THE big ship issued from the Mersey into ugly waters--into the
weather that at all seasons haunts and curses the coasts of
Northern Europe. From Saturday until Wednesday Susan and
Madame Délière had true Atlantic seas and skies; and the ship
leaped and shivered and crashed along like a brave cavalryman
in the rear of a rout--fighting and flying, flying and
fighting. Four days of hours whose every waking second lagged
to record itself in a distinct pang of physical wretchedness;
four days in which all emotions not physical were suspended,
in which even the will to live, most tenacious of primal
instincts in a sane human being, yielded somewhat to the
general lassitude and disgust. Yet for Susan Lenox four most
fortunate days; for in them she underwent a mental change that
enabled her to emerge delivered of the strain that threatened
at every moment to cause a snap.
On the fifth day her mind, crutched by her resuming body, took
up again its normal routine. She began to dress herself, to
eat, to exercise--the mechanical things first, as always--then
to think. The grief that had numbed her seemed to have been
left behind in England where it had suddenly struck her
down--England far away and vague across those immense and
infuriated waters, like the gulf of death between two
incarnations. No doubt that grief was awaiting her at the
other shores; no doubt there she would feel that Brent was
gone. But she would be better able to bear the discovery.
The body can be accustomed to the deadliest poisons, so that
they become harmless--even useful--even a necessary aid to
life. In the same way the mind can grow accustomed to the
cruelest calamities, tolerate them, use them to attain a
strength and power the hot-housed soul never gets.
When a human being is abruptly plunged into an unnatural
unconsciousness by mental or physical catastrophes, the
greatest care is taken that the awakening to normal life again
be slow, gradual, without shock. Otherwise the return would
mean death or insanity or lifelong affliction with radical
weakness. It may be that this sea voyage with its four days
of agitations that lowered Susan's physical life to a harmony
of wretchedness with her mental plight, and the succeeding
days of gradual calming and restoration, acted upon her to
save her from disaster. There will be those readers of her
story who, judging her, perhaps, by themselves--as revealed in
their judgments, rather than in their professions--will think
it was quite unnecessary to awaken her gradually; they will
declare her a hard-hearted person, caring deeply about no one
but herself, or one of those curiosities of human nature that
are interested only in things, not at all in persons, even in
themselves. There may also be those who will see in her a
soft and gentle heart for which her intelligence finally
taught her to construct a shield--more or less
effective--against buffetings which would have destroyed or,
worse still, maimed her. These will feel that the sea voyage, the
sea change, suspending the normal human life, the life on land,
tided her over a crisis that otherwise must have been disastrous.
However this may be--and who dares claim the definite
knowledge of the mazes of human character and motive to be
positive about the matter?--however it may be, on Thursday
afternoon they steamed along a tranquil and glistening sea
into the splendor and majesty of New York Harbor. And Susan
was again her calm, sweet self, as the violet-gray eyes gazing
pensively from the small, strongly-featured face plainly
showed. Herself again, with the wound--deepest if not
cruelest of her many wounds--covered and with its poison under
control. She was ready again to begin to live--ready to
fulfill our only certain mission on this earth, for we are not
here to succumb and to die, but to adapt ourselves and live.
And those who laud the succumbers and the diers--yea, even
the blessed martyrs of sundry and divers fleeting issues
usually delusions--may be paying ill-deserved tribute to
vanity, obstinacy, lack of useful common sense, passion for
futile and untimely agitation--or sheer cowardice. Truth--and
what is truth but right living?--truth needs no martyrs; and
the world needs not martyrs, not corpses rotting in unmarked
or monumented graves, but intelligent men and women, healthy
in body and mind, capable of leading the human race as fast as
it is able to go in the direction of the best truth to which
it is able at that time to aspire.
As the ship cleared Quarantine Susan stood on the main deck
well forward, with Madame Clélie beside her. And up within
her, defying all rebuke, surged the hope that cannot die in
strong souls living in healthy bodies.
She had a momentary sense of shame, born of the feeling that
it is basest, most heartless selfishness to live, to respond
to the caress of keen air upon healthy skin, of glorious light
upon healthy eyes, when there are others shut out and shut
away from these joys forever. Then she said to herself, "But
no one need apologize for being alive and for hoping. I must
try to justify him for all he did for me."
A few miles of beautiful water highway between circling shores
of green, and afar off through the mist Madame Clélie's
fascinated eyes beheld a city of enchantment. It appeared and
disappeared, reappeared only to disappear again, as its veil
of azure mist was blown into thick or thin folds by the light
breeze. One moment the Frenchwoman would think there was
nothing ahead but more and ever more of the bay glittering in
the summer sunlight. The next moment she would see again that
city--or was it a mirage of a city?--towers, mighty walls,
domes rising mass above mass, summit above summit, into the
very heavens from the water's edge where there was a fringe of
green. Surely the vision must be real; yet how could tiny man
out of earth and upon earth rear in such enchantment of line
and color those enormous masses, those peak-like piercings of
the sky?
"Is that--_it?_" she asked in an awed undertone.
Susan nodded. She, too, was gazing spellbound. Her beloved
City of the Sun.
"But it is beautiful--beautiful beyond belief. And I have
always heard that New York was ugly."
"It is beautiful--and ugly--both beyond belief!" replied Susan.
"No wonder you love it!"
"Yes--I love it. I have loved it from the first moment I saw
it. I've never stopped loving it--not even----" She did not
finish her sentence but gazed dreamily at the city appearing
and disappearing in its veils of thin, luminous mist. Her
thoughts traveled again the journey of her life in New York.
When she spoke again, it was to say:
"Yes--when I first saw it--that spring evening--I called it my
City of the Stars, then, for I didn't know that it belonged to
the sun-- Yes, that spring evening I was happier than I ever
had been--or ever shall be again."
"But you will be happy again dear," said Clélie, tenderly
pressing her arm.
A faint sad smile--sad but still a smile--made Susan's
beautiful face lovely. "Yes, I shall be happy--not in those
ways--but happy, for I shall be busy. . . . No, I don't take the
tragic view of life--not at all. And as I've known misery, I
don't try to hold to it."
"Leave that," said Clélie, "to those who have known only the
comfortable make-believe miseries that rustle in crêpe and
shed tears--whenever there's anyone by to see."
"Like the beggars who begin to whine and exhibit their
aggravated sores as soon as a possible giver comes into view,"
said Susan. "I've learned to accept what comes, and to try to
make the best of it, whatever it is. . . . I say I've learned.
But have I? Does one ever change? I guess I was born that
sort of philosopher."
She recalled how she put the Warhams out of her life as soon
as she discovered what they really meant to her and she to
them--how she had put Jeb Ferguson out of her life--how she
had conquered the grief and desolation of the loss of
Burlingham--how she had survived Etta's going away without
her--the inner meaning of her episodes with Rod--with Freddie
Palmer----
And now this last supreme test--with her soul rising up and
gathering itself together and lifting its head in strength----
"Yes, I was born to make the best of things," she repeated.
"Then you were born lucky," sighed Clélie, who was of those
who must lean if they would not fall and lie where they fell.
Susan gave a curious little laugh--with no mirth, with a great
deal of mockery. "Do you know, I never thought so before, but
I believe you're right," said she. Again she laughed in that
queer way. "If you knew my life you'd think I was joking.
But I'm not. The fact that I've survived and am what I am
proves I was born lucky." Her tone changed, her expression
became unreadable. "If it's lucky to be born able to live.
And if that isn't luck, what is?"
She thought how Brent said she was born lucky because she had
the talent that enables one to rise above the sordidness of
that capitalism he so often denounced--the sordidness of the
lot of its slaves, the sordidness of the lot of its masters.
Brent! If it were he leaning beside her--if he and she were
coming up the bay toward the City of the Sun!
A billow of heartsick desolation surged over her.
Alone--always alone. And still alone. And always to be alone.
Garvey came aboard when the gangway was run out. He was in
black wherever black could be displayed. But the grief
shadowing his large, simple countenance had the stamp of the
genuine. And it was genuine, of the most approved enervating
kind. He had done nothing but grieve since his master's
death--had left unattended all the matters the man he loved
and grieved for would have wished put in order. Is it out of
charity for the weakness of human nature and that we may think
as well as possible of it--is that why we admire and praise
most enthusiastically the kind of love and the kind of
friendship and the kind of grief that manifest themselves in
obstreperous feeling and wordiness, with no strength left for
any attempt to _do?_ As Garvey greeted them the tears filled
Clélie's eyes and she turned away. But Susan gazed at him
steadily; in her eyes there were no tears, but a look that
made Garvey choke back sobs and bend his head to hide his
expression. What he saw--or felt--behind her calmness filled
him with awe, with a kind of terror. But he did not recognize
what he saw as grief; it did not resemble any grief he had
felt or had heard about.
"He made a will just before he died," he said to Susan. "He
left everything to you."
Then she had not been mistaken. He had loved her, even as she
loved him. She turned and walked quickly from them. She
hastened into her cabin, closed the door and flung herself
across the bed. And for the first time she gave way. In that
storm her soul was like a little land bird in the clutch of a
sea hurricane. She did not understand herself. She still had
no sense that he was dead; yet had his dead body been lying
there in her arms she could not have been more shaken by
paroxysms of grief, without tears or sobs--grief that vents
itself in shrieks and peals of horrible laughter-like
screams--she smothered them in the pillows in which she buried
her face. Clélie came, opened the door, glanced in, closed
it. An hour passed--an hour and a half. Then Susan appeared
on deck--amber-white pallor, calm, beautiful, the fashionable
woman in traveling dress.
"I never before saw you with your lips not rouged!" exclaimed Clélie.
"You will never see them rouged again," said Susan.
"But it makes you look older."
"Not so old as I am," replied she.
And she busied herself about the details of the landing and
the customs, waving aside Garvey and his eager urgings that
she sit quietly and leave everything to him. In the carriage,
on the way to the hotel, she roused herself from her apparently
tranquil reverie and broke the strained silence by saying:
"How much shall I have?"
The question was merely the protruding end of a train of
thought years long and pursued all that time with scarcely an
interruption. It seemed abrupt; to Garvey it sounded brutal.
Off his guard, he showed in flooding color and staring eye how
profoundly it shocked him. Susan saw, but she did not
explain; she was not keeping accounts in emotion with the
world. She waited patiently. After a long pause he said in
a tone that contained as much of rebuke as so mild a dependent
dared express:
"He left about thirty thousand a year, Miss Lenox."
The exultant light that leaped to Susan's eye horrified him.
It even disturbed Clélie, though she better understood Susan's
nature and was not nearly so reverent as Garvey of the
hypocrisies of conventionality. But Susan had long since lost
the last trace of awe of the opinion of others. She was not
seeking to convey an impression of grief. Grief was too real
to her. She would as soon have burst out with voluble
confession of the secret of her love for Brent. She saw what
Garvey was thinking; but she was not concerned. She continued
to be herself--natural and simple. And there was no reason
why she should conceal as a thing to be ashamed of the fact
that Brent had accomplished the purpose he intended, had
filled her with honest exultation--not with delight merely,
not with triumph, but with that stronger and deeper joy which
the unhoped for pardon brings to the condemned man.
She must live on. The thought of suicide, of any form of
giving up--the thought that instantly possesses the weak and
the diseased--could not find lodgment in that young, healthy
body and mind of hers. She must live on; and suddenly she
discovered that she could live _free!_ Not after years of
doubtful struggles, of reverses, of success so hardly won that
she was left exhausted. But now--at once--_free!_ The heavy
shackles had been stricken off at a blow. She was
free--forever free! Free, forever free, from the wolves of
poverty and shame, of want and rags and filth, the wolves that
had been pursuing her with swift, hideous padded stride, the
wolves that more than once had dragged her down and torn and
trampled her, and lapped her blood. Free to enter of her own
right the world worth living in, the world from which all but
a few are shut out, the world which only a few of those
privileged to enter know how to enjoy. Free to live the life
worth while the life of leisure to work, instead of slaving to
make leisure and luxury and comfort for others. Free to
achieve something beside food, clothing, and shelter. Free to
live as _she_ pleased, instead of for the pleasure of a master
or masters. Free--free--free! The ecstasy of it surged up in
her, for the moment possessing her and submerging even thought
of how she had been freed.
She who had never acquired the habit of hypocrisy frankly
exulted in countenance exultant beyond laughter. She could
conceal her feelings, could refrain from expressing. But if
she expressed at all, it must be her true self--what she
honestly felt. Garvey hung his head in shame. He would not
have believed Susan could be so unfeeling. He would not let
his eyes see the painful sight. He would try to forget, would
deny to himself that he had seen. For to his shallow,
conventional nature Susan's expression could only mean delight
in wealth, in the opportunity that now offered to idle and to
luxuriate in the dead man's money, to realize the crude dreamings
of those lesser minds whose initial impulses toward growth have
been stifled by the routine our social system imposes upon all
but the few with the strength to persist individual.
Free! She tried to summon the haunting vision of the old
women with the tin cups of whisky reeling and staggering in
time to the hunchback's playing. She could remember every
detail, but these memories would not assemble even into a
vivid picture and the picture would have been far enough from
the horror of actuality in the vision she formerly could not
banish. As a menace, as a prophecy, the old women and the
hunchback and the strumming piano had gone forever.
Free--secure, independent--free!
After a long silence Garvey ventured stammeringly:
"He said to me--he asked me to request--he didn't make it a
condition--just a wish--a hope, Miss Lenox--that if you could,
and felt it strongly enough----"
"Wished what?" said Susan, with a sharp impatience that showed
how her nerves were unstrung.
"That you'd go on--go on with the plays--with the acting."
The violet eyes expressed wonder. "Go on?" she inquired,
"Go on?" Then in a tone that made Clélie sob and Garvey's
eyes fill she said:
"What else is there to live for, now?"
"I'm--I'm glad for his sake," stammered Garvey.
He was disconcerted by her smile. She made no other
answer--aloud. For _his_ sake! For her own sake, rather.
What other life had she but the life _he_ had given her? "And
he knew I would," she said to herself. "He said that merely to
let me know he left me entirely free. How like him, to do that!"
At the hotel she shut herself in; she saw no one, not even
Clélie, for nearly a week. Then--she went to work--and worked
like a reincarnation of Brent.
She inquired for Sperry, found that he and Rod had separated
as they no longer needed each other; she went into a sort of
partnership with Sperry for the production of Brent's
plays--he, an excellent coach as well as stage director,
helping her to finish her formal education for the stage. She
played with success half a dozen of the already produced Brent
plays. At the beginning of her second season she appeared
in what has become her most famous part--_Roxy_ in Brent's last
play, "The Scandal." With the opening night her career of
triumph began. Even the critics--therefore, not unnaturally,
suspicious of an actress who was so beautiful, so beautifully
dressed, so well supported, and so well outfitted with
actor-proof plays even the critics conceded her ability. She
was worthy of the great character Brent had created--the
wayward, many-sided, ever gay _Roxy Grandon_.
When, at the first night of "The Scandal," the audience
lingered, cheering Brent's picture thrown upon a drop,
cheering Susan, calling her out again and again, refusing to
leave the theater until it was announced that she could answer
no more calls, as she had gone home--when she was thus finally
and firmly established in her own right--she said to Sperry:
"Will you see to it that every sketch of me that appears
tomorrow says that I am the natural daughter of Lorella Lenox?"
Sperry's Punch-like face reddened.
"I've been ashamed of that fact," she went on. "It has made
me ashamed to be alive in the bottom of my heart."
"Absurd," said Sperry.
"Exactly," replied Susan. "Absurd. Even stronger than my
shame about it has been my shame that I could be so small as
to feel ashamed of it. Now--tonight" she was still in her
dressing-room. As she paused they heard the faint faraway
thunders of the applause of the lingering audience--"Listen!"
she cried. "I am ashamed no longer. Sperry, _Ich bin ein Ich!_"
"I should say," laughed he. "All you have to say is 'Susan
Lenox' and you answer all questions."
"At last I'm proud of it," she went on. "I've justified
myself. I've justified my mother. I am proud of her, and she
would be proud of me. So see that it's done, Sperry."
"Sure," said he. "You're right."
He took her hand and kissed it. She laughed, patted him on the
shoulder, kissed him on both cheeks in friendly, sisterly fashion.
He had just gone when a card was brought to her--"Dr. Robert
Stevens"--with "Sutherland, Indiana," penciled underneath.
Instantly she remembered, and had him brought to her--the man
who had rescued her from death at her birth. He proved to be
a quiet, elderly gentleman, subdued and aged beyond his
fifty-five years by the monotonous life of the drowsy old
town. He approached with a manner of embarrassed respect and
deference, stammering old-fashioned compliments. But Susan
was the simple, unaffected girl again, so natural that he soon
felt as much at ease as with one of his patients in Sutherland.
She took him away in her car to her apartment for supper with
her and Clélie, who was in the company, and Sperry. She kept
him hour after hour, questioning him about everyone and
everything in the old town, drawing him out, insisting upon
more and more details. The morning papers were brought and
they read the accounts of play and author and players. For
once there was not a dissent; all the critics agreed that it
was a great performance of a great play. And Susan made
Sperry read aloud the finest and the longest of the accounts
of Brent himself--his life, his death, his work, his lasting
fame now peculiarly assured because in Susan Lenox there had
been found a competent interpreter of his genius.
After the reading there fell silence. Susan, her pallid face
and her luminous, inquiring violet eyes inscrutable, sat
gazing into vacancy. At last Doctor Stevens moved uneasily
and rose to go. Susan roused herself, accompanied him to the
adjoining room. Said the old doctor.
"I've told you about everybody. But you've told me nothing
about the most interesting Sutherlander of all--yourself."
Susan looked at him. And he saw the wound hidden from all the
world--the wound she hid from herself as much of the time as
she could. He, the doctor, the professional confessor, had
seen such wounds often; in all the world there is hardly a
heart without one. He said:
"Since sorrow is the common lot, I wonder that men can be so
selfish or so unthinking as not to help each other in every
way to its consolations. Poor creatures that we
are--wandering in the dark, fighting desperately, not knowing
friend from foe!"
"But I am glad that you saved me," said she.
"You have the consolations--success--fame--honor."
"There is no consolation," replied she in her grave sweet way.
"I had the best. I--lost him. I shall spend my life in
flying from myself."
After a pause she went on: "I shall never speak to anyone as
I have spoken to you. You will understand all. I had the
best--the man who could have given me all a woman seeks from
a man--love, companionship, sympathy, the shelter of strong
arms. I had that. I have lost it. So----"
A long pause. Then she added:
"Usually life is almost tasteless to me. Again--for an hour
or two it is a little less so--until I remember what I have
lost. Then--the taste is very bitter--very bitter."
And she turned away.
She is a famous actress, reputed great. Some day she will be
indeed great--when she has the stage experience and the years.
Except for Clélie, she is alone. Not that there have been no
friendships in her life. There have even been passions. With
men and women of her vigor and vitality, passion is
inevitable. But those she admits find that she has little to
give, and they go away, she making no effort to detain them;
or she finds that she has nothing to give, and sends them away
as gently as may be. She has the reputation of caring for
nothing but her art--and for the great establishment for
orphans up the Hudson, into which about all her earnings go.
The establishment is named for Brent and is dedicated to her
mother. Is she happy? I do not know. I do not think she
knows. Probably she is--as long as she can avoid pausing to
think whether she is or not. What better happiness can
intelligent mortal have, or hope for? Certainly she is
triumphant, is lifted high above the storms that tortured her
girlhood and early youth, the sordid woes that make life an
unrelieved tragedy of calamity threatened and calamity realized
for the masses of mankind. The last time I saw her----
It was a few evenings ago, and she was crossing the sidewalk
before her house toward the big limousine that was to take her
to the theater. She is still young; she looked even younger
than she is. Her dress had the same exquisite quality that
made her the talk of Paris in the days of her sojourn there.
But it is not her dress that most interests me, nor the luxury
and perfection of all her surroundings. It is not even her
beauty--that is, the whole of her beauty.
Everything and every being that is individual in appearance
has some one quality, trait, characteristic, which stands out
above all the rest to make a climax of interest and charm.
With the rose it is its perfume; with the bird, perhaps the
scarlet or snowy feathers upon its breast. Among human beings
who have the rare divine dower of clear individuality the
crown and cap of distinction differs. In her--for me, at
least--the consummate fascination is not in her eyes, though I
am moved by the soft glory of their light, nor in the lovely
oval contour of her sweet, healthily pallid face. No, it is
in her mouth--sensitive, strong yet gentle, suggestive of all
the passion and suffering and striving that have built up her
life. Her mouth--the curve of it--I think it is, that sends
from time to time the mysterious thrill through her audiences.
And I imagine those who know her best look always first at
those strangely pale lips, curved in a way that suggests
bitterness melting into sympathy, sadness changing into
mirth--a way that seems to say: "I have suffered--but, see!
I have stood fast!"
Can a life teach any deeper lesson, give any higher inspiration?
As I was saying, the last time I saw her she was about to
enter her automobile. I halted and watched the graceful
movements with which she took her seat and gathered the robes
about her. And then I noted her profile, by the light of the
big lamps guarding her door. You know that profile? You have
seen its same expression in every profile of successful man or
woman who ever lived. Yes, she may be happy--doubtless is
more happy than unhappy. But--I do not envy her--or any other
of the sons and daughters of men who is blessed--and
cursed--with imagination.
And Freddie--and Rod--and Etta--and the people of
Sutherland--and all the rest who passed through her life and
out? What does it matter? Some went up, some down--not
without reason, but, alas! not for reason of desert. For the
judgments of fate are, for the most part, not unlike blows
from a lunatic striking out in the dark; if they land where
they should, it is rarely and by sheer chance. Ruth's parents
are dead; she is married to Sam Wright. He lost his father's
money in wheat speculation in Chicago--in one of the most
successful of the plutocracy's constantly recurring raids upon
the hoardings of the middle class. They live in a little
house in one of the back streets of Sutherland and he is head
clerk in Arthur Sinclair's store--a position he owes to the
fact that Sinclair is his rich brother-in-law. Ruth has
children and she is happier in them than she realizes or than
her discontented face and voice suggest. Etta is fat and
contented, the mother of many, and fond of her fat, fussy
August, the rich brewer. John Redmond--a congressman, a
possession of the Beef Trust, I believe--but not so highly
prized a possession as was his abler father.
Freddie? I saw him a year ago at the races at Auteuil. He is
huge and loose and coarse, is in the way soon to die of
Bright's disease, I suspect. There was a woman with him--very
pretty, very _chic_. I saw no other woman similarly placed
whose eyes held so assiduously, and without ever a wandering
flutter, to the face of the man who was paying. But Freddie
never noticed her. He chewed savagely at his cigar, looking
about the while for things to grumble at or to curse. Rod?
He is still writing indifferent plays with varying success.
He long since wearied of Constance Francklyn, but she clings
to him and, as she is a steady moneymaker, he tolerates her.
Brent? He is statelily ensconced up at Woodlawn. Susan has
never been to his grave--there. His grave in her heart--she
avoids that too, when she can. But there are times--there
always will be times----
If you doubt it, look at her profile.
Yes, she has learned to live. But--she has paid the price.