For the next six weeks Anthony was forced to listen to the distracted
self-accusations of Mariana. When the little white coffin had been
carried to Greenwood and laid in the over-grown plot beside the graves
of Algarcife's parents, to be shadowed by the storied urns that
redounded to the honor of a less impoverished generation, Mariana
returned, and, throwing herself upon the floor, refused consolation.
"I want nothing," she said--"nothing, nothing. What could comfort me?"
At Anthony's protestations of love and grief she lifted dull and
scornful eyes, wherein the triumph of motherhood showed supreme over all
other emotions.
"How can you know?" she asked, between tearless sobs. "You did not nurse
her, and hold her in your arms night and day; you did not bathe her
while she laughed at the bubbles; you did not put on her little dresses
and socks. Oh, my baby! my baby! I want my baby!"
Then she would rise and pace up and down in a sudden frenzy of despair,
clinching her hands at her own impotence, tearing her wounds asunder
with remorseless recollections. It was as if she found satisfaction in
thus inflicting upon herself the added agony of recalling the minor
details of her loss--in voicing the keenest passion of her grief.
Algarcife, writing in the adjoining room and wrung by a tortured brain,
would listen to her unsteady tread as she walked ceaselessly back and
forth, until the sound would madden him with its pauseless
monotony--and then would come that half-choked cry for reckoning with
fate, "Oh, my baby!"
To his more self-contained nature the violence of Mariana's grief was
like the searing of the bleeding sores in his own heart. To avoid that
cry of stricken motherhood he would have given the better portion of his
life--to have been deaf to that impulsive expression of a pain he felt
but could not utter he would have damned his soul.
And when, during the first few days, Mariana gathered together all the
scattered little garments, and brooded over them with the passion of
irremediableness, he would cry aloud out of his own bitterness,
"Put them away! If you love me, Mariana, hide them."
But Mariana, in the selfishness of loss, would glance at him with
reproachful eyes, and turn to stroke the rubber doll in its bright-hued
dress, and the half-worn socks with the impress of restless feet.
In the night she would start from a troubled sleep with corroding
self-questionings. "Make a light," she would say, fretfully, sitting up
and staring into the gloom. "Make a light. The darkness stifles me. I
can't breathe."
Then, when the flame of the candle would flare up beside her, she would
turn upon Anthony the blaze of her excited eyes, and play upon the sheet
with feverish fingers. The loss of sleep which these spasms entailed
upon Algarcife was an additional drain upon his wrecking system, and
sometimes in sheer exhaustion he would plead for peace.
"Mariana, only sleep. Lie still, and I will fan you--or shall I give you
bromide?"
But the hot questions would rush upon him and he would answer them as he
had answered such questions for the past six weeks.
"Was it my fault? Could I have done anything? Was it taken away because
I didn't want it to come?"
"Mariana!"
"Do you remember that I said I hoped it would die? You knew they were
idle words, didn't you? You knew that I didn't mean it?"
"Of course, my dearest."
"But somebody told me once that for every idle word we would be held to
account. Is this the account?"
"Hush."
For a moment she would lie silent, and then, rising again, the torrent
would come.
"Perhaps if I had not left the window open that first warm day. And I
did not send for the doctor at once. I thought it was only fretful.
Perhaps--"
"You could have done nothing."
"I did not know. I was so ignorant. I should have studied. I should have
asked questions."
Then she would turn towards him, laying her hot hand upon his arm.
"Tell me that it was not my fault. Tell me--tell me!"
"It was not. It was not."
"But I want her so. I want to feel her. I want to feel her soft and warm
in my arms. Oh, my baby!"
And so the summer nights would wear away.
But as time went on a reactionary lethargy pervaded her. Her vitality
being spent, she was left limp and devoid of energy. For hours she would
lie motionless in the heated room, the afternoon sun, intensified by the
reflected glare of pressed brick, streaming upon her, and she would
appear to be indifferent to both heat and glare. From Algarcife she
turned with an avoidance which was almost instinctive. When he touched
her she shrank into silence, when he spoke she met his words with
lethargic calm. It was as if the demands he made upon her emotional
nature became irksome to her when that nature lay dormant.
"I suppose I love you," she said one day, in answer to his questions. "I
think I do, but I don't feel it. I don't feel anything. I only want to
forget."
"Not to forget me, Mariana?"
Mariana shook her head impatiently.
"Do you know," she continued, "that the thought of feeling makes me
positively sick? I haven't any left, and I don't like it in other
people. I am tired of it all."
"And of me?"
"I don't know. I think not, but I oughtn't to have married you."
"Mariana!"
"It would have been much better. You said so yourself once. But love is
so strange. It makes people do such absurd things."
Algarcife did not reply. There was resentment in the look he bent upon
her. He had not learned that even a woman in love is not a woman always
in love--that love, in common with all other conditions, is subject to
the forces which attract and repel, and that its equilibrium is
maintained by a logical adjustment of opposites. To him Mariana's
alienation betokened a fundamental failing in her nature, and with the
thought he experienced a dull anger.
"I have felt so much in my life," continued Mariana, "that my capacity
for sensations is lying fallow. The lack of ice in my tea and the heat
in my room are of more importance than the excesses of affection. Were
you ever that way?"
For a moment Algarcife did not reply; then he said, "You are very
uncomfortable?"
"Yes."
"When we leave The Gotham it will be still worse. That room on Fourth
Street is hellish."
"No doubt."
"How will you stand it?"
Mariana interlaced her fingers with impatient weariness and yawned.
"I don't know. As I stand it now, I suppose. We are poorer than ever,
aren't we?"
"Poorer than ever."
She fingered her gown softly. "I suppose I shouldn't have bought this
mourning," she said. "What a pity!"
When Anthony had gone she went out upon the fire-escape and looked down
into the street below. The cry of a vender rolling his cart of over-ripe
melons came up to her, and she followed his figure with curious
intentness. From some indefinable cause, the vender suggested Signor
Morani to her mind, and she recalled his warning, as she had recalled it
in a different mood that rainy evening over a year ago. She realized now
that Anthony's objection to her accepting Signor Morani's offer was
still a canker within her heart. There remained, and there would always
remain, the possibility that had she overruled his objection and entered
into the engagement, Isolde might have been sent from the city, and
might now be playing in some country meadow. The possibility, facing her
as it did in all its ghastliness, produced a gnawing remorse, as
invincible as a devil's thrust.
Upon this followed the conception that her marriage had doomed to
failure not only her own life, but Anthony's; and there came a
passionate regret for the part she had played in drawing him from his
isolated abstraction into the turmoil of life and its passions. She
blamed herself that she had gone to him that night, carrying the letter
in her hand. She blamed herself that she had not resisted the appeal of
her love, and, with a sudden pang, she realized all that the change had
meant to him--the book that remained unwritten, the treadmill of
uncongenial toil, the physical hardihood which was being slowly ground
to dust. She realized this in its fulness, but with no determination of
endeavor, no resolutions to battle more with fate. There was regret for
the past, but there were no pledges for the future. The outcome was
beyond her and beyond Anthony, this she knew. It was something to be
left to the floodgates of hope that would be overborne by the press of
time. In the lowered state of her vitality she felt almost indifferently
her own inability to contest for larger measures of individual gain. She
accepted destiny, and acquiesced, not in resignation, but in the apathy
of one whom despair has drugged.
And above it all there rose the desire to escape, to be freed from it
forever. "If he had never seen me!" she cried, passionately. "If he had
never seen me!" Then colorless adumbrations of her own past blocked her
horizon--and she confronted the ashes of her aspirations. She saw those
illuminated dreams of her girlhood--the ideals which had crumbled at the
corroding touch of care. She saw the demand for power which had been
thwarted, the ambitions which had been undone, the cry for life more
abundant which had been forced back upon her quivering lips. She saw
herself walking day after day with empty arms along the way she had
carried the child. She saw herself a drag upon her own existence and
upon the existence of the man for whom she thought a love she had no
power to feel. She saw the stretch of those monotonous and neutral-toned
years, saw the sordid fight for bread, saw her sense of joy and beauty
blunted, saw the masculine brain that was fitted to grasp universal laws
decaying in the atmosphere of vulgar toil. And, woven and interwoven in
her thoughts, was the knowledge that the affection to be invigorated by
deprivations and to rise triumphant over poverty was not hers--that the
love which in happier surroundings might have shown inviolable, which
the great calamities of life might have left unassailed, had grown gray
in the round of unsatisfied desires and victorious commonplaces. In the
days to come, would not the jarring notes of their natures be
exaggerated, the sympathetic ones suppressed? When old age came, as come
it surely would, what would remain to them save a memory of discords and
a present of unfulfilment? Was not death itself preferable to death in
life?
Down on the sidewalk below a ragged urchin was turning somersaults in
the shade. Suddenly, with a howl of delight, he pounced upon a
half-rotten peach which a passer-by had thrown into the gutter. Mariana
smiled faintly, left the fire-escape, and went in-doors.
A week later they gave up The Gotham and moved into the room on Fourth
Street. Algarcife made an attempt to sell the greater part of his
library before moving, but the price offered was merely nominal, and at
the last moment his heart misgave him. So he hired a dilapidated van,
and the books were transported to the new lodgings and stacked along the
south wall.
When the hour came for their departure, it was with a feeling of despair
that he took Mariana's bag and descended for the last time the steps of
The Gotham. A black finality seemed looming beyond their destination.
At the entrance, Mr. Nevins, with tears in his eyes, grasped Anthony's
hand, and Miss Ramsey fell upon Mariana's neck.
Mariana laughed a little desperately.
"It reminds me of the time I saw a family move to the poor-house," she
said; "only their friends weren't quite so affectionate."
"But you will come back," insisted Mr. Nevins. "Surely you will come
back when things look a little brighter."
"Which will be when the flames of spontaneous combustion illuminate this
planet," remarked Ardly, cynically, but his eyes were sad as they rested
upon Mariana.
"Or when a relation dies," said Mr. Nevins.
"How we shall miss you!" said Miss Ramsey.
Here Mr. Paul, who had sauntered up as if by chance, drew Algarcife
aside.
"If you had only told me," he said, dryly. "I have a few thousands in
bank, and I--"
Anthony caught his hand, but his voice was choked and he could only
shake his head. Then Mariana said good-bye, and they left the house and
ascended the steps to the platform of the elevated road.
As Mariana took her seat, she turned to the window and watched the
little fire-escape upon the fourth story until The Gotham was lost to
sight. Then she raised her veil and wiped a tear-drop from her
eyelashes.
When the door was unlocked and she entered the new room, a fit of
restlessness seized her. The barrenness of existence struck her with the
force of a blow, and, with a swift return of impulse, she cried out in
rebellion. The stale odor of cooking, which rose from the apartment
below, the dustiness of the floor, the blackened ceiling, the hard and
unyielding bed, gave her a convulsive shudder.
"I cannot bear it," she said. "I cannot bear it."
Algarcife left the window, where he had been standing, and came towards
her. Between himself and Mariana a constraint had been growing, and he
recalled suddenly the fact that their old warmth of intercourse had
chilled into an indifferent reserve.
"It is bad," he said. "I am very sorry."
Mariana took off her hat and veil and laid them in one of the bureau
drawers. The drawer creaked as she opened it, and the sound jarred upon
Anthony's overwrought sensitiveness. He noticed suddenly that Mariana's
expression had grown querulous, and that she had ceased to wear her hair
becomingly.
"You can hardly think that I enjoy it," he added. "An existence composed
of two-thirds nerves and one-third caffeine is hardly rose-color."
He looked gray and haggard, and the hand which he raised trembled
slightly.
"Hardly," returned Mariana, shortly.
Both felt an instinctive desire to vent their wretchedness in words, and
yet each felt an almost passionate pity for the other. The very pity
emphasized the aggravation from which they suffered, and it was by a
process of reflex action that, when goaded by thoughts of each other,
they would strike out recklessly.
"No," repeated Mariana; "but it seems to be a case where two, instead of
lessening the misery, increase the discomforts."
Immediately after supper she went to bed, tossing restlessly for hours
because the mattress was uneven, the sheets coarse, and the lamp, by
which Anthony worked, shining in her face.
When she finally fell asleep, it was with a sob of revolt.