He went away from there that night not knowing more than that; it was
merely that she let him see. He knew now that there was some big thing
in her life he had known nothing about; that he had not understood Ruth,
though he had known her through all the years and had thought he knew
her so well. He was bewildered, his pain was blunted in that
bewilderment. There was a sick sense of life as all different, but he
was too dazed then for the pain that came later with definite knowing.
He went home that night and because he could not sleep tried to read a
medical book; usually that took all his mind, for the time other things
would not exist for him. But that was not true tonight; that world of
facts could not get him; he lived right on in the world of his own
feeling. He was not to have Ruth; he did not seem able to get a real
sense of that either, there was just a sick feeling about it rather than
actual realization, acceptance. And what did it mean? Surely he knew
Ruth's life, the people she went with; it was always he, when he was at
home, Ruth went about with. Someone away from home? But she had been
very little away from home. Who could it be? He went over and over that.
It came to seem unreal; as if there were some misunderstanding, some
mistake. And yet, that look.... His own disappointment was at times
caught up into his marvel at her; that moment's revelation of what her
caring could be was so wonderful as to bear him out of the fact that it
was not for him she cared. That was the way it was all through, his love
for her deepening with his marvel at her, the revelation of what she
felt for another man claiming more and more of himself for her. It was a
thing he would have scoffed at if told of, it was a thing he could not
somehow justify even to himself, but it was true that the more he saw of
what love meant to Ruth the more Ruth came to mean to him.
In those next few months, the months before he actually knew, there were
times when he could almost persuade himself that there was something
unreal about it all, torturous wonderings as to who the man could be
trailing off into the possibility of there being no man, because he knew
of none; sometimes he tried to persuade himself that this passionate
feeling he had glimpsed in Ruth was a thing apart from any particular
man--for who _was_ the man? Sometimes he could, for a moment, let in the
hope that since she could care like that she would care for him. Though
he more than half knew he deluded himself in that; there was, now that
his eyes were opened, that in Ruth's manner to indicate something in her
life which did not appear on the surface. He saw how nervous she
was--how strained at times, how worried and cross, which was not like
Ruth at all. There were times when her eyes were imploring, times when
they were afraid, again there were moments of that lovely calm, when
feeling deep and beautiful radiated from her, as it had that night they
sat on the steps and, drawn by something in her, he had to tell her that
he loved her. She did queer unreasonable things, would become
exasperated at him for apparently nothing at all. Once when she had told
him she was going somewhere with her mother he later saw her hurrying by
alone; another time she told him she was going to Edith's, and when he
called up there, wanting to take them both with him for a long trip he
had to make into the country, Edith said Ruth had not been there.
Thoughts that he did not like, that he could not believe, came into his
mind. He was not only unhappy, but he grew more and more worried about
Ruth.
That went on for several months, and then one day late that same summer
she came to him with the truth. She came because she had to come. He was
a doctor; he was her friend; she was in a girl's most desperate plight
and she had no one else to turn to. It was in his office that she told
him, not looking at him, her face without color and drawn out of shape,
her voice quick, sharp, hard, so unlike Ruth's sweet voice that without
seeing her he would not have known it. She threw out the bare facts at
him as she sat there very straight, hands gripped. He was stupefied at
first, but it was fury which then broke through, the fury of knowing it
was _this_, that not only was he not to have Ruth, but that another man
_had_ her, the fury that rose out of the driving back of all those loose
ends of hope that had eased pain a little. And _Ruth_--_this_! He little
knew what things he might not have said and done in those first moments
of failing her, turning on her because he himself was hurt beyond his
power to bear. And then Ruth spoke to him. "But I thought you believed
in love, Deane," she said, quietly.
"_Love!_" he brutally flung back at her.
"Yes, Deane, love," she said, and the simplicity, the dignity of her
quiet voice commanded him and he had to turn from himself to her. She
was different now; she looked at him, steadily, proudly. Out of the
humiliation of her situation she raised a proud face for love; love
could bring her disgrace, it could not strip her of her own sense of the
dignity of loving. Her power was in that, in that claim for love that
pain and humiliation could not beat back.
"I notice _he's_ not here," he sneered, still too overwhelmed to be won
from his own rage to her feeling.
"I thought it better for me to come," she said simply, and as she said
it and he remembered her drawn, wretched face in telling him, he was
quieted a little by a sense of what it had cost her to come. "Because,"
she added, "you're my friend, you know."
He did not say anything, miserably wondering what she now thought of him
as her friend.
"Oh, Deane," she broke out, "don't be hard! If you could know what he's
suffering! Being a man--being a little older--what's that? If you can
understand me, Deane, you've got to understand him, too!"
He stood there in silence looking at Ruth as, looking away from him now,
she brooded over that. In this hour of her own humiliation her appeal
was for the man who had brought it upon her. "How you love him!" escaped
from him, in bitterness, and yet marvelling.
She turned to him then in her swift way, again, as on that night of his
first seeing, her face transformed by that flaming claim for love; it
was as if life was shining triumphant through the cloud of misery it had
brought down around her. He could not rage against that look; he had no
scorn for it. It lighted a country between them which words could not
have undarkened. They came together there in that common understanding
of the power and beauty of love. He was suddenly ashamed, humbled,
feeling in her love a quality upon which no shameful circumstance could
encroach. And after that she found relief in words, the words she had
had to deny herself so long. It was as if she found it wonderfully good
to talk, in some little measure linking her love, as love wants to link
itself, with the other people of the world, coming within the human
unit. Things which circumstances had prisoned in her heart, too
intensified by solitude, leaped out like winged things let loose. But in
that hour of talking with him, though words served her well, it was that
proud, flaming claim for love which again and again lighted her face
that brought him into understanding, winning him for her against his own
love of her.
In the year which followed, that last year before circumstances closed
in too tight and they went away, it was he who made it possible for Ruth
to move a little more freely in the trap in which she found herself. He
helped her in deceiving her family and friends, aided them in the ugly
work of stealing what happiness they could from the society in which
they lived. He did not like doing it. Neither did he like attending the
agonies of child-birth, or standing impotently at the bed of the dying.
It might seem absurd, in trying to explain one's self, to claim for this
love the inevitability of the beginning and the end of life, and yet,
seeing it as he saw it he did think of it, not as a thing that should or
should not be, but as a thing that was; not as life should or should not
be lived, but as life. This much he knew: that whatever they might have
been able to do at the first, it had them now. They were in too powerful
a current to make a well considered retreat to shoals of safety. No
matter what her mood might have been in the beginning, no matter what
she could have done about it then, Ruth was mastered not master now.
Love _had_ her--he saw that too well to reason with her. What he saw of
the way all other people mattered so much less than the passion which
claimed her made him feel, not that Ruth was selfish, but that the
passion was mastering; the way she deceived made him feel, not that she
was deceitful, but that love like that was as unable to be held back in
the thought of wrong to others as in the consideration of safety for
one's self; the two were equally inadequate floodgates. Not that those
other things did not matter--he knew how they did make her suffer--but
that this one thing mattered overwhelmingly more was what he felt in
Ruth in those days when she would be thought to be with him and would be
with Stuart Williams.
For himself that was a year of misery. He saw Ruth in a peculiarly
intimate way, taken as he was into the great intimacy of her life. His
love for her deepened with his knowing of her; and anxiety about her
preyed upon him all the time, passionate resentment that it should have
gone like that for her, life claiming her only, as it seemed, to destroy
her.
He never admitted to himself how much he really came to like Stuart
Williams. There seemed something quixotic in that; it did not seem
natural he should have any sympathy with this man who not only had
Ruth's love, but was endangering her whole life. Yet the truth was that
as time went on he not only came to like him but to feel a growing
concern for him.
For the man changed in that last year. It was not only that he looked
older--harassed, had grown so much more silent, but Deane as a physician
noticed that he was losing weight and there was a cough that often made
him look at him sharply. A number of times Ruth said, "I don't think
Stuart's well," but she looked so wretched in saying it that he always
laughed at her. The Williams' were not patients of his, so he felt that
professional hesitance, even though he thought it foolish
professionalism, in himself approaching Stuart about his health. Once
when he seemed particularly tired and nervous Deane did venture to
suggest a little lay-off from work, a change, but Stuart had answered
irritably that he couldn't stop work, and didn't want to go away,
anyhow.
It was almost a year after the day Ruth came to him steeled for telling
what had to be told that the man of whom she that day talked came to
tell him what he had been suspecting, that he had tuberculosis and would
have to take that lay-off Deane had been hinting at. It seemed it was
either go away or die, probably, he added, with an attempted laugh, it
was go away and die, but better go away, he thought, than stay there and
give his friends an exhibition in dying.
They talked along over the surface of it, as is people's way, Deane
speaking mildly of tuberculosis, how prevalent, how easily controlled,
how delightful Arizona was, the charms of living out-of-doors, and all
the time each of them knew that the other was not thinking of that at
all, but thinking of Ruth.
Finally, bracing himself as for a thing that was all he could do, Stuart
spoke of her. "Ruth said she was coming in to see you about something
this afternoon. I thought I'd get in first and tell you. I wondered what
you'd think--what we'd better do--"
His voice trailed off miserably. He turned a little away and sat there
in utter dejection.
And as he looked at him it came to Deane that love could be the most
ruthless, most terrible thing in the world. People talked to him
afterwards about this man's selfishness in taking his own pleasure, his
own happiness, at the cost of everyone else. He said little, for how
could he make real to anyone else his own feeling about what he had seen
of the man's suffering, utter misery, as he spoke of the girl to whom he
must bring new pain. Some one spoke to him afterwards of this "light
love" and he laughed in that person's face. He knew that it was love
bathed in pain.
A new sense of just how hideous the whole thing was made him suddenly
demand: "Can't you--_do_ anything about it? Isn't there any _way_?--any
way you can get a divorce?" he bluntly asked.
"Mrs. Williams does not believe in divorce," was the answer, spoken with
more bitterness than Deane had ever heard in any voice before.
Deane turned away with a little exclamation of rage, rage that one
person should have this clutch on the life of another, of two
others--and one of them Ruth--sickened with a sense of the waste and the
folly of it,--for what was _she_ getting out of it? he savagely put to
himself. How could one get anything from life simply by holding another
from it?
"Does she know anything about Ruth?" he asked with an abrupt turn to
Stuart.
"She has mentioned her name several times lately and looked at me in
doing it. She isn't one to speak directly of things," he added with a
more subtle bitterness than that of a moment before. They sat there for
a couple of minutes in silence--a helpless, miserable silence.
When, after that, Deane stepped out into the waiting-room he found Ruth
among those there; he only nodded to her and went back and told Stuart
that she was there. "But it's only three," said he helplessly, "and she
said she was coming at four."
"Well, I suppose she came earlier than she intended," Deane replied,
about as helplessly, and went over and stood looking out the window.
After a moment he turned. "Better get it over with, hadn't you! She's
got to be told," he said, a little less brusquely, as he saw the man
wince,--"better get it over with."
Stuart was silent, head down. After a moment he looked up at Deane. It
was a look one would turn quickly away from. Again Deane stood looking
from the window. He was considering something, considering a thing that
would be very hard to do. After a moment he again abruptly turned
around. "Well, shall I do it!" he asked quietly.
The man nodded in a wretched gratefulness that went to Deane's heart.
So he called Ruth in from the waiting-room. He always remembered just
how Ruth looked that day; she had on a blue suit and a hat with flowers
on it that was very becoming to her. She looked very girlish; he had a
sudden sense of all the years he had known her.
The smile with which she greeted Deane changed when she saw Stuart
sitting there; the instant's pleased surprise went to apprehension at
sight of his face. "What's the matter!" she asked sharply.
"Stuart's rather bummed up, Ruth," said Deane.
Swiftly she moved over to the man she loved. "What is it!" she demanded
in quick, frightened voice.
"Oh, just a bad lung," Deane continued, not looking at them and speaking
with that false cheerfulness so hard fought for and of so little worth.
"Don't amount to much--happens often--but, well--well, you see, he has
to go away--for awhile."
He was bending over his desk, fumbling among some papers. There was no
sound in the room and at last he looked up. Stuart was not looking at
Ruth and Ruth was standing there very still. When she spoke her voice
was singularly quiet. "When shall we go?" she asked.