Part 35 (1/2)
Shortly after she went away--and left Magdalena alone with Henry James.
She took up one of the volumes. As she did so, something stirred in the cellars of her mind--beat its stiff wings against the narrow walls--struggled forward and upward.
She stood on the porch in the late evening: alone in a fog. Her young mind opened to literary desire--preceding it was a swift disturbing presentiment; it had recurred once, and again--but not for several years. What did it mean, here again? And what had Henry James to do with it? She dropped into a chair. Her hands trembled as they opened the book.
x.x.x
It was a week before she squarely faced the relation of Henry James to her own ambitions. Then she admitted it in so many words: she could not write, she never could write. The writers who were dust had inspired her to emulation; it took a great contemporary to bring her despair. It is only the living enemies we fear; the dead and their past are beautiful unrealities to the smarting ego.
Magdalena realised for the first time the exact value she had placed upon the art of expression,--a value that was in inverse ratio to her limitations. Literature to her was, above all else, the art of words.
Stories were to be picked up anywhere: had she not found a number ready to her hand? The creative faculty might, in its unique development, be something supremer still, although crippled without the perfected medium of this writer, who seemed above all writers to be the master and not the servant of words. She re-read her own efforts. They represented the hard thought and work of six years; not a great span, perhaps, but long enough to determine the promise of a faculty. The stories were wooden.
Her work would always be wooden. There was not a phrase to delight the cultivated reader, not a line that any moderately clever person, given the same material, might not have written. After as many more years of labour she might become a praiseworthy writer of the third rank. She put her ma.n.u.scripts in the fire.
After that, life turned grey indeed. Her imagination might have gone into the flames with the stories, for her illusions about Trennahan fell to ashes coincidently. She no longer believed that he would return, that he would even write demanding her friends.h.i.+p. She could hardly recall his face; the sound of his voice was gone from her. Indubitably he had forgotten her long since. Why not? She had ascended above the rosy stratum of youth, where delusions were possible.
Then began a long struggle against despair and its terrible consequences. It was a summer of raging trades which seemed to lift the sand dunes from their foundations and hurl them through the choking city. She could take little exercise. The Library was her only resource, but one can read only so many hours a day. If she could but travel, as Helena did, when anything went wrong! Or if her uncle had only left her an income that she could expend in charity! Her sympathy for the poor had never ebbed, and she would have gladly spent her life in their service, although she doubted if they were more miserable than herself.
It was true that she had enough to eat, a roof to her head, and clothes to wear,--extremely plain clothes; but that was all. A nun or a prisoner had as much.
There were times when she was threatened with a consuming hatred of life, and then she fled out into the dust and battled with the storms within and without; for her ideals were all that were left her. She knew the ugly potentialities in the depths of her ill-compounded nature: the day she ceased to be true to herself there would be a tragedy in that dark house on the hill. Sometimes she wondered toward what end she was persevering, striving to perfect the better part of her. A quarter of a century or more of meaningless earthly existence? A controvertible hereafter? But she ceased to a.n.a.lyse, knowing that it could lead nowhere until the human mind ceased to be human.
And one day, in the end of the summer, she lost her grip on herself.
For three days the trade-winds had raged; she had not been able to leave the house. Twice she had set forth, desperate with the nervous monotony of her hours, and been driven back by the blinding dust. It was on the third day that she happened to catch sight of herself in the gla.s.s. She saw her face plainer than ever, but her attention pa.s.sed suddenly to her shoulders and rested there. They were bent. Her carriage was dejected, apathetic. The sluggish tide mounted slowly to her face as she realised that this physical manner must have fallen upon her gradually, and been worn for some time; and its significance. She made an effort to rea.s.sume her old erect haughty poise, which had been partly the manifest of inherent pride, partly of half-acknowledged defiance of the beauty-wors.h.i.+p of the world. Her shoulders sank before the spine had risen to its perpendicular. What did it matter? Again she experienced that disintegration of will which once had left her at the mercy of that instinct for destruction which is one of the essential particles of the ego.
Her brain was almost torpid. The want of exhilarating exercise, the long dearth of companions.h.i.+p, the terrible monotony of her life, the restless nights, the dank gloomy atmosphere in which she had her perpetual being, were, she told herself dully, doing their work. And she did not care.
But if her brain was sodden, her nerves felt as if on the verge of explosion. She noticed that her hands were not steady, and sat for hours, wondering what was coming upon her. She cared less and less.
Ah Kee tapped at her door. She replied that she did not want any dinner, loathing the unvarying bill-of-fare.
The hours dragged on, and darkness came; but she did not light the gas, whose jet was but a feeble point in these times, hardly worth the waste of a match. She strained her ears, fancied she heard whisperings in the hall below. If San Francisco's skeletons really were down there, she wished they would go in and throttle her father. He was the author of all her misery; and was any woman on earth so miserable as she? Why should he live, exist down there like a beast in his cave, when his death would give her liberty?--a poignant happiness in itself. She wondered did she kill him should she be hanged? They rarely hanged anybody in California, never when there was gold to rattle contemptuously in the face of the law; why should she not deliver her mother and herself? They would both be in an asylum for the mad, or dead before their time, unless he went soon; and their lives were of several times more value than his. They, at least, had ruined the lives of no one, and with his h.o.a.rded unsavoury millions they would gladly do good to hundreds.
She tiptoed out into the hall, and leaned over the circular railing, and peered down into the s.p.a.ce below. Only an old-fas.h.i.+oned waxen taper burned in a cup of oil; it emitted a feeble and ghostly light. The large webs of the spiders quivered in a draught. They a.s.sumed strange distorted shapes and seemed to point long fingers at her father's door.
They are the ghosts that once animated the skeletons, she thought; and they think it time he joined them.
She stood there for a long while, her eyes narrowed in a hard searching regard; the trembling gloom with the tiny sallow flame in its middle suggested the purgatory of imaginative artists. Should she go down and thrust the dagger into his neck?
Her thoughts were torn apart by the abrupt loud shouts of the wind. She wondered if there were such winds anywhere else on earth, or if this were the voice of some fiend prisoned in the Pacific,--the spouse whom California had taken to her arms when the fires in her body were hewing and shattering and rehewing her, and divorced in an after-desire for beauty and peace.
Magdalena went back to her room and turned the key in the drawer which contained the dagger.
”I must get out of this house,” she said aloud, with the sensation of dragging her will from the depths of her brain and shaking it back to life. ”If I don't, I'll be in an asylum to-morrow. Something is certainly wrong in my head.”
She put on her jacket and hat with trembling fingers. Her nerves seemed fighting their way through her skin. Her ears were humming. Something had begun to pound in her brain.
She ran downstairs and let herself out, averting her eyes from her father's door. Her fingers were rigid, and curved.
As she reached the sidewalk, a squall caught and nearly carried her off her feet. It bellied her skirts and loosened her hair. She lost her breath and regained it with difficulty; she could hardly steer herself.
But the wind filled her with a sudden wild exaltation, not of the soul, but of the worst of her pa.s.sions,--those tangled, fighting, sternly governed pa.s.sions of the cross-breed.