On one point Susan was from the first determined: Miss Goucher's death
should make no difference in her struggle for independence; she would go
on as she had begun, and fight things through to a finish alone. Neither
Phil nor I could persuade her to take even a few days for a complete
change of scene, a period of rest and recuperation. Simply, she would
not. She settled down at once to work harder than ever, turning out
quotable paragraphs for _Whim_, as daring as they were sprightly; and
she resolutely kept her black hours of loneliness to herself. That she
had many such hours I then suspected and now know, but on my frequent
visits to New York--I had been appointed administrator of Miss Goucher's
more than modest estate--she ignored them, and skillfully turned all my
inquiries aside. These weeks following on Miss Goucher's death were for
many reasons the unhappiest of my life.
Never since I had known Susan, never until now, had our minds met
otherwise than candidly and freely. Now, through no crying fault on
either side--unless through a lack of imagination on mine--barriers were
getting piled up between us, barriers composed of the subtlest, yet
stubbornest misunderstandings. Our occasional hours together soon became
a drab tissue of evasions and cross purposes and suppressed desires.
Only frankness can serve me here or make plain all that was secretly at
work to deform the natural development of our lives.
There are plays--we have all attended them to our indignation--in which
some unhappy train of events seems to have been irrationally forced upon
his puppets by the author; if he would only let them speak out freely
and sensibly, all their needless difficulties would vanish! Such plays
infuriate the public and are never successful.
"Good Lord!" we exclaim. "Why didn't she _say_ she loved him in the
first place!"--or, "If he had only told her his reasons for leaving home
that night!"
We, the enlightened public, feel that in the shoes of either the hero
or the heroine we must have acted more wisely, and we refuse our
sympathy to misfortunes that need never have occurred. Our reaction is
perhaps inevitable and aesthetically justified; but I am wondering--I am
wondering whether two-thirds of the unhappiness of most mortals is not
due to their failure clearly to read another's thoughts or clearly to
reveal their own? Is not half, at least, of the misery in our hearts
born of futile misunderstandings, misunderstandings with which any sane
onlooker in full possession of the facts on both sides, can have little
patience, since he instinctively feels they ought never to have taken
place? But it is only in the theater that we find such an onlooker, the
audience, miraculously in possession of the facts on both sides. In
active life, we are doing pretty well if we can partly understand our
own motives; we are supermen if we divine the concealed, genuine motives
of another. Certainly at this period Susan, with all her insight, did
not seize my motives, nor was I able to interpret hers. Hence, we could
not speak out! What needed to be said between us could not be said. And
the best proof that it could not is, after all, that it was not....
The conversation that ought to have taken place between us might not
unreasonably have run something like this:
SUSAN: Ambo dear--what _is_ the matter? Heaven
knows there's enough!--but I mean between _us_?
You've never been more wonderful to me than these
past weeks--and never so remote. I can feel you
edging farther and farther away. Why, dear?
I: I've been a nuisance to you too long, Susan.
Whatever I am from now on, I won't be that.
SUSAN: As if you could be; or ever had been!
I: Don't try to spare my feelings because you like
me--because you're grateful to me and sorry for
me! I've had a glimpse of fact, you see. It's the
great moral antiseptic. My illusions are done for.
SUSAN: What illusions?
I: The illusion that you ever have really loved
me. The illusion that you might some day grow to
love me. The illusion that you might some day be
my wife.
SUSAN: Only the last is illusion, Ambo. I do love
you. I'm growing more in love with you every day.
But I can't be your wife, ever. If I've seemed
changed and sad--apart from Sister's death, and
everything else that's happened--it's _that_,
dear. It's killing me by half-inches to know I can
never be completely part of your life--yours!