THE ENERGY OF BEING
Cabs were an infrequent phenomenon in that quarter and a crowd of small
boys,--eager, dirty, volatile, with thin bare little legs and miserable
little elbows, were gathered around the knock-kneed horse that
dejectedly hung its head. They were feeding the animal with dusty
grass plucked from between the cobblestones of the pavement. But at
Rachel's approach they fell away as if pushed away. The driver in his
tall hat bent to receive her order. She gave it without looking at him.
Mad, uncalculating love, too long repressed, struggled in her with a
vague sense of shame. But at first the sense of shame was shadowy
indeed. Carried out of every perception but the throbbing one of her
loss of self in Emil, for a time she heard only his words "my own."
"Yes, yours, yours always," the blood proclaimed, and the soul's
contradiction sounded small and faint. Then, as the voice of
conscience grew stronger, she turned her head from side to side in
agony. Chaste and fiercely proud, she told herself she was a
humiliated woman. But not his the blame. All that had happened she
had invited. By her expression she seemed to be saying, "I will not
think."
None the less she did think. She went over the scene from which she
had just issued, not once, but countless times, and at each repetition
she extracted from it the keenest misery, the most poignant bliss. All
the mystery and domination of her passion were written on her face and
at intervals sighs escaped her, mingled with breathless,
half-articulated words:
"Oh,--he loves me--he loves me--and if it weren't for a certain thing
we could be happy."
She paused, again borne out of herself by an animating memory. Once
more Emil stood before her with his glance, laughing, kindling,
melting. Once more he spoke. As she listened to all the mad, foolish,
electrifying things that fell from his lips, life seemed to break forth
in her in its plentitude. His words were to her panting heart what
rain is to the parched earth. She experienced a feeling at once
violent and divine.
And she had repulsed him.
The memory left her almost sobbing. She moved her hands; she lifted
her face with its tremulous mouth breathing a caress. For uncounted
instants she remained suspended in abysses of tenderness. Then she
braced herself with resolution.
"No, no," she said aloud. "It's settled."
The dead, expressionless words voiced finality. Thus the will brought
the heart temporarily into subjection.
After innumerable involuntary returns to the scene of the marble works
she forced herself to give attention to her surroundings. Feverishly
she stared about her with breath suspended and lips a little open like
a child after a violent fit of weeping.
As the cab rolled forward, with bare tracts, isolated houses and clumps
of trees revealing themselves on either side, to her superalert mind,
the city appeared a million-eyed, million-footed monster. Excitedly
she nourished the grotesque fancy, seeking in it escape from deeper
realization. With its great legs of brick and stone, with its
numberless eyes of glass, turbid and bleary, its voluminous, impure
breath of smoke, its voice of inconceivable uproar, the city was
encroaching on the innocent country. It was devouring it field by
field; it was swallowing down the sweet cottages which disappeared from
the landscape with miraculous swiftness; swallowing the brooks, the
woods, glutting itself and growing big at the expense of the fresh
country that never could be restored in all its natural beauty. "Yes,
yes, God made the country but man makes the city," she whispered.
As the cab rolled on over more crowded pavements, her consciousness of
the scene through which she had just passed was dulled briefly, as pain
is dulled in a patient suffering with delirium.
"Ah, how useless is all this bustle and confusion!" she thought
irritably. "Surely man could live more simply. But he is dedicated to
vanity, he must make a splurge. What was that I said to André this
morning? Oh yes--about the energy of being. Man must make a show, if
not for his Creator's satisfaction at least for his own. The Creator!"
she murmured bitterly, "He knows nothing of us! We pine constantly for
a liberty fuller than any we have ever known, and that accounts for all
our unwearying expenditure of force. Poor pygmies! Persisting deep in
the soul of man, is a vague, undefined sense, 'I am the heritor of the
infinite.' And so he works," she continued, "he produces marvels and
he thinks his immediate achievement embraces his entire object. But it
isn't so. And he opens his heart to passions; but his object is the
same. For back of the least labour into which he throws himself, back
of the most depraved emotion in which he loses himself, is a vast,
mysterious, subconscious searching; and that," she declared, "accounts
for everything."
She was soaring now above herself, above the terror of her problem.
She was viewing the situation as the universal situation and her
thoughts were transfigured, rendered impersonal by the clearness of her
perception. She saw life no longer with the eyes of an inexperienced
and impassioned woman, but with the eyes of one made wise through
extremity of anguish.
"It accounts for all the good that we do and for all the evil that we
do," she resumed. "Each chooses a road of escape, perhaps many roads,
and follows them madly. But," she concluded, "we never find that
larger freedom. We are tormented by the feeling of its imminence, but
it retreats ever beyond us. And finally we come face to face with the
eternal, basic fact of existence: _I am a prisoner_. That's what we
discover. We learn the truth. I learned it that night after the
opera. _I am the bird in the box!_"
For an instant she held her head erect, then shrank, a pained and
huddled form, against the cushions of the cab.
"Yes, I have my dream like the others," she whimpered. "But it isn't a
dream. Love _is_ a mode of escape. It is. It is. And it's my road.
But do I follow it?"
The answer was a forlorn shake of the head.
"Emil, my Father, Simon, Emily Short, that girl Betty Holden, even Nora
Gage; all--all wiser than I. They follow their instincts, creditable
or discreditable, they follow them and they glean at least some
satisfaction. While I--"
The full tide of her misery, that which she had tried to evade,
inundated her.
"Fool, why am I like that?" she muttered, "for some scruple, which God,
if he knows, probably laughs at me for respecting. As Emil said,
wasn't it God made us capable of love?"
The tears had not come before. Now she checked them with her
handkerchief, but constantly they fell, constantly she gave long deep
sighs, heartrending, mournful. Presently a flaming, defiant thought
stood out against the background of her misery. There was relief in
action, even in the action that is called sin.
"Madam would like to have me get her ferry ticket?"
The greasy red face of the driver was peering down upon her; the cab
had come to a standstill. She had entirely forgotten why she was there
and it was only by an effort that she understood what he was asking.
Once on the ferry boat, she leaned her elbows on the railing and, as
she listened to the talk of the water, she grew calmer. For it was
strange, wise talk with a laugh under it. The little choppy waves
seemed to be telling her that life was short and sweet. Grey and blue
and dun colour, pink and rose red, the waves shouted and sang together.
And above the roofs of the receding city, wrapped in the mists of
evening and the ascending vapour of traffic, the dull and yet flaming
disk of the sun hung suspended.
A passenger disturbed her and she shifted her position. Important
little tugs towing huge rafts, and the arms of derricks being convoyed
over the water, like helpless giants, came into view; and for a time
the ferry boat passed into the sheltering shadow of a great bridge.
Emerging from one confused and sparkling distance and disappearing into
another, the bridge appeared like a tangible bow of promise between the
two cities. The sight of the cable cars and the tiny moving mites
that, like insects, slowly crawled over it, comforted her like a
friendly omen.
But when they gained the other shore and she entered the station, the
locomotives, emitting great volumes of smoke, recalled to her mind her
grandfather's fanciful description; and she remembered with a pang how
she used to behold the world in an innocent and beautiful fashion. But
now she saw deeper, now she understood all.
The rest of the trip she ceased to think. She had entered that land
known to every unhappy lover, that land in which the misery, longing
and fierce passion that consume his heart, constitute the one reality
in a universe otherwise cold and dead.