Sheila had thought herself acquainted with loneliness in the days
immediately following her grandmother's death--days when she had had
the consolation and companionship of Peter's frequent visits; but after
Peter left Shadyville, she knew loneliness indeed. Charlotte had taken
flight to Paris soon after Peter's departure, and there remained in
Sheila's small world not one to comprehend the depths of her, the real
needs and desires and aspirations of her mind and spirit.
To all outward seeming, her life flowed on in its usual channels; she
occupied herself with her housewifely duties, with her care for her
husband's and child's well-being; she exchanged visits with her
neighbors and went to afternoon tea-parties. Certainly her life
appeared to flow on smoothly enough, but in fact it did not flow at
all--that which was really the life current; it was checked, stemmed,
thrown back upon itself in a tempestuous flood. Heart, mind, spirit,
all had come up against an obstacle which there was no surmounting, no
eluding--the indestructible obstacle of a mistaken marriage. Those
were the bitterest days of Sheila's existence--the days when all the
vital, matured forces of her throbbed and surged and clamored, prisoned
things that beat in vain against the walls of circumstances.
Worn out at last by this inner rebellion and conflict, she began to
question whether she might not write once more. What she felt for
Peter must forever be suppressed; must, if possible, be crushed out
altogether; for her heart, importunate though it was with her woman's
maturity, there could be no satisfying outlet. And in her
conscientious recognition of this, in her resolution to abide by it,
her very genuine affection for Ted--despite all the differences of
temperament that divided them, despite even her realization and
resentment of the wrong his selfishness had done her--was her greatest
source of strength. But though she thus armed herself with her
affection for her husband, though she so strove for utter loyalty to
him, the suppression of her gift was no part of her conception of
wifely duty now. And, thanks to Charlotte, she no longer regarded her
compact with God for Eric's life as a thing sacred and binding. Even
before Charlotte had expressed herself so vigorously on the subject,
Sheila had, indeed, grown to see that her vow to renounce her gift had
been unfairly wrung from her by a too effective combination of accident
and Ted's opinions. And after Charlotte had cried out upon that vow as
"morbid, hysterical nonsense," after she had exclaimed that Sheila's
only fault had been in wasting her gift, it was but a step for Sheila
to the conclusion that her vow could not--_should_ not!--bind her. At
last she saw herself free for work, if not for love; she saw herself
the more free for work because love must be denied. Her work should be
her recompense; she had earned it now, as all things worth the having
must be earned--by what one suffers for them. And she believed that
her work would be the better for all that she had suffered, all that
she had endured. It would be the better for that secret, unceasing
ache of her heart for a love forbidden to her; and it would be the
better for all the hours of pure suffering for itself alone.
She had suffered for the loss of her work--Oh, very really! Even
through years that had been altogether happy otherwise, the
restlessness and hunger and depression of a talent unappeased had come
upon her at times, come upon her almost unbearably. Though she had set
her little son between it and her, it had reached her; it had harassed
her unspeakably with demands that she had, perforce, refused to
gratify. The sudden note of a violin, the sight of a flowering tree
pearly against an April sky, a glimpse of tranquil stars through her
window at night--such things as these had been enough to bring her
gift's importuning and torment upon her. Earnestly and sincerely as
she had tried to steel herself from such importunity and torment, they
had come upon her again and again; they still came; they would come
always--unless she flung off the shackles of that foolish, unnecessary
vow.
Fling off its shackles she did, with a sudden, blessed sense of liberty
and strength. With neither confession to Ted, nor any attempt at
concealment, she set herself to write. For the first time since her
marriage--at least since her motherhood--she felt her life, in some
measure, her own. That she made no announcement of her independence to
Ted was significant of the complete independence she had begun to feel.
Perhaps it was significant of it, also--of the extent to which she
conveyed, without words, her emancipation--that Ted, discovering, in
the ensuing days, what she was about, said nothing of it either.
When she sat down, at last, to her writing-table, to her clean sheaf of
paper, it was with the conviction of her individual rights spurringly
upon her. But though she was finally so sure of her right to set free
her gift, she felt within her no stir and flutter of a thing mad to fly
and now released to do it. No winged words sprang upon her paper to
leave bright traces of a heavenly flight. At the end of a long,
uninterrupted morning, there was upon her paper no word at all.
Not for lack of ideas did the paper remain thus bare. There were ideas
enough and to spare in the treasure chamber of her brain, ideas long
hoarded, but still fresh with the glamour of their first conception.
There was one idea which had especially tantalized and allured her
through years of resistance on her part, an idea for a story really
insolently quiet and unpretentious--because its stuff was such pure
gold. How that gold would shine through the cunningly chosen medium of
her simple, unassuming phrases! She had seen it shining so through all
the time that she had resisted it. But now--though she gave herself
unreservedly to the cherished idea, though she turned over and over,
with a passionate preoccupation, the little golden nugget of it--the
simple, delicate phrases that were to reveal, to exploit it, did not
appear.
She had always written with a singular ease, and it seemed strange to
sit before her tempting pages and write not a word. But on the first
morning, she felt no alarm. After all, it was but natural that she
should have to spend some time in coaxing it out to the light--that
talent of hers so long confined. It was but natural that it should not
have courage to soar and sing at once. But on the second day her paper
was as empty as before; it lay upon her table like a useless snare for
some wild and lovely bird that no longer had vitality enough to flutter
within reach of it.
And now, sitting at her writing-table in vain for several days, fear
seized upon Sheila, fear that she would not name or analyze.
Well, as one grew older, one often wrote differently, with more
difficulty. She had heard that, she reflected eagerly. She had heard
that deliberate, intellectual effort had often to succeed the flushed,
panting rush of youthful inspiration. This was probably the case with
her now; of course it was, indeed. She must undertake the effort; she
must accept and master a new method. Then all would be right with her.
And so she went about deliberately translating the gold of her idea
into those dreamed-of words which were so fitly to interpret it. She
went about it with an energy, a will to accomplish the feat, that
should have been sufficient to achieve miracles. If there had been,
hitherto, a strain of weakness in her, she was now all strength. And
by that sheer strength--of purpose, of determination--she sought to
realize her dream of perfection.
Now the white sheets on her table were no longer barren. Slow, painful
writing covered them. She wrote and discarded, and wrote again. Day
after day, she sat there at her table, engaged, as she came at last to
perceive, in her final, her ultimate tragedy.
For when the thing that she had visioned as a little golden masterpiece
was finished, she knew it for what it was. There was no felicity of
phrase, no cunning art of construction, no conviction of truth, no
throb of vitality within it. As surely as a still-born child had it
been brought into the world dead. And it was incredibly ugly and
deformed. There was not a gleam of gold upon it!
She recognized all this with unsparing clearness. Not one illusion was
left to her, not one merciful deception; with a single glance at her
completed story, illusions and self-deceptions were swept from her--and
hope was swept from her with them.
Her gift was dead--or, at the least, it was forever ineffectual. There
would be no more mad, glad flights; no more songs high in the sunlit
heavens. The flights and songs and ecstasies were over for all time.
Not for an instant did she cheat herself with sophistries of an
eventual recovery. She knew that if it lived at all--this gift of hers
which had once been more alive than she herself--it would but live
within her as the pain of a thing balked and futile, restless still
perhaps, but not restless with any power. Always--always now--the too
exquisite note of a violin, the sight of blossoming trees at dawn, of
silver, inscrutable stars at night would waken in her the hunger, the
grief, of the unsatisfied. There would never be a time when she could
look on poignant beauty with the peace of one who is herself a part of
all beauty--having created something beautiful. For the ultimate
calamity had befallen her; her gift had been killed, or hopelessly
maimed.
Under the tremendous impact of this blow she was curiously unresentful.
She wondered a little how it had happened. She wondered if she had
suffered too much, suffered to the point of numbness--a thing fatal to
one whose work had been fine largely through her capacity for emotion;
or if the habit, the superstition, of her vow, persisting within her
after the vow itself had been cast aside, had thus finally broken the
wings of her talent. She wondered if her marriage alone, or her
motherhood, or her shamed and hopeless love for Peter had been most
disastrous to her. She had been conscious of them all as she had sat
there trying to write. Eric's face and Peter's had drifted between her
and her pages. Ted's cold declaration that talent was a bad thing for
a married woman, and her own impassioned promise to God to renounce her
work for Eric's life had both drowned for her the voice of her gift.
It was as if all these factors in her destiny had had too much of her;
it was as if they had claimed her too entirely and tenaciously ever to
release her. Even in silence and solitude and a belated sense of
liberty and rights, she could not be free of them. She could not
decide whether one or all of them had been responsible for this final
frustration. She wondered--and then she ceased to wonder at all. She
knew that the frustration had been accomplished--and that she was
suddenly too weary even to cry out.
It was at the moment when she realized all this fully, when she sat
staring at the deformed and lifeless thing which she had brought forth,
that a letter from Charlotte was handed to her. It came from New
York--where was Peter. Sheila opened it with shaking fingers--and
found what she desired:
I have seen Peter [wrote Charlotte] and he seems to have fitted
himself, very happily, into the right place. I say happily, but I do
not use the word literally, for Peter is scarcely happy. But he is
appreciated here, and he likes his work. I'm sure you'll be glad of
that.
As for happiness--I sometimes question whether those of us who catch a
glimpse of a happiness perfect and transcendent ever experience the
reality. I doubt, in fact, if any reality could stand, unimpaired, by
that vision. It may be that we have to choose between the
vision--beheld for an instant and forever remembered--and an earthy,
faulty, commonplace little happiness. We may have to choose between a
fairy tale that can never be anything but a wonderful fairy tale, and a
grubby reality that will spoil fairy tales for us evermore. If that be
true, Peter is not to be pitied. He is manifestly one of the chosen;
he's had his matchless vision; he still believes in the fairy tale.
I told you, once, that I might marry him--in spite of him, as it were!
Now I know that I will never marry him. But you must not be sorry for
me, my dear. I, too, have had my vision. I'll always believe in the
fairy tale.
Sheila laid the letter down--beside the stillborn child of her gift.
And fleetingly she saw again the pure gold of her idea--saw it gleaming
through the misshapen thing she had actually fashioned. After all,
though she could never create masterpieces, she had had her vision of
them; that, at least, had been vouchsafed to her. And she had had her
vision of the perfect love; not even unspeakable sorrow and humiliation
had dimmed it. She, also, was one of the chosen; she would always
believe in the fairy tale.