"I'll turn it up." She did so, and as she lay down again saw with a
swift furtive glance that his face was haggard, that his eyes seemed
deep sunk in black pits, and that he was gazing at the floor. And still
she had the sense of unreality, of the dream that will pass.
He advanced a step or two. She felt him intently looking at her. Again
that breathless silence. Then he gave a great sigh, bent over her,
gently kissed her hair. "What glorious hair you have," he said. "And
what a pure, innocent face. It's only necessary to see your face, to
know you are good."
She wondered why her skin was not burning, why her lips did not open and
her voice cry out. "But when _this_ is past," she said to herself, "no
more lies--never again!"
"Good night," he was saying.
"Good night," she murmured, the sense of unreality, of the passing
dream, stronger than ever.
She heard him cross the room, heard the door close behind him. She
leaped from her bed to lock it. As she was halfway across the room, the
door opened. Mechanically she snatched from the sofa a dark kimona,
drew it round her. "I forgot to turn out your light," he said. "Oh--it
was the night-stand light, wasn't it?" Then she had the sense of
impending disaster and-- His whole expression, body as well as face,
changed. His eyes seemed starting from his head. "You--you"--he
stammered--"That night when I came home unexpectedly--" He flung out
his arms, dropped heavily to the chair behind him. "It's true!" he
gasped. "It's _true_!"
The kimona that had helped to remind him and to betray her had dropped
from her listless shoulders to the floor. She seated herself on the
edge of the bed, her hands clasped loosely in her lap. She looked
calmly at him. She now felt as much her normal self as she had up to the
moment when Lizzie brought her the news that he had gone to Nanny. She
was glad the crisis had come. More--she was glad he knew the truth.
"Now," she said to herself, with dizzy elation, "I'll either die or
begin to live. 'Nothing is settled, till it's settled right.' My life
will be settled right, at last."
He made several attempts to look at her, could not lift his eyes. As
they sat there she seemed innocence and he guilt. "Nanny told me," he
said, as if feeling round for a beginning. Then, after a long wait,
"She said she couldn't die with it on her conscience. I thought her
mind was wandering--but--somehow--I couldn't--" He broke off. Another
long wait. He ended it with the question she had been expecting:
"Where's--he?"
"Gone."
Another pause, longer. "I'm stunned--stunned." He stared at the floor,
his head between his hands, his elbows on his knees. "So--he ran away."
"I sent him."
"I am glad. I might have--" He did not finish. "I'm stunned," he
muttered.
She clasped her hands round one knee--a favorite attitude of hers--and
waited. It was a time for her to be silent, to watch, to wait. A word,
any word, from her might cause the explosion.
"Why did you send him away?" he asked. It was as if he were talking
with a stranger about an indifferent matter.
"Because he has nothing to do with this. It's between you and me."
Their eyes met. "Nothing to do with this?" he repeated, as if trying to
understand.
"It's between you and me," she repeated.
His eyes turned away, as if he were reflecting upon this. Silence
again. Then he: "I don't know what to do. I know it's so, but I can't
believe it. It's not like you--not at all." He looked at her. She met
his gaze steadily. His eyes shifted. "Not at all," he repeated. He was
still talking as if to a stranger. She understood why; it would have
been impossible for any force, even such a discovery as this, to
galvanize into a living personality, with a mind to think and to will,
the woman who had for six years been mere incident in his busy life,
"Not at all like you," he again repeated. "Yet--why did I feel it was
true as soon as Nanny told me?"
She remained silent and motionless.
"Why don't you speak?" he demanded, trying to rouse himself to reality.
"Why don't you defend yourself?"
So long as she did not defend, he could not attack. She did not answer.
"You do not deny. You admit?"
She was silent.
"He is safe, so long as he keeps away. You need not be afraid to
confess that he took advantage of a moment of weakness." It was an
offer of a defense he would accept.
She refused it instantly. "That is not true," she said.
"Yes, it is," he insisted. "He took advantage of my absence----"
"What I did," she interrupted, "was of my own free will--was what I felt
I had the right to do."
His eyes lifted to hers in amazement. Again they found her gaze steady
and direct. "Don't you realize what you've done?" he exclaimed. Such
an expression as hers must mean either innocence or a shamelessness
beyond belief.
"Yes, I realize," she answered in the same calm colorless tone in which
she had spoken all her few words.
"How like a child you are," said he gently--and child-like she certainty
looked, sitting there all in white, so small and lovely and sweet, with
her heavy braids twisted round her little head, giving her appearance a
touch of quaintness, of precocious gravity. "A mere child. You don't
even understand what you're accused of. It simply can't be true--it--"
He started up. "My God--if only I hadn't seen that room that night!"
And she knew he was seeing what she was seeing--Basil's disheveled
room--and she in it, like it. "Courtney! Courtney! How could you--how
could you!" And down he sank with face buried in his hands and
shoulders heaving.
She hung her head in shame. In vain she reminded herself how he had
refused to treat her as a human being, how he had spurned all her
appeals, how he had refused to let her live either with him or without
him--would give her neither marriage nor divorce. All in vain. Before
his grief she could feel only her own deceit. It might be true that he
had not allowed her to be honest; it was also true that she had not been
honest.
When she looked at him again, she was fascinated by the expression of
his long aristocratic profile--stern, inscrutable. "I realize," he
presently said, "that I don't know or understand you at all. But of one
thing I'm certain--that you are not a bad woman. I've been recalling
you from the beginning--from our childhood even. You never were bad. I
can remember only sweet and beautiful things about you."
She covered her face with her arm. "Don't!" she murmured.
"I wasn't saying that to make you ashamed," he hastened to explain. "I
can't help feeling that somehow or other I am more to blame than you.
But that's aside. The main thing is, we must both do the best we can to
straighten things out. Isn't it so?"
To straighten things out! Not to rave and curse and kill--not scandal
on scandal, disgrace on disgrace--but--"to straighten things out." She
pressed both hands to her face, flung herself upon the pillow and sobbed
into it--an outburst like a long-pent volcano relieving itself of the
fiery monsters that have been tormenting its vitals.
"We'll not talk of it," he went on, as the storm was subsiding, "until
we're both of us calmer."
A long pause, the silence broken by the sound of her sobs which she
strove in vain to suppress. Then she heard his voice gently saying
"Good night." And she was alone, dazed and shamed before this
incredible anticlimax to her forebodings.
*XXV*
At nine the next morning she appeared at the laboratory as usual. As
she was passing through Dick's room, he glanced up. Their eyes did not
meet. "Good morning," she said without pausing. She was in the rear
room and out of view when his cold answering "Good morning" came. She
went about her work, and several times she carried in to him the things
she finished. He was absorbed, seemed as unconscious of his
surroundings as had been his wont. It was the rule there never to
interrupt; she did not break the rule. Toward noon the quiet was
disturbed by the telephone buzzer. She answered. In Lizzie's voice
came, "The grocery over to Wenona wants to speak to you." She knew at
once that it was Basil. "Ask them to call up again about four," replied
she and went back to her table. At noon she stopped work and left for
the house. At the usual time Richard appeared, had dinner with them
all, sat calm and silent and aloof, acting much as he always did.
In the warm part of the year, with the gardens to look after, it was her
habit to spend only the mornings at the laboratory. She sent Helen to
the Donaldsons with Winchie about three. When the telephone bell rang
she herself answered. First came the voice of some clerk, then
Basil's--"Is that you?"
"Yes," replied she.
"I'm at Fenton."
"Go to New York."
"Are you--well?"
"Never better. Some one may be listening along the wire."
"I understand. You are _sure_ all's well?"
"Sure. Wait in New York."
"I understand. Good-by."
"Good-by."
As she hung up the receiver and turned round, she startled guiltily.
There was Richard, just stepping from lawn to veranda, his eyes upon
her. She felt as if she had been caught violating in stealth an implied
compact not to communicate with Basil. Dick's expression told her that
he was reading in her eyes with whom she had been talking. When they
were face to face, he on the veranda, she one step up in the doorway,
she said: "He wanted to reassure himself before starting East."
Dick's lips curled slightly.
"It isn't fair for me to let you think him a coward. I made him see so
clearly that----"
"You were right," he interrupted. "I wish to hear no more about it."
Her eyes flashed at his peremptory tone, reminiscent of his habit of
brushing her aside as merely woman. But the thought of Winchie was a
talisman against any attack of temper.
"You said last night," he went on, "that this is between you and me
only. You were right. So--I've wiped him off the slate."
As they crossed the lawn toward the water's edge, she felt a fear of him
deeper than any that physical force could inspire. If he had
threatened--had reviled--had done her physical violence, she would have
met him with contempt, with a sense of her own superiority. But how
deal with this intelligence? She had always known it was an
intelligence; she was realizing that it was an intelligence she did not
understand, was therefore superior to her own. When they reached the
benches near the landing and sat, she was so weak that she could not
have walked many steps farther.
"I think," he began, a quiet sarcasm in his tone that did not lessen her
uneasiness, "you rather misunderstood me last night. In such
circumstances, I believe, a man is expected to tear his hair and paw the
ground and do violent things. I confess--" He hesitated an instant
before going on--"I've had that inclination several times since I
recovered from my stupor. Tradition and instinct and--vanity--are
strong. I'll have to ask you to be a little careful what you say to
me--not for your own sake but for mine. I have some emotional dynamite
in my nature. I don't wish it to be set off. To mention only one
thing, there's Winchie to be thought of. I have no desire to punish
you. I feel too human myself, to play the part of judge or executioner.
But, most of all, I'm determined that Winchie shall never know--which
means that the world must never know."
Her clenched hands relaxed as she drew the first free breath since
Lizzie told her where he had gone. Now, she felt she could face him for
the struggle for Winchie on less unequal terms--not on equal terms, for
he had the power to take Winchie away from her--had the power and--
_How_ could she prevent his using it?
"But when you came into the laboratory this morning as if nothing had
happened," he proceeded, "you showed that you misunderstood me." He
looked away reflectively. "I don't know just how I restrained myself."
"You were mistaken," said she. "I went because it's been my habit to
go. I went just as you did."
He fixed his gaze upon her, danger in it. "You count too much on your
success in deceiving me thus far," he said. "I must ask you not to do
so--not to try to deceive me. Do you suppose I don't know now why
you've been coming to the laboratory?"
His menacing gaze did not daunt her. She met it fearlessly. "That was
the reason for a while--at first. But for a long time I've been going
because I liked the work."
He studied her with those eyes that saw into everything, once they were
focused properly. "I beg your pardon," he said with formal courtesy.
"It's true you couldn't have worked so well if you hadn't liked the
work."
"I've loved it." And her tone put her sincerity beyond question.
He glanced away. After a pause he said, "To go to the point--the
future. I thought at first that I'd decide alone what should be done.
Then it seemed to me I hadn't the right to act--about Winchie--without
at least finding out what your ideas were."
He waited long; she did not speak.
"You feel, I suppose," he said gently, "that you've forfeited the right
to speak."
She did not venture to contradict him. Anything she would say, however
guarded, might anger him--and Winchie was at stake.
"As I told you last night, I know you are somehow not a bad woman.
Until yesterday, I'd have said there were just two classes of women--the
good and the bad. But I'd also have said that I'd have killed both you
and him. I find I've got to revise many ideas I had. Just how, I don't
know. I'm realizing in regard to my grandfather what I've long realized
about everything else--that nothing from the past is trustworthy. The
wisdom of yesterday is the folly of to-day." He roused himself from his
half abstraction, said, "So--you need not be afraid to speak out
whatever is in your mind."
On impulse of response to this breadth--an impulse that was yet,
perhaps, not without quick feminine wit to see and seize advantage--she
said, "You make me feel that I can trust to your sense of justice."
He smiled satirically. "I see you still don't understand. You fancy
I'm more than human because I don't act as if I were less than human. I
know you are a woman, but women have been given mind enough to
distinguish between right and wrong, between honor and dishonor. And--
Is it necessary that I give its plain name to what you've done--to what
you are?"
"No," she said in a suffocating voice. Only her boy was saving her from
bursting out.
"Then--don't try to cajole me with talk about my sense of justice. What
do you ask?"
All in an instant--whether because her natural bent was for the frank
and courageous or because instinct told her it was the only hopeful
course with him--she resolved to act as she felt, to speak her thoughts.
"What do I ask?" she repeated. "First, that you stop posing."
He flushed.
"If you really mean," she hastened on, "that you're acting as you have
thus far because it's the right way to act, because the way men usually
act is wrong and degrades them, why, you'll stop trying to convince me
that you're giving a wonderful exhibition of gracious generosity."
"I had no such intention."
"Then why do you treat me as if I were an object of charity?"
"You can hardly expect me to treat you as if you had done something
noble."
"You say I'm not a bad woman."
They looked at each other in silence. "No, you are not," he said. "You
have acted like a bad woman, but you are not a bad woman."
"Then," she went on slowly, never taking her grave, earnest eyes from
his, "I want you to ask yourself how it happens that the girl who, you
said last night, was good, the girl who loved you when she married you,
has become the woman you are condemning?"
A long silence. He looked away, looked again--and his gaze remained
fixed upon her face. Then, in a low, hesitating voice: "Well--how did
it happen?"
"Because you did not love me."
"You know better than that," he cried. "I've never given any woman but
you a thought. I've never--" He broke off abruptly, grew angry. "But
you're simply trying to improve your position by putting me on the
defensive. And I ask you again not to goad me----"
"Because you did not love me," she repeated. "Your anger shows that you
are trying to deny the truth to yourself. You married me on an impulse
of passion. Oh, you had the usual romantic deceptive names for it--the
words that make the man feel spiritual and tickle the girl's vanity.
But you've shown what it really was by giving me only an
incidental--carnal thought now and then. That's been our married life."
"Why did you not tell me you had these false, unjust ideas?"
"But they're not false, not unjust," she rejoined. "What do you know of
me except my outside? What's my mind like? What's my heart like? What
do I, a human being like yourself, think and feel? You don't know.
You've lived on your grandfather's pompous old-fashioned ideal--that
lust is love, if the preacher has christened it--that a woman's whole
life is the good pleasure of her husband's various appetites."
She paused for breath. She was not so carried away by the tempest of
her emotions that she did not note that he was listening and thinking.
He presently said: "Even so, how does that excuse _you_?--you, the
mother of Winchie."
She paled, and her hands clasped convulsively in her lap. But she went
boldly on. "I had a heart and a mind, like you. How could a human
being live the life you assigned me? When I pleaded for a share in your
life you refused. When I begged for freedom you refused. What I did was
my compromise between the woman and the mother. A mother isn't less a
woman, Richard, but more."
He rose in his excitement; for, his keen mind penetrated to her purpose.
"You want your freedom and you want my son!" he cried.
Her gaze was steady but her deep voice trembled as she answered, "I want
my freedom and I want my child--the child I brought into the world--the
child I've watched over from birth. Be fair--be just, Richard. What
have you done for him except provide the home the law would have
compelled? You've amused yourself playing with him a few minutes now
and then. You've asked me to buy him a present now and then. And never
even inquired whether I'd done it. Do you know his birthday? Do you
know how old he is? Do you know anything about him? Why then do you
call him your son?"
He had been in such struggle with his fury that he was unable to check
her torrent of half-defiant half-piteous appeal. He now mastered
himself sufficiently to say, "How dare you talk to me like this?"
"Because," replied she, quick as a flash, "I respect your intelligence,
even if you don't respect mine. You asked me to speak freely. I've
done it. Would you have preferred me to lie to you?"
He walked away from her to the edge of the lake, immediately returned
and sat again at the other end of the bench. He eyed her passive
figure--hands quiet in her lap, gaze upon the town across the lake. Her
face was quiet, but all the intelligence and character which her gayety
and small stature and young loveliness veiled from unobservant eyes were
clearly revealed now. "It's a succession of blows, these discoveries
that you are so different from what I imagined," said he. With bitter
reproach, "When I think how I exalted, how I idealized you!"
"Did I ask you to do it? Did I tempt you by hypocrisy? ... Whenever I'd
try to show you what I was, didn't you stop me or refuse to listen?
And--is it true that you idealized me? Is woman as mere female--mere
flesh an ideal?"
"I have told you----"
"But," she interrupted appealingly, suddenly all animation, "you spoke
without thinking. Think of me as you'd think of one of your problems of
chemistry. Don't let your grandfather do your thinking--or the
hypocritical world--or the shallow people round us."
He was silent. Presently he rose to pace the retaining wall. As she
watched him there was no outward sign of the dread that was licking at
her heart like a flame at living flesh. "And what of me?" he said,
wheeling abruptly upon her. "You say it was my fault that you did what
you've done. Do you mean to tell me you think you're not to blame at
all?"
"No, I don't think that," she answered. "If I'd been brought up brave
and independent, instead of to be a cowardly dependent-- Oh, the crime
of it! To take a being with a mind and a heart and, simply because it's
female instead of male, to bring it up so that it's unfit really to
live--to forbid it to live--to make it afraid to live! If I'd been
brave I'd have spoken out frankly. I'd have demanded my freedom--I'd
have taken it. As it was--I broke my marriage promises--as you broke
yours. It was chiefly your fault." And she went on, with flushed
cheeks and accusing eyes: "I don't say it because I wish to shirk, but
because I must tell the whole truth so that you won't do a cruel
injustice. You promised me love and care and you gave me lust and
neglect. We were joined in equal marriage. You treated me much as if I
were a slave you'd bought. And I had to submit. For, I really was a
kind of slave, and I hadn't the courage and the skill to go out and make
my own living--and anyhow, you could and would have taken Winchie away
from me, if I'd tried to do it. Isn't that so?"
She saw that he was impressed. Again he reflected a long time pacing up
and down the wall. When he turned toward her once more he said: "But
listen while I state plainly what you ask. You ask me to reward your
treachery by letting you marry the man who betrayed me--and you cap it
by asking me to let you make my son his!"
"No, Richard," she protested. "I simply ask you to let me keep my child
on any condition you make. I'll promise not to see--him. I'll take
Winchie and live on the farm with my people until he's old enough to go
away to school. I know the law puts me at your mercy. But I don't
believe you'll use your power to crush me." She was choking, was
fighting back the tears.
He turned to the retaining wall, gazed into the water until she should
fight down the evidences of weakness which he could not but see she was
ashamed of. When he joined her again, it was to say in a voice that
reassured her: "I want to do what's best for us all--especially for
Winchie. It's very difficult.... When I think of the misery I might
have caused, if I had believed Nanny and hadn't had time to reflect--I
must not act until I've seen every side--Winchie's--yours--mine----"
The sound of the supper gong came floating across the lawn. Courtney
rose mechanically and in silence they returned to the house. Helen and
Winchie had enjoyed themselves at the Donaldsons, and told all about it.
The strain between Dick and Courtney passed unnoticed. When Winchie
went up, Courtney accompanied him. Toward ten she left the book she had
been pretending to read and sat in the hammock on the balcony. The
moon, huge and ruddy through an opening among the boughs, poured its
flood of elfin light over lake and lawns and gardens. The soft shadows,
the vague vistas, the overpowering perfume of honeysuckle and jasmine
and rose combined to beguile her out of all sense of reality. "I've
been dreaming--dreaming," she murmured. And what an incredible dream!
No man--least of all Richard, the prejudiced, the domineering--would
have acted so in real life. "A dream--a dream." It was impossible,
this experience of hers that belied all she had read, all she had been
taught, about the relations of men and women. She, a married woman, had
taken a lover--and, instead of its degrading her, it had made her better
than she had been when she thrust love out of her life and tried to live
by rule of duty to husband. And now--instead of her husband's killing
her or of her killing herself or of any of the various kinds of violence
prescribed for such situations, her husband had acted like a civilized
human being, gently, considerately, at the dictates of humanity and not
at the dictates of vanity. And instead of abysm below abysm of disaster
and death in punishment for religion's scarlet sin of sins for woman,
there was prospect of a life in which she could profit by the experience
she had gained. "A dream--a dream." Or, was a new world dawning?--a
new way of living that made the old way seem a grotesque carnival of the
beast in man?
As she was dressing next morning, in came Winchie. "Has papa gone away?"
he asked at the threshold.
She paused with the eye of her belt at the prong of its buckle. "Why?"
said she.
"I don't know whether I dreamed it. I thought it was so. I thought I
waked up and there was papa kissing me. And I thought it made me sad.
And he said, 'Good-by, Winchie. Take care of your mother and do what
she says, and don't forget me.' And I kissed him and said, 'Can't Mamma
Courtney and I go too?' And he said, 'No, dear.' And I said, 'All
right. Bring me a gun, like Charlie Donaldson's.' And then I fell
asleep again."
In the mirror she saw him run to the door into the hall, pick up a
letter which had evidently been thrust through the crack. She turned
and held out her hand. He brought it to her, spelling out the
"Courtney" written on it as he came. "Go take Aunt Helen down to
breakfast," she said. When he was gone, she opened the envelope and
read:
"The important point is Winchie. I am going away to try to think it
out. However, one thing is certain. There must be a divorce. In a few
days I shall send you a formal notice of abandonment, and you will begin
an action at once. Until we are free--perhaps so long as you are
alone--it is best that Winchie stay with you. I leave him on one
condition--that you keep him here, carrying on everything exactly as
usual. He must see no sign of change.
"Please let me know whether you accept. A line, in care of my lawyers,
James & Vandegrift, will reach me.
"R.V."
"So long as you are alone." Courtney felt as if the air had suddenly
changed from the leaden oppressiveness of before the storm to the
buoyant freshness afterwards. With the paralyzing dread about Winchie
removed, she could think of the rest of the situation. She read the
letter again and again. The regularity of line and word, the precision
of phrasing indicated a carefully copied final draft. There was not the
faintest clue to the feelings of the writer. She recalled those last
two talks with him. At both she was in no condition to observe him, so
absorbed was she in the things immediately at issue. But now, as she
went over his words, looks, manner, she saw a personality wholly
different from the Richard Vaughan she had known--or had fancied she
knew. That Richard Vaughan really had no personality beyond a chemical
intelligence, was an abstraction like an algebraic formula. This
Richard Vaughan was a flesh-and-blood man; but--what sort of a man? And
his conduct toward her, did it not mean that he had eliminated her as
one empties out a test tube when the experiment ends--in failure? Did
it not mean supreme indifference? Yes--it must be so. Still, no
ordinary man, however indifferent to wife and child, could act in such
circumstances so absolutely without personal vanity, with such obvious
determination to do nothing small or revengeful. On any theory, there
must be behind those curiously unemotional lines a character big,
generous, incapable of meanness.
She looked at this newly revealed large personality, with a depressing
sense of her own contrasting smallness. In the last few years of
widening intelligence her sex vanity, so diligently fostered throughout
her childhood and girlhood, had received many a rude shock from within
as well as from without. But none so rude, so demolishing as this.
"He's a man really worth while," thought she. "And women are too
insignificant either to be loved by such a man or to love him."
She had been bred in and to the American feminine ideal--the woman
graciously deigning to permit some man to support her in idleness; the
man more than repaid by the honor of being allowed to support her;
whatever further he might get, a voluntary largess from his royal guest,
to be given or withdrawn at her good pleasure. This delusion was a
distorted tradition from a bygone era--an era of conditions around the
relations of the sexes that are forever past. In that "woman's
paradise" women were scarce and men plenty; and there was the constancy
that is natural in a narrow life of severe toil, with the intelligence
too little developed to be restless or critical, with the passions
undisputedly in the ascendant. This feminine tradition had been dying
hard, as delusions flattering to vanity, encouraging to laziness, ever
do. She had tried to keep on believing the lies she heard and read
everywhere--especially novelists and preachers dependent on unthinking
women for a living--the romantic exaltation of woman's love as of value
star spaces beyond the value of man's love. She had tried to suppress
her sense of humor and to be impressed when she heard women speak of
kissing a man in reward for some service as if one of their kisses made
an archangel's diadem, in comparison, a cheap bauble. She had tried not
to see how intelligent men scarcely restrained the grin of insincerity
as they poured out extravagances to some woman whom their whimsical
passions chanced to covet. She had struggled against the
disillusionizing thoughts about her own sex's private opinion of itself
that would arise as she noted how often women treated lightly the man
who took them seriously and all but offered themselves to him who winked
as he bought or passed on untempted or cynically inquired for the inside
price.
Step by step she had been thrust out into the truth that the whole
feminist cult was a colossal fiction, that in the actualities of the
life of this new era woman's value was precisely like man's--the
usefulness of the particular combination of mind and heart, intellect
and character, that made up the personality. She began to suspect that
woman's ability to sway man through his passion was more often a
handicap to her, and to him, than a help to either. She began to
realize that learning how to use that ability wisely was the supreme
hard problem the life of to-day set for woman to solve or perish. While
passion sometimes had made one man for a moment slave to some one woman,
or a few men slaves to any woman, it had through all time made womankind
slave to mankind. And in the new era, while the slave was still
willing, the master was becoming weary, was demanding something less
burdensome, more companionable.
As she stood at the bureau, buckle still unfastened, eyes and mind upon
those few calm, precisely pruned lines of Dick's, there came a thought
that dealt a deathblow to her long dying feminine _folie de grandeur_.
While it was true she had not sought nor wished Dick's interest of any
kind, the fact remained that he, after living in daily contact with her
for six years, had been so little affected by her personality that he
was letting her go without any sign of emotion. "But I am as
indifferent to him as he to me." she urged upon herself in hope of some
slight consolation. She instantly remembered that it was he, not she,
who had begun the indifference. And then came the stinging,
blood-heating recollection that he had used at his pleasure the only
part of her that had been able to impress him as valuable to a man of
purpose and achievement. Nor could she dismiss him with a contemptuous
"low minded and unworthy," for she knew he was neither. Squirm how she
would, she could not get away from the humiliating fact--"six years of
me, and not even enough physical value to make his jealousy for a single
moment triumph over his sense of self-respect!"
Winchie had finished breakfast and was playing with his wagon on the
veranda. Helen was still at table. "Has Mr. Gallatin gone East with
Dick?" she inquired, turning rosy red.
"No," replied Courtney, not noting Helen's color. If she had, she would
have suspected nothing. When Helen came home in good spirits from that
visit to Saint X, after the Chicago shopping trip, and was no longer ill
at ease with Basil, Courtney--eager, as we all are, to seize the first
pretext to be relieved of a weight upon conscience--assumed that she had
got completely over her fancy. As for Basil, Courtney trusted him
absolutely.
"But he's away, isn't he?" persisted Helen, after a pause. "Lizzie
tells me his rooms haven't been disturbed for two nights."
"He went day before yesterday, I believe," said Courtney. "Did you see
Richard this morning?"
"Just a minute. He was hurrying for the train when I came down."
"I thought he didn't look very well, last night," pursued Courtney.
Helen, absorbed in her own agitating thoughts, failed to respond to this
lead; so she put the question direct. "How did he look this morning?"
"About as usual," replied Helen. "I didn't notice any change. He had
on that new gray suit. It's very becoming. When's he coming back?"
Courtney seemed not to have heard. "He forgot to give me his address.
Did he leave it with you?"
"The Willard in Washington, then the Astor in New York."
"It may be I'll want to write him or something."
"I should think so!" cried Helen. "You and he write every day, don't
you?"
"Not to each other," said Courtney dryly. "We never did establish the
daily letter. That's one of the dreariest farces in married life. It
belongs to the kind of people who think they're happy because they're
too stupid or too bored to quarrel."
When she had eaten the tip end of a roll and drunk a little coffee, she
went out on the veranda, sent Winchie to the lawn and asked Helen to sit
with her at the western end where no one could hear or overhear. "You
asked me when Richard was coming back," she began.
"It was simply a chance question," apologized Helen.
"He's not coming back."
"Not coming back!" echoed Helen. "You're going to move East?"
The emerald eyes met Helen's excited glance placidly. "We are going to
get a divorce," she said.
Helen's big brown eyes opened wide. With lips ajar she stared at
Courtney. Then she gave a little laugh that sounded as if the shock had
unbalanced her mind and reduced her to imbecility. "A divorce," she
murmured feebly.
"We both wish to be free," continued Courtney, talking in the
matter-of-fact way that was the surest preventive of hysteria in herself
or in Helen. "So, he's gone away. I'll stay here a while, then-- But
I haven't made any plans. There's plenty of time."
A long silence, Helen gazing at Courtney, at Winchie racing along the
paths with his red-striped wagon, at Courtney again, at trees and lake,
as if she doubted the reality of all things. "I don't know what to
say!" she exclaimed at last.
"Naturally," replied Courtney, "since there's nothing to say."
"I can't believe it!"
"Why not?"
"There aren't two people better suited to each other. Why, you never
quarreled."
"That's it. I love contention. He wouldn't give it to me. So--pop
goes the weasel."
"How can you! When your heart must be breaking." Helen put aside her
stupefaction and brought the tears to her soft brown eyes in tardy
conformity to the etiquette for nearest female friend on such occasions.
"Now, dear, please don't cry. You know that I know how easy it is for
women to cry, and how little it means."
Helen hastily dried her eyes. "Oh, dear! It must be fixed up!" she
said in a more natural tone, genuinely sympathetic and friendly. "He
doesn't mean it. I'm sure he doesn't."
Courtney laughed--rather disagreeably. Helen was confirming her own
newly formed, anything but exalted opinion of herself as a human value.
"I suppose it'll never for an instant occur to anyone that I might be
the discontented one."
"Well, you know, yourself, Courtney," stammered Helen, "it doesn't seem
likely a woman'd give up a good husband and a good home----"
Courtney's arresting smile was bitterly ironic. "Indeed it doesn't,"
assented she. "Give up what she married for? Not unless she was sure of
a better living. Men think they marry for love--but it's really to--I'm
not equal to saying why men marry. You can find the reason in Ben
Franklin's autobiography, if you care to look it up. As for us
women--it's the living."
"It's not true of me!" cried Helen, who had in all its amusing, or
exasperating, efflorescence the universal feminine passion for drawing
everything down to the personal, for seeking a compliment to herself or
a reflection upon herself in any and every remark addressed to her by
man or woman. "Poor as I am, I'm----"
"Never mind, dear," said Courtney with good-humored raillery. "At your
age I was talking the same way. You'll find out some day that the
hardest person in the world to get acquainted with is your real self.
Why, there isn't one human being in ten million who'd know his real self
if they met in the street." She rose to inspect the thick mat of
morning-glories trellised up the end of the veranda. "And most of us,
if we were introduced to our real selves, would refuse to speak to such
low creatures--especially the romantic people."
"I _know_ I'd not marry for _anything_ but love!"
Courtney, her back to Helen, was busy with the morning-glories. "Of
course," said she. "One may eat because one is fond of the dinner--of
the dishes, of the way it's served, of the company, and so on, and so
on. But what's the _real_ reason?" She turned on Helen with a mocking
smile. "Why, because to live one must eat. That makes the rest
incidental. A sensible person tries to take the most favorable view of
the food he has to eat or go without. A sensible woman does her best to
love the man that asks her."
"I wish you wouldn't say that sort of things, Courtney," Helen cried.
"I know illusions are illusions, but I want to keep them."
Courtney's expression changed abruptly. The deep-green eyes looked
dreamily away. "If only one _could_ keep them!" she said. "But one
can't." She shook her head sadly. "One can't." Then her face
brightened. "My dear, it's better to throw them away oneself and
get--perhaps something better--certainly something truer--in place of
them. Sooner or later life will snatch them away, anyhow--and leave one
quite naked." She turned sad, mysterious eyes on the girl. "You don't
know," she went on, "what it has cost me, this being bred in illusions.
Illusions--everywhere! Illusions for and about everything and
everybody! Oh, Helen--Helen--that's what's the matter with us women.
That's why we're such poor creatures--why we make such bad marriages,
why we're such imperfect wives and mothers. We don't think. We purr or
scratch."
A long pause, then Helen sighed. "And I believed you and Richard were
happy!"
"No," replied Courtney, her smile mocking, but pain in her eyes. "But
we're going to be--if we can get over what our illusions have cost us
and can set our feet on the solid earth. No more lies! And the biggest
lie of all is that lying can ever bring real happiness." She was
standing in the long, open window. She thought a moment, then said with
an energy that frightened the girl: "And I'm sick--sick--sick of
perfumes that end in a stench!"
That afternoon she sent an acceptance of Richard's proposition--a "line"
as he had suggested: "Winchie and I will stay on here until the
divorce--and, if you so wish, so long as I am alone. I will keep Helen
here, too." On the fourth morning after the dispatch of this, there
came a letter from James & Vandegrift, inclosing one, unsealed, from
Richard. She read the inclosure first:
"MADAM: From this date I cease to be your husband. You may take such
legal action as this may suggest.
"RICHARD VAUGHAN."
She understood that Dick was simply meeting the legal requirements.
But, these curt words made her tremble, made her skin burn, made her
eyes sink with shame, though she was alone. A few moments and she
glanced at the accompanying note from the lawyers. This sentence in it
caught her eye: "As two years is the legal period in this State in
actions on the ground of abandonment, you will observe that the date of
Mr. Vaughan's letter enables you shortly to begin suit." She took up
Dick's letter, looked at the date--August 17th, two years before. Then
in a few weeks she could sue; in a few weeks more, she would be free.
Free! That charmed word had no spell of exultation for her. She sank
down by the window with heart suddenly faint and terror-stricken. She
had been looking forward to a long time in which to plan--about Winchie,
about her future, about Basil. And she would have only a few weeks. A
few weeks--and her whole future to be decided--and she without
experience, without anyone she could rely upon or even consult, without
resources.
August 17th--why had he chosen that date? With so many serious things
to think of, her mind kept swinging back to that triviality--why August
17th? All at once it flashed upon her. August 17th--that was the date
when Nanny had spied on her and Basil at the summerhouse. She covered
her face, and the blood surged in hot billows against her scorching
skin.
Helen came, crying: "Oh, there you are. Winchie wants ice cream for
supper. Don't you think-- Why, Courtney, how solemn you look!"
"And you would, too," said Courtney, "if your hair had been falling out
the way mine has lately."
"Don't be so foolish," reassured Helen. "You could lose half of what
you've got, and still have more than most women.... Perhaps it's worry
that's making it fall?"
"I--worry? How absurd."
"No, I don't believe you ever do."
"Let's have the ice cream. Chocolate. And I feel just like jelly
roll."
*XXVI*
The pause before the first decisive step toward freedom--and perhaps
away from Winchie--had shrunk to a day less than two weeks.
It is mercifully not in human nature vividly to anticipate catastrophe.
Death is the absolute certainty; yet no living being can imagine himself
dead. And it was anything but certain that Dick would ever assert his
legal right and take away her child. In her anxiety about Winchie, she
had been giving much thought to Dick's character, which would be the
deciding factor. And she was surprised at the knowledge of it she had
unconsciously absorbed. Except among fools--who, whether they look
within or without, see nothing--it is a commonplace of experience to
discover that what we fancied we thought about a certain person or thing
is precisely the opposite of what we really think when compelled to
interrogate ourselves honestly. That is why the whole world can live and
die by formulas in which it has not the least actual belief. These
discoveries of our self-ignorance always astonish us, no matter how
often they occur. Courtney had got many surprises of this kind in the
past two years; yet this find--her intimate knowledge of her "abstract"
husband's character--seemed incredible.
It wasn't strange that she should know how he took his coffee, his
favorite brand of cigarettes and of whisky, that he detested cold baths
and would not wear underclothes with silk in them, or, if it could
possibly be avoided, starched shirts--that he hated low shoes and high
collars. As a "dutiful wife" she had made it her chief business, after
Winchie, to see to her legal husband's material comfort, so far as he
would permit it. But how had she come by a deep conviction of his
honesty, of his truthfulness, of his incapacity for meanness of any
kind? Where had she got her confidence in his sense of justice--he who
had alienated her by his stubborn and tyrannical injustices to her? Why
did she summarily dismiss as absurd the suggestion that his recent
conduct was dictated merely by indifference to her or selfish
consideration for his own comfort? These high ideas of him certainly
did not date from their courtship and honeymoon; for, then she had no
more interest or discrimination as to character than the next young
person. There was no accounting for it. She simply found that these
beliefs were immovably lodged under the opinion of him she had supposed
was hers--the opinion that had made her love for Basil seem as right as
if she had been a girl. So, while she feared he would take Winchie away
from her, with a fear dark enough to shadow her days and make many a
night uneasy, she was always saying to herself believingly, "He could
not do anything unjust."
One evening she fell into a somber mood. It wasn't so clear as usual
that Dick would see the to her obvious injustice of separating mother
and child. She left Helen, went up and stole in to sit by Winchie's
bed--a habit she had formed lately. She got so low spirited that, when
she heard Helen go along the hall toward the upstairs sitting room, she
slipped downstairs and out into the air to wander among the flowers and
beneath the scented trees. There was a thin moon and one of those
faint, soft, intermittent breezes that give the disquieting yet
fascinating sense of spirit companionship. She strolled to the edge of
the lake; the fireflies seemed the eyes of the breeze spirits that were
whispering and friendlily touching her. She saw a boat with a single
occupant a few yards down the lake, close in shore. Even as she glanced,
a low voice--Basil's--came from the boat: "Courtney--may I come?"
She was not startled. Before the voice she had thought, "Basil will
probably be trying to see me before long." She answered in the same
undertone, "Helen may be looking this way."
"If you sit on the bench down here, I can come to you. The shadow's deep
enough."
She hesitated, went to the bench he indicated. The press of the
immediate had been all but keeping him out of her mind. But whenever
she did think of him it was as her lover. With a nature as tenacious as
hers habit is not dethroned in a day or demolished all at once by any
convulsion however violent. Also, the more she suffered and the
lonelier she felt--not a soul about to whom she could speak or hint any
part of what was harassing her--the more tender grew her thoughts of the
man in whom she had invested so much. Throwing good love after bad is
not a rare human weakness--and Courtney was by no means certain in those
depressed days that her investment had been bad, as such investments go
in a world of human beings.
He soon had his boat opposite the bench, made it fast. He sprang to her,
seized her hands and was kissing them. "No--no. You mustn't," she
protested, drawing away.
"Tell me all about it!" he cried. "How I suffered till I heard your
voice on the telephone! I was watching the house with a glass all
afternoon until dark. I was in the boat, lying a few rods up there all
night. And from dawn I was across the lake watching with the glass
again. So, I knew everything was quiet. But until your voice came, I
was mad with dread--though I had seen you, just like your usual self, in
the grounds and on the veranda hours before. But--tell me all about
it."
"There's nothing to tell," said she. His recital had seemed to her as
if it were of something in which she had neither part nor interest.
"He knows, doesn't he?
"Yes--he knows." And there she stopped because she never had discussed
and never would discuss with anyone what happened between her and her
husband.
"What is he going to do?"
"I don't know."
"But-- Don't keep me in suspense, dear. Is he going to get a divorce?"
"No. I'm to get it."
"Your voice is very queer. Aren't you--glad?"
"I'm afraid about Winchie."
"Oh--of course. Does he threaten to--" Basil halted.
"No. But-- Basil, you must go."
"Go? It's perfectly safe here."
"Yes. But I've no right to see you, after the way he has acted--until
I'm free." All true enough; yet she could not make her voice sound
right to herself. "It isn't wise and it isn't honorable," she ended
haltingly.
She saw, or rather felt, him eying her somberly. "When will you be
free?" he asked in a constrained tone.
"In a few months--I think."
"And then we shall marry at once." He said it in the tone a man uses
when he wishes to convince himself and another that what he is saying is
the matter of course.
She did not answer.