until he had passed an evening in his library unvisited by it. He longed
passionately to ask some one to go with him. A bell-boy from the hotel
would do. But he knew such an evening would be no test. He ordered a cab
to come for him at eleven, and told the driver not to ring the bell, but
to whistle outside. When he reached the gate, it seemed to him that he
could not enter; but something--the rusted remnant of his iron will,
perhaps--carried him in. In his pocket he had a loaded pistol--a quaint
notion, which none the less gave him some comfort. Completely
uncorporeal as the thing was, it seemed to understand his motions. He
could not speak to it; his silent spirit could not communicate with its
silence; he could make it know what he felt about it, apparently, only
by the gestures of some low fellow in a rage. Oh, it was a vulgar beast!
Pistol cocked in his hand, Louquier sat through his first half-hour,
waiting. There was no sign of its approach. Then, little by little, he
became aware that it was not going to come. So slowly did this assurance
gain on him that he knew it only as a deepening peace, gradual as the
long northern twilight. The room was splendidly empty of the
presence--empty of it to all eternity. He could fling his keys at the
agent, and take a train to-morrow. He had the definite sense of having
crossed something; of being on the other side of a gulf; of having
emerged from a region of horror and having left a big neutral space
between it and him. It even came over him as he sat there, healthily
lulled, that he had, without knowing it, experienced a third act of his
own. Louquier’s enemy was at last, for him, behind footlights. He had
got his grip, and could now deal with the episode as drama. It
“composed” for him: clear proof that he was blessedly outside it; and
that he was again (as it had intended he never should be) Louquier. His
weariness became pleasant, turned to a velvet drowsiness. Not once,
since the girl had rejected him, had he known such peace. He could
almost, with half-shut eyes, envisage a future--a happy future that he
could build with patience and delight. Louquier drowsed, sunk in his
chair. He knew now that it would not come, and he felt safe as a child
in its cradle. He was too dog-tired to mind the discomfort of his
position. Presently he slept profoundly, his head on his curled arm.
The cabman’s whistle sounded in the late evening, and Louquier came up
through layers of sleep to greet it. In that waking instant before the
pattern of life is wholly clear, he jumped, startled. His cramped,
unconscious fingers closed tight on the trigger of the pistol, and he
fired, as neatly as if he had meant to. Louquier was even spared the
knowledge of what he had done, for the bullet, knowing what it was made
for and knowing nothing else, went straight. For he had won his moral
victory; and there was nothing left his baffled enemy but to stoop to
physical accident. At last the impatient cabman’s ring pealed through
the house, but no one answered it.
XI
THE TOAD AND THE JEWEL
I didn’t exactly want to go; but there are cowardices for which there is
no excuse. If I had come back to America, I must face America; and Joan
Delabere was the thing in America supremely to be faced. I should have
been showing my heels to the whole adventure if I had turned my back on
her. I hadn’t seen her since the accident and the two--or was it
three?--operations that followed. I had been away for four years, and
not from one person had I had one vital fact about Joan. There were
letters from the whole group--letters that skimmed the subject and took
everything for granted. If I asked them plainly and directly for news of
Joan Delabere, I got no answer; my question was flung silently back on
my hands. And yet there must be news, I had always reasoned. A hideous
thing like that didn’t happen to a creature like that, without results.
If she had been completely done for, stricken into nullity, why did they
mention her at all? If she had managed to be exquisite among the ruins
of her life, why didn’t they sound the tabret in her honor? There was a
conspiracy among them all not to answer the great, inevitable query:
How, on the whole, has she made it out with life? Beautiful; adoring her
husband and adored by him; waiting, almost like the slim girl in an old
Annunciation, for her child--that blow could not have found a prettier
mark than Joan Delabere. More than once, before I finally took my way
to Joan’s own house, I recalled the fabulous toad with a jewel in its
forehead; the toad that may, if one will, symbolize disaster. In what
guise would disaster have come to her? Would it bear the jewel in its
forehead, or should I see, on Joan Delabere’s threshold, only the squat
batrachian figure unadorned?
The house was large and cool and empty; full of light, with pale vistas
stretching everywhere. It was airy and soundless, like a palace kept in
order but uninhabited. Joan had arranged it originally, I suspected, for
a background to her own ambient vividness. The high walls and the
polished floors called, like a stage, for moving human color. Joan would
have been color enough; but now, in their purposeless state, they seemed
more uncannily irrelevant than the shrouded and darkened chambers of a
house before a funeral. The master, too, was absent--abroad, as I had
learned in New York--and there was nothing anywhere that suggested male
ownership or habitation. The rooms had evidently once been Joan’s; and
since then had been no one’s.
It was half an hour before I was led up-stairs by a pale, cheerful
nurse, and shown into a sunny sitting-room; panelled, floored, and
ceiled in pale, polished woods, adorned with carved Eastern furniture.
It was like Joan, I thought as I stood on the threshold, to change her
æsthetic mood so completely on the second floor: down-stairs, the French
perfections; here, this carved casket of a room. Then I saw her.
She lay on a broad _chaise-longue_, propped into a strange position with
white silk cushions of every size and shape. She wore--if the word does
not belie the shapelessness of her wrappings--a thin gown of
apricot-colored stuff, frilled and pleated, ruffled and tucked into
exceeding elaboration; and over her whole form--face, feet, and
body--was thrown a sheer veil of white tulle. Through it, very vaguely,
I could see her moving eyes; and at one side a white hand crumpled the
soft folds. The eyes and the hand were all I could see of Joan Delabere;
for the shapeless shape, in its yards of apricot chiffon, might have
been anybody--or anything.
The hand disengaged itself and met mine--neither limply nor feverishly;
a mere conventional clasp. For very awkwardness, I could not kiss her.
“I am sorry to have kept you waiting. It takes them a long time to move
me; and if I am moved beforehand, I have just so much less time to stay
here. I wanted a good talk--I want to hear all about Europe.”
I sighed a little with relief. The voice, at least, was all right; fresh
and healthy, though Joan’s old musical modulations seemed to have gone.
I was soothed by it; it was recognizable, it made a frail bridge to the
past. But it was hard to know what to say. I had intended to begin with
something banal about her looking well. The veil somehow made it very
difficult to say anything.
“Oh, Europe is always the same.” Joan Delabere and I, for talk, had come
to this!
“Nonsense! Europe’s never the same two days running. That’s why I keep
Tony over there so much.” There was a touch of the old imperiousness in
her impatience.
I was tongue-tied. The vision must be worse than I had dreamed, since it
could affect me so: that was the curious inverted path my reasoning
took. The form on the _chaise-longue_ stirred ever so slightly; there
was the faintest perceptible movement in my direction of that mass of
chiffon and lace; the head was turned to me beneath the veil. I felt the
hand tighten on mine, and I looked down at it, fastening my corporeal
gaze on that one member of familiar flesh.
“I have very little pain, you know, Garda. I’m just rather useless.” Her
voice struck one or two of the crisp, sweet notes one had always stopped
to listen to.
“Thank heaven for that, my dear! You see--oh, Joan, you see no one has
ever told me anything I wanted to know! And until now, I couldn’t come.”
I felt the eyes roving over my lustreless crêpe dress, my long black
veil.
“Your poor brother has died?”
“Yes, only two months since. I was with him to the last.”
“Lucky you--to be able to do things for him. Was it a bad illness?”
“Very bad, Joan. Day and night, for--well, you may call it years.”
“Oh, you lucky thing!”
It was the very tone with which, of old, she would have congratulated me
on a heap of cotillion favors. I did not, just at once, see why. But I
would give her no inkling of poor Philip’s bodily and mental decay--pile
horrors on that veiled creature. If she thought me lucky, whether for
Phil’s having lived or for his having died, let her think me so. It was
luck enough for any human creature not to be Joan Delabere. Perhaps that
was all she meant.
“No one is wholly lucky, Joan. But I do feel lucky, in spite of
everything, just to see you again and hear your voice. It has been so
long.”
“Ye-es. We’ll let it go at the voice for a little while, Garda, if you
don’t mind. I’ll unveil before you go. I’m what you call--disfigured,
you know.”
Joan was not making it easy for me; but the mere fact that she was not
trying to helped me a little. I had known that she would not be
lachrymose--imagine Joan lachrymose!--but I had been afraid that she
would try to spare me things, and that I should break down under her
futile efforts. It is a terrible thing when the weak and luckless play
at ministering to one--worse when they seem to succeed. Joan had been
very dear to me ever since we climbed the trees of the old orchard below
the fish-pond ... and the staircase was near, and the car waiting. We
would be magnificent together--or I would run. There need be no
miserable compromise. I grew stronger moment by moment.
“Do as you like--you Eastern lady in an Eastern room. But I’m not afraid
of anything--of anything, you understand.” I forced myself to seek the
brilliant brown eyes beneath the veil.
Joan patted my hand. “Dear old Garda! I really believe you aren’t. But
I’ll lead you down from _giro_ to _giro_ neatly, Virgil-fashion, if you
don’t mind. I know a little better than you all about it. I’ve never
shrunk from mirrors.” She drew her hand under the veil.
“It’s a charming hand, Joan. You needn’t pull it away.”
Immediately she laid it on the cushion beside her. “Yes, it’s a good
hand. But useless--oh, how useless!... So you like my room?”
“Yes. It’s odd, and, decoratively speaking, has no place in the house;
but I like it. It’s a wonder the architect let you do it. Of course it
swears absolutely at the rest.”
“It’s lucky I got my way. I had it done last year. Imagine me
down-stairs among the various French periods! Every chair in the
drawing-rooms would know that I belonged in a convent. But this is
Eastern and timeless. ‘Eastern and timeless’,” she repeated; “it just
suits me. For any sense of company, I have to go to the zenana. If I’m
like anything human, I’m like the first wife of a Rajput. I just might
be that, you know. And it is excellent to feel oneself human, on any
terms--to fall in with some type, no matter what. One comes to seem so
outside of it all.”
She crossed her arms above her head--so familiar a gesture!--and the
wide veil rippled like a wave and fell into new folds.
“This is what I have been waiting for, all this time: some one I could
really talk to. Except when Tony is at home, there is no one; and there
are so many things I can’t say to Tony--God bless him!--that it’s rather
a relief to have him on the other side. We must have a long gossip, you
and I. I can say anything to you, because you’re not involved.”
“How do you manage to get rid of Tony so much?” True, cataclysmic things
had happened since I had seen Joan and Tony Delabere plight their troth
before the dim high altar of Saint Jude’s; but it had been a real love,
I fancied.
“I make Miss Stanley write and engage his passage. I make his man pack
his things. I hold out the ticket to him; and then I give him a
commission--something I am languishing for, that can’t be got this side
of Paris or Rome or Constantinople. It takes a deal of thinking, for
there’s not much you can’t get in New York, as we all know. But I am
hoping to discover something yet that he’ll have to fetch in person from
New Zealand--unless by that time his philosophy is as ripe as mine. He
takes managing, Tony does.”
“Isn’t it a little unkind, Joan?”
“Well, of course”--her tones were growing more and more familiar--“it’s
a pretty weak bluff to chuck; but Tony is too well-bred to question me.
He sees I want him to go; and we play the game out, every time, very
prettily. It’s a great strain on us both--there’s the truth. And Tony
goes; and one of my sisters comes to stay with me, and I pack her off as
soon as he has sailed. Miss Stanley’s worth all my family to me, and
more. Imagine them, Garda, snuffling in their lace handkerchiefs! They
do it by the hour--and whisper outside the door, and then come in with a
smile that apparently aches. _They_ don’t ask me to take off my veil. I
do it in spite of them. Oh yes, I pack them off as soon as I get Tony’s
first wireless. Tony used to come back always on the next steamer--‘sick
for the leash,’ he would say; but now his excuses are nearly as
transparent as mine. One day there’ll be no more excuses--naked truth
between us, and then my blessed brain can go to sleep, as all my senses
have done.” She broke off suddenly, and reached for the enamelled
bell-handle beside. “Please, Miss Stanley, tell Myra we are ready for
tea.” The cheerful nurse rearranged half a dozen cushions deftly, in
accordance with some mysterious law, and went out, smiling. “A nice
woman, that,” murmured Joan. “Treats me as if I had a mild case of
grippe; has been doing it for four years. Treats me also as if all
normal beings had atrophy of the emotions. A _very_ nice woman.”
I laughed. Joan was so like herself that I had only to turn my eyes away
from her to forget. But as I poised the teapot, my hand trembled a
little. I realized that, to eat or drink, Joan would have to strip her
face of the concealing veil. “None for me,” she said; and, looking down
again, I saw that there was only one cup. My strength returned to me in
a shamefaced flood. I would rather have broken something than have been
so relieved.
“I eat queer nursery things at queer nursery times, and, I’m afraid, in
queer nursery fashion.” She spoke quite simply. Nothing that she had
said before had focussed light on so many elements of her frustration as
did, by sheer trickery of phrase, that little speech. Poor Joan! It was
not only one life, not even only two, but three that fate had reached by
that “accident.” But her voice had not faltered; it had not even been
carefully controlled; it had been colorless.
I drank some tea in silence. I ate one after the other, three
infinitesimal cakes. In such trivial fashion I braced myself. Joan
watched me, and waited--but not, I felt sure, to brace herself. She was
giving me time. Joan Delabere was wonderful. In her place--I suddenly
felt it as I watched the mockery of good cheer, the Sèvres and silver,
carried out of the door--I would have opened my lips to taste only one
thing....
“Yes; but you see, Garda, I can’t get it.” It was Joan’s voice, sounding
very clear, as the footsteps of the maid, beyond the closed door, went
down the hall.
I started. Witchlike, to an unloving eye, in all that formless drapery,
she would from the first have seemed; now, in that bit of divination,
she seemed witchlike to me. But Joan laughed.
“It’s what you all think of, sooner or later. You were bound to think of
it sooner than some--and later than others. You thought of it, my dear
Garda, at just about the right time. Sooner would have proved you hard;
later would have proved you dull. I’m glad you’re neither; I’m still
more glad you’re here.”
I bit my lip. The situation was, as always, Joan’s very own. Her luck
could be maimed in every way but that.
“I was much too canny to ask for it explicitly, ever; but I’ve tried
every indirect way that I could think of. No use: they have me utterly
in their power; and they’ll give me every gift but poison. I’ve stopped
thinking about it, even--that way lies madness. But you couldn’t help
thinking of it--once. I used to hope the ether would play me tricks; but
you have thought it was ‘my sister, Water,’ it was so loyal to my poor
old heart. No, Garda; there is no discharge in this war. And that is the
whole point. It is just there that Tony comes in to complicate a
situation that without him would have the simplicity of hell.”
There was a long pause. She went on, half dreamily, yet always with that
crispness in her voice which of old had given her lightest speech
factitious weight.
“Did it ever occur to you that the only argument against purgatory is
the complexity of it--that to keep purgatory going for all those
millions would tax even the wits of Omniscience? Prison is organized, at
least; but imagine being probation officer for all the sons of Adam! No,
I’m not irreverent; but, as I said, I’ve only a brain left, and
sometimes it whirls.”
Well, I had wanted to have, at any cost, vital talk with Joan Delabere,
and I was to get it. It was clear to me, from the rapidity with which we
had come to the core of the matter, that Joan had not intended, from the
first, to waste time.
Again, as if in answer to the unspoken, she took up the thread of my
thought.
“You see, they don’t allow me in here too long at a time. Miss Stanley
will come at any minute to say I must be moved back. I don’t let any one
see me in my bedroom except Tony--and for days together not even him.
There are sickening paraphernalia there--I have to be propped in all
sorts of queer ways. Not that they hope for anything better, but I will
say they work like nailers to make me as comfortable as they can. And I
_am_ comfortable, you know, most of the time; only it takes queer things
to make me so. Now, I rather fancy myself here. I feel like Madame
Récamier--but much more like that faded Rajput queen. Smell the
sandalwood, Garda! I love it. It’s my ‘ounce of civet, to sweeten my
imagination.’ I tremble to think what Tony’s ounce of civet may be.”
I laid my hand on her arm gently, almost fearfully. “Don’t run on like
that, Joan. It’s humiliating to have you trying to distract me. There’s
nothing I can’t stand. Out with it!”
She clasped her hands on her breast. “I could go on ‘like that’
endlessly with no effort, I assure you. But I’m glad you’re game, for I
haven’t overmuch time, as I said, and you may not come back.”
“Indeed I shall come back!” I cried.
“Well--I hope so; but you may not, all the same. I shan’t be hurt,
because nothing hurts me any more. If things hurt me, I should be dead.
There isn’t a thing in the world that could shock or wound me. Inaction
has brought its anodyne. You can’t lie like a log for four years, with a
veil between you and the world, and still _care_, you know. There’s only
one thing I want; and I sometimes think it’s only for the honor of my
five wits that I want that. See if you can help me.”
“What is it you want, Joan?”
“I want a way out for Tony.” She was silent for a moment, and we faced
each other--lucidly and intimately, for all the veil between. I did not
want to enter the labyrinth, but I could not step back and still be
loyal.
“‘A way out for Tony.’” I repeated it mechanically while I searched the
phrase for all its implications.
“Yes.” She clasped her hands. Her wedding-ring gleamed through the
tulle. “You may not know what a sordid and useless tangle our divorce
laws are,” she went on. “There’s no decent way, apparently, for him to
be quit of me. I’m divorceable enough, one would think, but the law
doesn’t see it in that light. Or, at least, the law sees nothing that
Tony and I can bring ourselves to see. Besides, Tony won’t divorce me. I
don’t know that you could expect him to. It’s in his tradition to fling
himself in the path of the unfortunate and let poor crippled feet stamp
on him.... Never marry a gentleman, Garda, unless you can be perfectly
sure of giving him more than he gives you. Otherwise, he’ll make your
life a hell of humility. It must have taken nerve to marry Cophetua.
Certainly I never planned to do it; yet here I am.”
She stopped a minute; then, still with clasped hands, went on in her
didactic tone, so like the occasional Joan of old.
“You can, as an impartial witness, consider that possibility eliminated.
Tony will not divorce me. There remains only the possibility of my
divorcing him. That, again, isn’t easy. If I could go out west, as the
others do--but even then, what judge wouldn’t rock with laughter at the
notion of a fragment like me wanting a divorce? I should be a by-word,
nothing more. I ought to be glad and grateful--the whole world would
say--to get any man to stick to me, even in the empty legal sense....
And here--Well, how, lying here, in the effete East, can I get a
divorce? Especially as Tony won’t help.”
“If Tony won’t help, I should think it clear enough that Tony doesn’t
want it. And really, Joan”--I tried to be very quiet and convincing--“if
Tony doesn’t want it, I don’t see that you’ve anything to complain of.
It’s unimaginable that you should care about being legally free. What
would you get out of that?”
“Nothing of any importance--only my self-respect.” She spoke with
concentrated bitterness.
“My dear Joan, if any human creature has a right to self-respect, I
think it’s you.” I said it honestly, brooding for a moment on all the
things that white hand of hers had gallantly rejected: hysteria,
melancholy, egotistic evasions, vanity. I spoke my thought: “A platonic
devotion to truth is enough for self-respect, I imagine. And that you’ve
got; you’ve saved it out of whatever wreck there may have been.”
“Trust you to strike home, Garda!” she cried, softly. “Now that is the
best thing that has been said to me for many a day, though Herbert
Melcham has written a sonnet to me _as I am_--poor young decadent! ‘To
hold the mirror up to nature’--and not let your hand shake. That’s
it.... When the senses are dead, you must satisfy the brain. It clamors
in the night--one’s brain. Why should I have a brain at all? I don’t
know. But it will not release me until it has saved Tony. It will keep
on working until it does.”
There was a long silence. I determined to let Joan herself break it. She
stirred at last and spoke again.
“Probably you can’t imagine, Garda, what an odd thing it is to lie
outside of time and space, as I do--discarnate, except for this
accidental burden of flesh that I carry like a pack. I suppose it’s what
happened to the saints. Perhaps I should be a saint if I could get rid
of Tony. It’s worse than having passions of your own, to lie there like
a dead thing and see other people’s passions hard at work. Usually one
has something at stake, oneself. There’s the blindness and the beauty of
the game to carry one on. I’m out of the game, but I mustn’t forget that
Tony isn’t. That’s what my brain beats in on me. _That’s_ why Tony
drives me mad; why I have to send him off.”
“My dear child, you must remember that Tony has inhibitions, too. You’re
not the only civilized person in the world.”
“‘Inhibitions!’” She mocked me. “We’ve all had them, always. That’s not
the name of my malady. But don’t you suppose that I remember what life
was before I was stricken? Do you suppose I imagine for a moment that
Tony is in my case? I may have, as it were, no lips to kiss with; but
Tony is still the magnificent young pagan god he always was.”
“It’s a very curious thing, Joan”--I bent forward to her--“that the
great love has always been able to do anything it liked with the body;
but so it is.”
She was very patient with me. “I don’t know whether or not you’ve ever
been in love, Garda; but I do know that you’ve never been married to the
man you loved. And I am forced to tell you that there is a part of the
philosophy of life that can’t be resolved in the cloister.”
“One has eyes in one’s head, my dear, and life’s an open common. Why
talk like an old wife by the fire?”
“Simply because you will babble like a child in arms.”
It was very like old times. As before, I had only to turn my head away
to forget.