friends, the small daily events of her life and her own
dissatisfaction, had become stale and repugnant to her mood, and she
thought of the day before her as of a gray waste of utterly intolerable
hours.
"Nothing will happen in it that has not happened every twenty-four hours
since I was born," she said; "it is always the same--everything is the
same, and it is this monotony that seems to me insupportable. As I sit
here at this window I feel it to be impossible that I should ever drag
myself through the remainder of this afternoon, and through the evening
which will be like every other evening that I have spent. Aunt Rosa
will repeat her exhaustless jokes, Aunt Angela will make her old
complaints, Uncle Percival will begin to play upon his flute." And these
things when she thought of them--the stories of Mrs. Payne, the despair
of Angela, the piping of Uncle Percival's flute--appeared to her to
exact a power of moral endurance which she felt herself no longer to
possess. A disgust more terrible than grief seized upon her--a revolt
from the commonplace which she knew to be worse than tragedy.
Then in the midst of her depression she remembered that on the following
afternoon she would see Arnold Kemper, and the hours appeared instantly
to open into the light. The end of everything was there just twenty-four
hours ahead, and she felt, like a physical agony, the necessity to
stifle the consciousness of time, to kill the minutes, one by one, as
they crept slowly into sight. She thought of the meeting in this very
room, of the gown that she would wear, of the words that she would
speak, of the curious exquisite mixture of attraction and repulsion, of
the ardent tenderness she would find in his look. This tenderness, she
felt, was the solitary expression of the real man--of the man whom Gerty
had never known, whom Madame Alta had not so much as glimpsed; and the
assurance produced in her a secret rapture which was all the sweeter for
being exclusively her own. She wondered where he was at the instant--how
he would pass the hours which dragged so heavily for her--and the
interest which had vanished so strangely from her own existence attached
itself immediately to his. The people he knew, the club he went to,
even the motor cars he drove, were surrounded in her thoughts with a
fresh and vivid charm. Apart from this there was no longer any
charm--hardly any animation about the life she led. A single idea had
enlarged itself at the cost of all the others, and she had a sense of
standing amid a desert waste, in the drab miles of which a solitary
palm-tree flourished.
"And yet why should I hunger for his presence and what is there in it
when it comes that is worth this wanting?" she asked in dismay of her
own longing. "When I am away from him I think of nothing except of the
hour when I shall see him again, and yet when the meeting comes I am not
happy and he is always a little different from what I hoped that he
would be. I have no particular satisfaction when I see him, but when he
goes the longing and the dream begin again and I build up other ideals
of him which he will destroy the first time that we come together. Is it
because I have never really got to the thing that he is eternally--to
the soul of him--that he creates in me this agony of expectancy and of
disappointment? When I meet him to-morrow may it not happen that for the
first time he will fulfill all the ideals of him that I have made?"
And it seemed to her almost impossible that she should wait the
twenty-four intervening hours before making her final discovery--that
she should exist a day and a night in utter vacancy while the ultimate
moment still beckoned her from to-morrow. Would time never pass? Was
there no way of strangling it before it came to birth? She picked up her
favourite books from her desk--Spinoza, Shelley, "The Imitation of
Christ"--but the throbbing vitality in her own breast caused the printed
pages to turn chill and lifeless.
A mirror was placed over the mantel and she looked closely into it,
meeting her profound gaze and the poetic charm which hung like an
atmosphere about her delicate figure. She felt at the instant that she
would have given her life--her soul even and its infinite
possibilities--for an exterior of Gerty's brilliant beauty. The
blackness of her hair, the prominence of her brow, the faint amber
pallor of her skin, provoked her into a sensation of anger; and she
turned away with an emotion that was almost one of bitterness. A minute
later it seemed to her that the afternoon would pass more quickly if she
spent it out of doors, and as she slipped into her walking clothes she
thought with relief of the crowded streets and of the noises that would
drown the consciousness of her own thoughts. When Angela called to her
as she passed along the hall it was with a movement of irritation that
she turned the handle of the door and entered the invalid's room, where
the pale winter sunshine fell over the tall white candles and uncarpeted
floor.
Mrs. Payne, in her black velvet and old rose point, sat by the window
reading aloud in her shrill voice extracts from a society paper which
she had brought for the purpose of entertaining her sister. In the
conventual atmosphere in which Angela lived the biting scandals and
malicious gossip of the worldly old woman always produced upon Laura an
impression of mere vulgar insincerity. To have lived over seventy years
and still to find one's chief interest in the social indiscretions of
one's neighbours was a fact which would have been pathetic had it been
less ridiculous. Tottering reluctantly to her grave, in the centre of a
universe filled with a million mysteries of dead and living suns, she
was absorbed to the exclusion of all larger matters in the question as
to whether or not "Tom Marbury had compromised Mrs. Billy Pearce?"
"As if it mattered," sighed Angela from her couch. "As if it really
mattered to me in the least."
Mrs. Payne fixed upon her a painted pair of eyes set in lustreless
vacancy between two flashing diamond earrings. "That's because you live
so out of the world, my dear," she observed, "that you have ceased to
feel any longer a rational interest in life."
"But is life all somebody's impropriety?" enquired Angela, with the
meekness of a child.
"It is that--or charities," returned Mrs. Payne. "You may take your
choice between the two. It was only after I failed to interest you in
our day nursery that I turned to the social news."
"But you haven't tried the sports," suggested Laura, with a laugh, while
she felt the presence of her aunts to have become an intolerable burden.
Mrs. Payne raised her blackened eyebrows, and sat smoothing out the
crumpled paper with her claw-like jewelled fingers. It seemed to Laura
that she wore her body to-day as if it were a tattered, yet
industriously mended garment for which her indomitable spirit would soon
have no further use. Everything about her was youthful except the flesh
which wrapped her, and that was hideously, was grotesquely ancient. Yet
she had once been both a beauty and a belle, famed for her quick
affairs and her careful indiscretions; and as Laura watched her she saw
in this living decay but the inevitable end and weariness of pleasure.
Of her many lovers, which remained to her to-day? With the multiplied
sensations of her youth what had her loveless age to do? She had hardly
laid up even a sweetness of memories, or why did she feast upon
uncovered scandals as a vulture upon carrion?
"What poor dear Angela needs is an object in life--a passion," remarked
Mrs. Payne, picking up her gold-rimmed eye glasses which hung on a
little jewelled chain from her bosom. "I used to say that when I got too
old for an emotion I wanted to be chloroformed, but I found, thank
heaven, that with care one's emotions may last one pretty well to one's
eightieth year. When men fail one cards are left, and after cards, I
daresay, there would come gossip. It is for this reason," she pursued
with conviction, "that I am trying to persuade Angela to take up a
little bridge."
"A little bridge!" gasped Laura, and from sheer amazement she sat down
on the foot of Angela's couch.
"I was considering the moral support of it, of course," resumed Mrs.
Payne. "First of all I would advise some inspiring religious conviction,
but as religion does not appeal to her, I suggested bridge."
"It might as well be white rabbits, I don't see the difference,"
protested Angela, rolling over upon her side with a despairing movement
of fatigue.
"The difference, my dear, is that white rabbits are dirty little
beasts," observed the elder woman.
Angela lay back upon her sofa and regarded her sister with a smile sharp
and cold as the edge of a knife. "I wonder why you were more fortunate
than I, Rosa," she said, after a pause, "for in my heart I was always a
better woman."
Mrs. Payne laughed her hard little mirthless laugh, and stretched out
her withered hand with a melodramatic gesture. "But I was never a fool,
my dear," was her retort, "and there are few women of whom it can be
said with truth that they were never at any time, from the beginning to
the end of their career, a fool. Nobody is a fool always, but there are
very few people who escape it throughout their lives."
"Oh, I was," sighed Angela submissively, "I know it, but I was
punished."
"It is the one thing for which we can count quite certainly upon being
punished in this life," remarked Mrs. Payne, with a kind of moral
satisfaction, as of one who was ranged upon the side of worldliness if
not of righteousness. "Other sins are for eternity, I suppose, but I
have never yet seen a fool escape the deserts of his folly. It is the
one reason which has always made me believe so firmly in an overruling
Providence. Are you going out, my child?" she asked, as Laura rose.
"I am stifling for want of air," replied the girl, shrinking away from
the unnatural flash of her aunt's eyes. "I'll read to aunt Angela when I
come in, but just now I must get out." Then as Mrs. Payne still sought
to detain her, she broke away and ran rapidly down into the street.
But she was no sooner out of doors than it seemed to her that she ought
to have stayed in her room--that the minutes would have passed more
swiftly in unbroken quiet. Her senses were absorbed in the single desire
to have the day over--to begin to-morrow; and it seemed to her that when
once the night was gone, she would be able to collect her thoughts with
clearness, that the morning would bring some lucid explanation of the
disturbance that she felt to-day. Then it occurred to her that she would
follow Gerty's example and seek a distraction in the shops, and she took
a cab and drove to her milliner's, where she tried on a number of
absurdly impossible hats. She bought one at last, to realise immediately
as she left the shop that she would never persuade herself to wear it
because she felt that it gave her an air of Gerty's "smartness" which
sat like an impertinence upon her own individual charm. Glancing at her
watch she found that only two hours had gone since she left the house,
and turning up the street she walked on with a step which seemed
striving to match in energy her rapid thoughts.
"You have effaced every other impression of my life," he had said to her
yesterday; and as she repeated the words she remembered the quiver of
his mouth under his short brown moustache, the playful irony of the
smile that had met her own. Had he meant more or less than the spoken
phrase? Was the strength of his handclasp sincere? Or was the caressing
sound of his voice a lie, as Gerty believed? Was he, in truth, fighting
under all the shams of life for the liberation of his soul? or was there
only the emptiness of sense within him, after all? She felt his burning
look again, and flinched at the memory. "Every glance, every gesture,
every word speaks to me of things which he cannot utter, which are
unutterable," and yet even with the assurance she felt as if she were
living in an obscure and painful dream--as if the element of unreality
were a part of his smile, of his voice, of the feverish longing from
which she told herself that she would presently awake. It was as if she
moved an illusion among illusions, and yet felt the unreal quality of
herself and of the things outside.