A CLAIRVOYANT INTERVAL
It was still May and the North Carolina mountain-side that John Wollaston
looked out upon was at the height of its annual debauch of azalea blooms,
a symphonic romance in the key of rose-color with modulations down to
strawberry and up to a clear singing white. For him though, the invalid,
cushioned and pillowed in an easy chair, a rug over his knees, these
splendors and the perfume of the soft bright air that bathed them had an
ironic significance.
He had arrived with Paula at this paradise early in the week, pretty well
exhausted with the ordinary fatigues of less than a day's journey in the
train. They were feeding him bouillon, egg-nogs and cream. On Paula's arm
he had managed this afternoon, his first walk, a matter of two or three
hundred yards about the hotel gardens, and at the end of it had been glad
to subside, half reclining into this easy chair, placed so that through
the open door and the veranda it gave upon, he could enjoy the view of
the color-drenched mountain-side.
He had dismissed Paula peremptorily for a real walk of her own. He had
told her, in simple truth, that he would enjoy being left to himself for
a while. She had taken this assurance for an altruistic mendacity, but
she had yielded at last to his insistence and gone, under an exacted
promise not to come back for at least an hour.
It offered some curious compensations though, this state of
helplessness--a limpidity of vision, clairvoyant almost. For a fortnight
he had been like a spectator sitting in the stalls of a darkened theatre
watching the performances upon a brilliantly lighted stage,
himself--himselves among the characters, for there was a past and a
future self for him to look at and ponder upon. The present self hardly
counted. All the old ambitions, desires, urgencies, which had been his
impulsive forces were gone--quiescent anyhow. He was as sexless, as cool,
as an image carved in jade.
And he was here in this lover's paradise--this was what drew the tribute
of a smile to the humor of the high gods--with Paula. And Paula was more
ardently in love with him than she had ever been before.
The quality of that smile must have carried over to the one he gave her
when she came back, well within her promised hour, from her walk. One
couldn't imagine anything lovelier or more inviting than the picture she
made framed in that doorway, coolly shaded against the bright blaze that
came in around her. She looked at him from there, for a moment,
thoughtfully.
"I don't believe you have missed me such a lot after all," she said.
"What have you been doing all the while?"
"Crystal-gazing," he told her.
She came over to him and took his hands, a caress patently enough through
the nurse's pretext that she was satisfying herself that he had not got
cold sitting there. She relinquished them suddenly, readjusted his rug
and pillows, then kissed him and told him she was going to the office to
see if there were any letters and went out again. She was gone but a
moment or two; returning, she dropped the little handful which were
addressed to him into his lap and carried one of her own to a chair near
the window.
He dealt idly with the congratulatory and well-wishing messages which
made up his mail. There was but one of them that drew even a gleam of
clearly focused intelligence from him. He gave most of his attention to
Paula. She was a wonderful person to watch,--the expressiveness of her,
that every nerve and muscle of her body seemed to have a part in. She
had opened that letter of hers with nothing but clear curiosity. The
envelope evidently had told her nothing. She had frowned, puzzled, over
the signature and then somehow, darkened, sprung to arms as she made it
out. She didn't read it in an orderly way even then; seemed to be trying
to worry the meaning out of it, like one stripping off husks to get down
to some sort of kernel inside. Satisfied that she had got it at last,
she dropped the letter carelessly on the floor, subsided a little deeper
into her chair and turned a brooding face toward the outdoor light and
away from him.
"Are you crystal-gazing, too?" he asked. Unusually, she didn't turn at
his voice and her own was monotonous with strongly repressed emotion.
"I don't need to. I spent more than a week staring into mine."
That lead was plain enough, but he avoided, deliberately though rather
idly, following it up. The rustle of paper told her that he had turned
back to his letters.
"Anything in your mail?" she asked.
"I think not. You can look them over and see if I've missed anything. To
a man in my disarticulate situation people don't write except to express
the kindness of their hearts. Here's a letter from Mary designed to
prevent me from worrying about her. Full of pleasant little anecdotes
about farm life. It's thoroughly Arcadian, she says. A spot designed by
Heaven for me to rusticate in this summer when--when we go back to town.
Somehow, I never did inhabit Arcady. There's a letter from Martin
Whitney, too, that's almost alarmingly encouraging in its insistence that
I mustn't worry. If only they knew how little I did--these days!"
"Well, that's all right then," she said. "Because those were Doctor
Darby's orders. You weren't to be excited or worried about anything. But,
John, is it really true that you don't? Not about anything?"
The fact that her face was still turned away as she asked that question
gave it a significance which could not be overlooked.
"It's perfectly true," he asserted. "I don't believe I could if I
tried. But there's something evidently troubling you. Let's have it.
Oh, don't be afraid. You've no idea what an--Olympian position one
finds himself in when he has got half-way across the Styx and come
back. Tell me about it."
"You know all about it already. I told you the first day you could
talk--that I was going to give up singing altogether except just for
you,--when you wanted me to. I knew I'd been torturing you about it. I
thought perhaps you'd get well quicker,--want to get well more--if you
knew that the torture wasn't to go on. It was true and it is true.
Perhaps you thought it was just one of those lies that people tell
invalids--one of those don't-worry things. Well, is wasn't.
"But you made me promise I wouldn't do anything--wouldn't break my
Ravinia contract--until we could talk it all out together. Your
temperature went up a little that afternoon and when Doctor Darby asked
me why, I told him. He said I mustn't, on any account, speak again to you
about it until you brought the subject up yourself. I don't know whether
he'd call this bringing it up or not, but anyway that's it. I've kept my
promise to you though," she concluded. "I haven't written. They still
think I am going to sing this summer."
"I am very glad of that," he said quietly. "I thought the thing was
settled by our first talk. I didn't realize that you had taken it merely
as an--adjournment."
She was still turned rigidly away from him, but the grip of one of her
hands upon the arm of a chair betrayed the excitement she was laboring
under, while it showed the effort she was making to hold it down.
"I didn't think, though," he went on, "that that resolution of yours to
give up your whole career,--make ducks and drakes of it, in obedience to
my whim--was nothing more than one of those pious lies that invalids are
fed upon. I knew you meant it, my dear. I knew you'd have done
it--then--without a falter or a regret."
"Then or now," she said. "It's all the same. No, it isn't! Now more than
then. With less regret. Without a shadow of a regret, John,--if it would
bring you back to me."
The last words were muffled, for she had buried her face in her hands.
He had heard the ring of undisguised passion in her voice without an
answering pulse-beat, sat looking at her thoughtfully, tenderly. The
reflection that occupied his mind was with what extravagant joy he would
have received such an assurance only a few weeks ago. On any one of those
last days before his illness fastened upon him;--the Sunday he had gone
to Hickory Hill alone because Paula had found she must work with March
that day; the evening when he had made his last struggle against the
approaching delirium of fever in order to telephone for an ambulance to
get him out of that hated house. What a curious compound of nerve ends
and gland activities a man's dreams--that he lived by, or died for--were!
She pulled him out of his reverie by a deliberate movement of resolution,
taking her hands away from her face, half rising and turning her chair so
that she faced him squarely.
"I want to know in so many words," she said, "why you're glad that I'm
still bound to that Ravinia thing. You seem to want me to sing there
this summer, as much as you hated the idea of my doing it before. Well,
why? Or is it something you can't tell me? And if I sing and make a
success, shall you want me to go on with it, following up whatever
opening it offers; just as if--just as if you didn't count any more in my
life at all?"
Before he could answer she added rather dryly, "Doctor Darby would kill
me for talking to you like this. You needn't answer if it's going to
hurt you."
"No," he said, "it isn't hurting me a bit. But I'll answer one question
at a time, I think. The first thing that occurred to me when you spoke of
the Ravinia matter was that I didn't want you to break your word. You had
told them that they could count on you and I didn't want you, on my
account, to be put in a position where any one could accuse you of having
failed him. My own word was involved, for that matter. I told LaChaise I
wouldn't put any obstacles, in your way. Of course, I didn't contract
lobar pneumonia on purpose," he added with a smile.
The intensity of her gaze did not relax at this, however. She was waiting
breathlessly.
"The other question isn't quite so easy to answer," he went on, "but I
think I would wish you to--follow the path of your career wherever it
leads. I shall always count for as much as I can in your life, but
not--if I can help it--as an obstacle."
"Why?" she asked. "What has made the perfectly enormous difference?"
It was not at all an unanswerable question; nor one, indeed, that he
shrank from. But it wanted a little preliminary reflection. She
interrupted before he was ready to speak.
"Of course, I really know. Have known all along. You haven't
forgiven me."
He echoed that word with a note of helplessness.
"No," she conceded. "That isn't it, exactly. I can't talk the way you and
Mary can. I suppose you have forgiven me, as far as that goes. That's the
worst of it. If you hadn't there'd be more to hope for. Or beg for. I'd
do that if it were any good. But this is something you can't help. You're
kind and sweet to me, but you've just stopped caring. For me. What used
to be there has just--gone snap. It's not your fault. I did it myself."
"No," he said quickly. "That's where you're altogether wrong. You didn't
do it. You had nothing to do with the doing of it."
She winced, visibly, at the implication that, whoever was responsible,
the thing was done.
"Paula, dearest!" he cried, in acute concern. "Wait! There are things
that can't be dealt with in a breath. That's why I was trying to think a
little before I answered."
Even now he had to marshal his thoughts for a moment before he could go
on. It was too ridiculous, that look of tragic desperation she wore while
she waited! He averted his eyes and began rather deliberately.
"You are dearer to me now--at this moment, as we sit here--than ever
you've been before. I think that's the simple literal truth. This matter
of forgiveness--of your having done something to forfeit or to destroy
my--love for you... Oh, it's too wildly off the facts to be dealt with
rationally! I owe you my life. That's not a sentimental exaggeration.
Even Steinmetz says so. And you saved it for me at the end of a period of
weeks--months I guess--when I had been devoting most of my spare energies
to torturing you. Myself, incidentally, but there was nothing meritorious
about that. In an attempt to assert a--proprietary right in you that you
had never even pretended to give me. That I'd once promised you I never
would assert. The weight of obligation I'm under to you would be
absolutely crushing--if it weren't for one thing that relieves me of it
altogether. The knowledge that you love me. That you did it all for the
love of me."
She moved no nearer him. These were words. There was no reassurance for
her in them. One irrepressible movement of his hands toward her, the mere
speaking of her name in a voice warmed by the old passion, would have
brought her, rapturous, to his knees.
"There's no such thing as a successful pretense between us, I know," he
said. "So I'll talk plainly. I'm glad to. I know what it is you miss in
me. It's gone. Temporarily I suppose, but gone as if it had never been.
That's a--physiological fact, Paula."
She flushed hotly at that and looked away from him.
"I don't know exactly what a soul is," he went on. "But I do know that a
body--the whole of the body--is the temple of it. It impenetrates
everything; is made up of everything. Well, this illness of mine has, for
these weeks, made an old man of me. And I'm grateful to it for giving me
a chance to look ahead, before it's too late. I want to make the most of
it. Because you see, my dear, in ten years--or thereabouts--the course of
nature will have made of me what this pneumonia has given me a foretaste
of. Ten years. You will be--forty, then."
She was gazing at him now, fascinated, in unwilling comprehension. "I
hate you to talk like that," she said. "I wish you wouldn't."
"It's important," he told her crisply. "You'll see that in a minute, if
you will wait. Before very long--in a month or so, perhaps--I shall be, I
suppose, pretty much the same man I was--three months ago. Busy at my
profession again. In love with you again. All my old self-assurance back;
the more arrogant if it isn't quite the real thing. So now's the time,
when the fogs one moves about in have lifted and the horizon is sharp, to
take some new bearings. And set a new course by them. For both of us.
"There is one fact sitting up like a lighthouse on a rock. I'm
twenty-four years older than you. Every five years that we live together
from now on will make that difference more important. When you're
forty-five--and you'll be just at the top of your powers by then--I shall
be one year short of seventy. At the end, you see, even of my
professional career. And that's only fifteen years away. Even with good
average luck, that's all I can count on. It's strange how one can live
along, oblivious to a simple sum in arithmetic like that."
She had been on her feet moving distractedly about the room. Now she came
around behind his chair and gripped his body in her strong arms.
"You shan't talk like that!" she said. "You shan't think like that! I
won't endure it. It's morbid. It's horrible."
"Oh, no, it's not," he said easily. "The morbidity is in being afraid
to look at it. It was morbid to struggle frantically, the way I did all
the spring, trying to resist the irresistible thing that was drawing
you along your true path. It was a cancerous egotism of mine that was
trying to eat you up, live you up into myself. That, thank God, has
been cut out of me! I think it has. Don't misunderstand me, though. I'm
not going to relinquish anything of you that I can keep;--that I ever
had a chance to keep."
He took her hands and gently--coolly--kissed them.
"Then don't relinquish anything," she said. "It's all yours. Can't you
believe that, John?"
He released her hands and sank back slackly in his chair. "Victory!" he
said, a note of inextinguishable irony in his voice. "A victory I'd have
given five years of my life for last March. Yet I could go on winning
them--a whole succession of them--and they could lead me to nothing but
disaster."
She left him abruptly and the next moment he heard her fling herself down
upon his bed. When he rose and disengaged himself from his rug, she said,
over an irrepressible sob or two, that he wasn't to mind nor come to her.
She wasn't going to cry-not more than a minute.
He came, nevertheless, settled himself on the edge of the bed and took
possession of her hands again.
"I wouldn't have told you all this," he said--"for you don't need any
lessons in arithmetic, child--if I dared trust myself to remember, after
the other thing had come back. Now I'm committed--don't you see?--not to
play the fool, tragically or ludicrously, as the case might be, trying to
dispute the inevitable. And I shall contrive to keep a lot, my dear. More
than you think."
Later, the evening of that same day, he asked her what was in the letter
that had provoked their talk. Did they want her back in Chicago for
rehearsals or consultations? Because if they did there was no reason in
the world why she should not go. At the rate at which he was gaining
strength there would not be the slightest reason--he gave her his
professional word of honor--why she should not go back in a day or two.
"I should have to go back," she said, "if I were going to sing March's
opera. There is such a lot of work about a new production that there
would be no time to spare."
"But," he asked, "isn't March's opera precisely what you are going to
sing?"
"No," she said rebelliously. "It's not. There wasn't anything in the
contract about that. I'll carry out the contract this summer. I'll keep
my word and yours, since that is what you want me to do. But I won't sing
'Dolores' for anybody."
He did not press her for the reason.
After a little silence, she said, "Lucile thought I'd fallen in love with
him. So did Rush, I guess,--and poor old Nat. Did you, John?"
"I tried to, hard enough," he confessed.
She stared. "Tried to!"
"That would have been the easier thing to fight," he said. "There's
nothing inevitable about a man,--any man. I'd have stood a chance at
least, of beating him, even though he had a twenty-year handicap or so.
But the other thing,--well, that was like the first bar of the Fifth
Symphony, you know; Fate knocking at the door. Clear terror that is until
one can get the courage to open the door and invite Fate in."