He dined alone and walked home to his rooms in the rain. As he turned
into Fifth Avenue he caught the wet gleam of carriages on their way to
the opera, and he took the first side street, in a moment of irritation
against the petty restrictions that thwarted every impulse. It was
ridiculous to give up the opera, not because one might possibly be bored
there, but because one must pay for the experiment.
In his sitting-room, the tacit connivance of the inanimate had centred
the lamp-light on a photograph of Alexa Trent, placed, in the obligatory
silver frame, just where, as memory officiously reminded him, Margaret
Aubyn’s picture had long throned in its stead. Miss Trent’s features
cruelly justified the usurpation. She had the kind of beauty that comes
of a happy accord of face and spirit. It is not given to many to have
the lips and eyes of their rarest mood, and some women go through life
behind a mask expressing only their anxiety about the butcher’s bill or
their inability to see a joke. With Miss Trent, face and mind had the
same high serious contour. She looked like a throned Justice by some
grave Florentine painter; and it seemed to Glennard that her most
salient attribute, or that at least to which her conduct gave most
consistent expression, was a kind of passionate justice--the intuitive
feminine justness that is so much rarer than a reasoned impartiality.
Circumstances had tragically combined to develop this instinct into a
conscious habit. She had seen more than most girls of the shabby side of
life, of the perpetual tendency of want to cramp the noblest attitude.
Poverty and misfortune had overhung her childhood and she had none of
the pretty delusions about life that are supposed to be the crowning
grace of girlhood. This very competence, which gave her a touching
reasonableness, made Glennard’s situation more difficult than if he had
aspired to a princess bred in the purple. Between them they asked
so little--they knew so well how to make that little do--but they
understood also, and she especially did not for a moment let him forget,
that without that little the future they dreamed of was impossible.
The sight of her photograph quickened Glennard’s exasperation. He was
sick and ashamed of the part he was playing. He had loved her now for
two years, with the tranquil tenderness that gathers depth and volume
as it nears fulfilment; he knew that she would wait for him--but the
certitude was an added pang. There are times when the constancy of the
woman one cannot marry is almost as trying as that of the woman one does
not want to.
Glennard turned up his reading-lamp and stirred the fire. He had a long
evening before him and he wanted to crowd out thought with action. He
had brought some papers from his office and he spread them out on his
table and squared himself to the task....
It must have been an hour later that he found himself automatically
fitting a key into a locked drawer. He had no more notion than a
somnambulist of the mental process that had led up to this action. He
was just dimly aware of having pushed aside the papers and the heavy
calf volumes that a moment before had bounded his horizon, and of laying
in their place, without a trace of conscious volition, the parcel he had
taken from the drawer.
The letters were tied in packets of thirty or forty. There were a great
many packets. On some of the envelopes the ink was fading; on others,
which bore the English post-mark, it was still fresh. She had been dead
hardly three years, and she had written, at lengthening intervals, to
the last....
He undid one of the earlier packets--little notes written during their
first acquaintance at Hillbridge. Glennard, on leaving college, had
begun life in his uncle’s law office in the old university town. It was
there that, at the house of her father, Professor Forth, he had first
met the young lady then chiefly distinguished for having, after two
years of a conspicuously unhappy marriage, returned to the protection of
the paternal roof.
Mrs. Aubyn was at that time an eager and somewhat tragic young woman,
of complex mind and undeveloped manners, whom her crude experience of
matrimony had fitted out with a stock of generalizations that exploded
like bombs in the academic air of Hillbridge. In her choice of a husband
she had been fortunate enough, if the paradox be permitted, to light on
one so signally gifted with the faculty of putting himself in the wrong
that her leaving him had the dignity of a manifesto--made her, as
it were, the spokeswoman of outraged wifehood. In this light she was
cherished by that dominant portion of Hillbridge society which was
least indulgent to conjugal differences, and which found a proportionate
pleasure in being for once able to feast openly on a dish liberally
seasoned with the outrageous. So much did this endear Mrs. Aubyn to the
university ladies that they were disposed from the first to allow her
more latitude of speech and action than the ill-used wife was generally
accorded in Hillbridge, where misfortune was still regarded as a
visitation designed to put people in their proper place and make them
feel the superiority of their neighbors. The young woman so privileged
combined with a kind of personal shyness an intellectual audacity that
was like a deflected impulse of coquetry: one felt that if she had been
prettier she would have had emotions instead of ideas. She was in fact
even then what she had always remained: a genius capable of the
acutest generalizations, but curiously undiscerning where her personal
susceptibilities were concerned. Her psychology failed her just where it
serves most women and one felt that her brains would never be a guide
to her heart. Of all this, however, Glennard thought little in the first
year of their acquaintance. He was at an age when all the gifts and
graces are but so much undiscriminated food to the ravening egoism of
youth. In seeking Mrs. Aubyn’s company he was prompted by an intuitive
taste for the best as a pledge of his own superiority. The sympathy
of the cleverest woman in Hillbridge was balm to his craving for
distinction: it was public confirmation of his secret sense that he was
cut out for a bigger place. It must not be understood that Glennard was
vain. Vanity contents itself with the coarsest diet; there is no
palate so fastidious as that of self-distrust. To a youth of Glennard’s
aspirations the encouragement of a clever woman stood for the symbol
of all success. Later, when he had begun to feel his way, to gain a
foothold, he would not need such support; but it served to carry
him lightly and easily over what is often a period of insecurity and
discouragement.
It would be unjust, however, to represent his interest in Mrs. Aubyn as
a matter of calculation. It was as instinctive as love, and it missed
being love by just such a hair-breadth deflection from the line of
beauty as had determined the curve of Mrs. Aubyn’s lips. When they met
she had just published her first novel, and Glennard, who afterward had
an ambitious man’s impatience of distinguished women, was young enough
to be dazzled by the semi-publicity it gave her. It was the kind of book
that makes elderly ladies lower their voices and call each other “my
dear” when they furtively discuss it; and Glennard exulted in the
superior knowledge of the world that enabled him to take as a matter of
course sentiments over which the university shook its head. Still
more delightful was it to hear Mrs. Aubyn waken the echoes of academic
drawing-rooms with audacities surpassing those of her printed page. Her
intellectual independence gave a touch of comradeship to their intimacy,
prolonging the illusion of college friendships based on a joyous
interchange of heresies. Mrs. Aubyn and Glennard represented to each
other the augur’s wink behind the Hillbridge idol: they walked together
in that light of young omniscience from which fate so curiously excludes
one’s elders.
Husbands who are notoriously inopportune, may even die inopportunely,
and this was the revenge that Mr. Aubyn, some two years after her return
to Hillbridge, took upon his injured wife. He died precisely at the
moment when Glennard was beginning to criticise her. It was not that
she bored him; she did what was infinitely worse--she made him feel his
inferiority. The sense of mental equality had been gratifying to his raw
ambition; but as his self-knowledge defined itself, his understanding of
her also increased; and if man is at times indirectly flattered by the
moral superiority of woman, her mental ascendency is extenuated by no
such oblique tribute to his powers. The attitude of looking up is a
strain on the muscles; and it was becoming more and more Glennard’s
opinion that brains, in a woman, should be merely the obverse of beauty.
To beauty Mrs. Aubyn could lay no claim; and while she had enough
prettiness to exasperate him by her incapacity to make use of it, she
seemed invincibly ignorant of any of the little artifices whereby women
contrive to palliate their defects and even to turn them into graces.
Her dress never seemed a part of her; all her clothes had an impersonal
air, as though they had belonged to someone else and been borrowed in an
emergency that had somehow become chronic. She was conscious enough of
her deficiencies to try to amend them by rash imitations of the most
approved models; but no woman who does not dress well intuitively will
ever do so by the light of reason, and Mrs. Aubyn’s plagiarisms, to
borrow a metaphor of her trade, somehow never seemed to be incorporated
with the text.
Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.
The fame that came to Mrs. Aubyn with her second book left Glennard’s
imagination untouched, or had at most the negative effect of removing
her still farther from the circle of his contracting sympathies. We are
all the sport of time; and fate had so perversely ordered the chronology
of Margaret Aubyn’s romance that when her husband died Glennard felt as
though he had lost a friend.
It was not in his nature to be needlessly unkind; and though he was
in the impregnable position of the man who has given a woman no more
definable claim on him than that of letting her fancy that he loves
her, he would not for the world have accentuated his advantage by any
betrayal of indifference. During the first year of her widowhood their
friendship dragged on with halting renewals of sentiment, becoming more
and more a banquet of empty dishes from which the covers were never
removed; then Glennard went to New York to live and exchanged the faded
pleasures of intercourse for the comparative novelty of correspondence.
Her letters, oddly enough, seemed at first to bring her nearer than her
presence. She had adopted, and she successfully maintained, a note as
affectionately impersonal as his own; she wrote ardently of her work,
she questioned him about his, she even bantered him on the inevitable
pretty girl who was certain before long to divert the current of his
confidences. To Glennard, who was almost a stranger in New York,
the sight of Mrs. Aubyn’s writing was like a voice of reassurance in
surroundings as yet insufficiently aware of him. His vanity found a
retrospective enjoyment in the sentiment his heart had rejected, and
this factitious emotion drove him once or twice to Hillbridge, whence,
after scenes of evasive tenderness, he returned dissatisfied with
himself and her. As he made room for himself in New York and peopled the
space he had cleared with the sympathies at the disposal of agreeable
and self-confident young men, it seemed to him natural to infer that
Mrs. Aubyn had refurnished in the same manner the void he was not
unwilling his departure should have left. But in the dissolution of
sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to
withdraw their funds at the same time; and Glennard gradually learned
that he stood for the venture on which Mrs. Aubyn had irretrievably
staked her all. It was not the kind of figure he cared to cut. He had
no fancy for leaving havoc in his wake and would have preferred to sow
a quick growth of oblivion in the spaces wasted by his unconsidered
inroads; but if he supplied the seed it was clearly Mrs. Aubyn’s
business to see to the raising of the crop. Her attitude seemed indeed
to throw his own reasonableness into distincter relief: so that they
might have stood for thrift and improvidence in an allegory of the
affections.
It was not that Mrs. Aubyn permitted herself to be a pensioner on his
bounty. He knew she had no wish to keep herself alive on the small
change of sentiment; she simply fed on her own funded passion, and the
luxuries it allowed her made him, even then, dimly aware that she had
the secret of an inexhaustible alchemy.
Their relations remained thus negatively tender till she suddenly wrote
him of her decision to go abroad to live. Her father had died, she had
no near ties in Hillbridge, and London offered more scope than New York
to her expanding personality. She was already famous and her laurels
were yet unharvested.
For a moment the news roused Glennard to a jealous sense of lost
opportunities. He wanted, at any rate, to reassert his power before she
made the final effort of escape. They had not met for over a year, but
of course he could not let her sail without seeing her. She came to
New York the day before her departure, and they spent its last hours
together. Glennard had planned no course of action--he simply meant to
let himself drift. They both drifted, for a long time, down the languid
current of reminiscence; she seemed to sit passive, letting him push
his way back through the overgrown channels of the past. At length she
reminded him that they must bring their explorations to an end. He rose
to leave, and stood looking at her with the same uncertainty in his
heart. He was tired of her already--he was always tired of her--yet he
was not sure that he wanted her to go.
“I may never see you again,” he said, as though confidently appealing to
her compassion.
Her look enveloped him. “And I shall see you always--always!”
“Why go then--?” escaped him.
“To be nearer you,” she answered; and the words dismissed him like a
closing door.
The door was never to reopen; but through its narrow crack Glennard, as
the years went on, became more and more conscious of an inextinguishable
light directing its small ray toward the past which consumed so little
of his own commemorative oil. The reproach was taken from this thought
by Mrs. Aubyn’s gradual translation into terms of universality. In
becoming a personage she so naturally ceased to be a person that
Glennard could almost look back to his explorations of her spirit as on
a visit to some famous shrine, immortalized, but in a sense desecrated,
by popular veneration.
Her letters, from London, continued to come with the same tender
punctuality; but the altered conditions of her life, the vistas of new
relationships disclosed by every phrase, made her communications as
impersonal as a piece of journalism. It was as though the state, the
world, indeed, had taken her off his hands, assuming the maintenance of
a temperament that had long exhausted his slender store of reciprocity.
In the retrospective light shed by the letters he was blinded to
their specific meaning. He was not a man who concerned himself with
literature, and they had been to him, at first, simply the extension of
her brilliant talk, later the dreaded vehicle of a tragic importunity.
He knew, of course, that they were wonderful; that, unlike the authors
who give their essence to the public and keep only a dry rind for their
friends, Mrs. Aubyn had stored of her rarest vintage for this hidden
sacrament of tenderness. Sometimes, indeed, he had been oppressed,
humiliated almost, by the multiplicity of her allusions, the wide scope
of her interests, her persistence in forcing her superabundance of
thought and emotion into the shallow receptacle of his sympathy; but
he had never thought of the letters objectively, as the production of a
distinguished woman; had never measured the literary significance of her
oppressive prodigality. He was almost frightened now at the wealth in
his hands; the obligation of her love had never weighed on him like
this gift of her imagination: it was as though he had accepted from her
something to which even a reciprocal tenderness could not have justified
his claim.
He sat a long time staring at the scattered pages on his desk; and in
the sudden realization of what they meant he could almost fancy some
alchemistic process changing them to gold as he stared. He had the
sense of not being alone in the room, of the presence of another self
observing from without the stirring of subconscious impulses that sent
flushes of humiliation to his forehead. At length he stood up, and
with the gesture of a man who wishes to give outward expression to his
purpose--to establish, as it were, a moral alibi--swept the letters into
a heap and carried them toward the grate. But it would have taken too
long to burn all the packets. He turned back to the table and one by one
fitted the pages into their envelopes; then he tied up the letters and
put them back into the locked drawer.