As she heard Ray coming up the stairs, she tossed some more wood on the
fire and lighted the candles in her Russian candlesticks.
"It's what any silly girl would do!" she admitted to herself
disgustedly.
Well, there was his rap on the foolish imitation Warwick knocker. Kate
flung wide the door. He stood in the dim light of the hall, hesitating,
it would seem, to enter upon the evening's drama. Tall, graceful as
always, with a magnetic force behind his languor, he impressed Kate as a
man whom few women would be able to resist; whom, indeed, it was a sort
of folly, perhaps even an impiety, to cast out of one's life.
"Kate!" he said, "Kate!" The whole challenge of love was in the accent.
But she held him off with the first method of opposition she could
devise.
"My name!" she admitted gayly. "I used to think I didn't like it, but I
do."
He came in and swung to the door behind him, flinging his coat and hat
upon a chair.
"Do you mean you like to hear me say it?" he demanded. He stood by the
fire which had begun to leap and crackle, drawing off his gloves with a
decisive gesture.
She saw that she was not going to be able to put him off. The hour had
struck. So she faced him bravely.
"Sit down, Ray," she said.
He looked at her a moment as if measuring the value of this courtesy.
"Thank you," he said, almost resentfully, as he sank into the chair she
placed for him.
So they sat together before the fire gravely, like old married people,
as Kate could not help noticing. Yet they were combatants; not as a
married couple might have been, furtively and miserably, but with a
frank, almost an exhilarating, sense of equally matched strength, and of
their chance to conduct their struggle in the open.
"It's come to this, Kate," he said at length. "Either I must have your
promise or I stay away entirely."
"I don't believe you need to do either," she retorted with the
exasperating manner of an elder sister. "It's an obsession with you,
that's all."
"What man thinks he needs, he does need," Ray responded sententiously.
"It appears to me that without you I shall be a lost man. I mean
precisely what I say. You wouldn't like me to give out that fact in an
hysterical manner, and I don't see that I need to. I make the statement
as I would make any other, and I expect to be believed, because I'm a
truth-telling person. The fairest scene in the world or the most
interesting circumstance becomes meaningless to me if you are not
included in it. It isn't alone that you are my sweetheart--the lady of
my dreams. It's much more than that. Sometimes when I'm with you I feel
like a boy with his mother, safe from all the dreadful things that might
happen to a child. Sometimes you seem like a sister, so really kind and
so outwardly provoking. Often you are my comrade, and we are completely
congenial, neuter entities. The thing is we have a satisfaction when we
are together that we never could apart. There it is, Kate, the fact we
can't get around. We're happier together than we are apart!"
He seemed to hold the theory up in the air as if it were a shining
jewel, and to expect her to look at it till it dazzled her. But her
voice was dull as she said: "I know, Ray. I know--now--but shall we
stay so?"
"Why shouldn't we, woman? There's every reason to suppose that we'd grow
happier. We want each other. More than that, we need each other. With
me, it's such a deep need that it reaches to the very roots of my being.
It's my groundwork, my foundation stone. I don't know how to put it to
make you realize--"
He caught a quizzical smile on her face, and after a moment of
bewilderment he leaped from his chair and came toward her.
"God!" he half breathed, "why do I waste time talking?"
He had done what her look challenged him to do,--had substituted action
for words,--yet now, as he stretched out his arms to her, she held him
off, fearful that she would find herself weeping on his breast. It would
be sweet to do it--like getting home after a long voyage. But dizzily,
with a stark clinging to a rock of integrity in herself, she fought him
off, more with her militant spirit than with her outspread,
protesting hands.
"No, no," she cried. "Don't hypnotize me, Ray! Leave me my judgment,
leave me my reason. If it's a partnership we're to enter into, I ought
to know the terms."
"The terms, Kate? Why, I'll love you as long as I live; I'll treasure
you as the most precious thing in all the world."
"And the winds of heaven shall not be allowed to visit my cheek too
roughly," she managed to say tantalizingly.
He paused, perplexed.
"I know I bewilder you, dear man," she said. "But this is the point: I
don't want to be protected. I mean I don't want to be made dependent; I
don't want my interpretations of life at second-hand. I object to having
life filter through anybody else to me; I want it, you see, on my
own account."
"Why, Kate!" It wasn't precisely a protest. He seemed rather to reproach
her for hindering the onward sweep of their happiness--for opposing him
with her ideas when they might together have attained a beautiful
emotional climax.
"I couldn't stand it," she went on, lifting her eyes to his, "to be
given permission to do this, that, or the other thing; or to be put on
an allowance; or made to ask a favor--"
He sank down in his chair and folded across his breast the arms whose
embrace she had not claimed.
"You seem to mean," he said, "that you don't want to be a wife. You
prefer your independence to love."
"I want both," Kate declared, rising and standing before him. "I want
the most glorious and abounding love woman ever had. I want so much of
it that it never could be computed or measured--so much it will lift me
up above anything that I now am or that I know, and make me stronger and
freer and braver."
"Well, that's what your love would do for me," broke in McCrea. "That's
what the love of a good woman is expected to do for a man."
"Of course," cried Kate; "but is that what the love of a good man is
expected to do for a woman? Or is it expected to reconcile her to
obscurity, to the dimming of her personality, and to the endless petty
sacrifices that ought to shame her--and don't--those immoral sacrifices
about which she has contrived to throw so many deceiving, iridescent
mists of religion? Oh, yes, we are hypnotized into our foolish state of
dependence easily enough! I know that. The mating instinct drugs us. I
suppose the unborn generations reach out their shadowy multitudinous
hands and drag us to our destiny!"
"What a woman you are! How you put things!" He tried but failed to keep
the offended look from his face, and Kate knew perfectly well how hard
he was striving not to think her indelicate. But she went on
regardlessly.
"You think that's the very thing I ought to want to be my destiny? Well,
perhaps I do. I want children--of course, I want them."
She stopped for a moment because she saw him flushing with
embarrassment. Yet she couldn't apologize, and, anyway, an apology would
avail nothing. If he thought her unwomanly because she talked about her
woman's life,--the very life to which he was inviting her,--nothing she
could say would change his mind. It wasn't a case for argument. She
walked over to the fire and warmed her nervous hands at it.
"I'm sorry, Ray," she said finally.
"Sorry?"
"Sorry that I'm not the tender, trusting, maiden-creature who could fall
trembling in your arms and love you forever, no matter what you did, and
lie to you and for you the way good wives do. But I'm not--and, oh, I
wish I were--or else--"
"Yes, Kate--what?"
"Or else that you were the kind of a man I need, the mate I'm looking
for!"
"But, Kate, I protest that I am. I love you. Isn't that enough? I'm not
worthy of you, maybe. Yet if trying to earn you by being loyal makes me
worthy, then I am. Don't say no to me, Kate. It will shatter me--like an
earthquake. And I believe you'll regret it, too. We can make each other
happy. I feel it! I'd stake my life on it. Wait--"
He arose and paced the floor back and forth.
"Do you remember the lines from Tennyson's 'Princess' where the Prince
pleads with Ida? I thought I could repeat them, but I'm afraid I'll mar
them. I don't want to do that; they're too applicable to my case."
He knew where she kept her Tennyson, and he found the volume and the
page, and when he had handed the book to her, he snatched his coat
and hat.
"I'm coming for my answer a week from to-night," he said. "For God's
sake, girl, don't make a mistake. Life's so short that it ought to be
happy. At best I'll only be able to live with you a few decades, and I'd
like it to be centuries."
He had not meant to do it, she could see, but suddenly he came to her,
and leaning above her burned his kisses upon her eyes. Then he flung
himself out of the room, and by the light of her guttering candles
she read:--
"Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height.
What pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang).
In height and cold, the splendor of the hills?
But cease to move so near the Heavens, and cease
To glide a sunbeam by the blasted pine,
To sit a star upon the sparkling spire;
And come, for Love is of the valley, come thou down
And find him; by the happy threshold, he
Or hand in hand with Plenty in the maize,
Or red with spirted purple of the vats,
Or foxlike in the vine; nor cares to walk
With Death and Morning on the Silver Horns,
Nor wilt thou snare him in the white ravine,
Nor find him dropped upon the firths of ice,
That huddling slant in furrow-cloven falls
To roll the torrent out of dusky doors;
But follow; let the torrent dance thee down
To find him in the valley; let the wild
Lean-headed eagles yelp alone, and leave
The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill
Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,
That like a broken purpose waste in air;
So waste not thou; but come; for all the vales
Await thee; azure pillars of the hearth
Arise to thee; the children call, and I
Thy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound,
Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;
Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro' the lawn,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees."
She read it twice, soothed by its vague loveliness. She could hear,
however, only the sound of the suburban trains crashing by in the
distance, and the honking of the machines in the Plaisance. None of
those spirit sounds of which Ray had dreamed penetrated through her
vigorous materialism. But still, she knew that she was lonely; she knew
Ray's going left a gray vacancy.
"I can't think it out," she said at last. "I'll go to sleep. Perhaps
there--"
But neither voices nor visions came to her in sleep. She awoke the next
morning as unillumined as when she went to her bed. And as she dressed
and thought of the full day before her, she was indefinably glad that
she was under no obligations to consult any one about her programme,
either of work or play.