Part 31 (2/2)

He turned his face toward me that I might see the lines of anxious thought there, the buffetings and disappointings, and through it all, the plain hunger of the man for his natural mate.

I saw that and I didn't flinch from it. I took his face between my hands and drew it down to my breast.

”I'm under contract for the next year,” I told him. ”I signed just before I left ... what does it all matter? Can't we be just ...

engaged.”

”We'd be engaged to be married. And I couldn't take you to Mexico on an engagement.”

”I'm under contract,” I told him again.

”You mean to say that you'd go on acting after we were married?”

It isn't worth while retailing what we said after that. It has been said so many times. It was the same thing that Tommy said, better put, more fully. He was ready, you understand, to make concession to my liking for the stage, to feel himself sincerely a poor subst.i.tute for what I had got for myself out of living, but there it was at the end, that he couldn't make for his own work the concessions he demanded of mine.

”We would have to live in Mexico,” he said at last. ”That's incontrovertible. And besides there are the kiddies to think of. Their mother wouldn't want them brought up in the atmosphere of the stage.” He had me there. I thought of Miss Dean and Griffin, of the Cecelia Brunes I had known, and Polatkin tracing the outline of my figure with his fat forefinger.

”I wouldn't either,” and my frank admission of it brought us out of the atmosphere of controversy to the community of our love again.

”You understand, don't you, that I feel even more obligation to her _now_.” I nodded. I understood fully that obstinate trace of disloyalty that came of his having given himself to what she wouldn't approve of, to what he couldn't for decency's sake admit of giving her daughters.

”I know what people think of the life of the stage,” I agreed; ”and I know what's worse, that most of it is true. Not that it need to be; but it has got in the habit of being so.”

”Well, then, if you feel that way----” The inference was plain that he didn't know in that case why I held on to it.

”It has got into my blood, Helmeth. I can't explain, and I didn't realize until we got to talking of it, but I don't believe I could live away from it. It is with me as it is with you about your engineering.”

If I had a momentary qualm lest that last should be not quite disingenuous, it pa.s.sed in the realization that the comparison hadn't come home to him. I remembered how Forester would have accepted the abnegation of my gift to his necessity of being important, and I didn't hold it out against Helmeth that he failed to realize at all the place that my work occupied, just as work, in the scheme of my existence.

We came back to it the next day and the next. It would have been simpler, of course, if it hadn't been for the children, and for my being at one with him in the opinion that the stage wasn't the proper atmosphere for the rearing of young ladies. I was still of the opinion which was exemplified in so far as I knew it, by Pauline and Mrs.

Franklin Shane, that the function of mothering could not go on except by complete separateness from the business of making a living. All my training and heredity had fostered an ideal of family life which rendered obligatory a proper house and servants, in the neighbourhood of good schools, and the exclusion from it of everybody but those who found themselves in an identical situation. And if we had been able to imagine a compromise, Helmeth and I would have been hindered by the defrauded capacity for loving, from working it out logically. At the mere suggestion of anything to drive us apart, the mating instinct set us toward one another irresistibly. We would leave off any argument and fall to kissing. We were pierced through and through with loving.

”Let us not think of it any more; something will work out for us. Let us just be happy the way we are,” I would protest.

”Oh, child, child, will you never understand that the way we are is what is so hard to bear!” Then he would s.n.a.t.c.h me up until the suffusing fire of his caress would steal through all my body and sing in me like bacchic sap of vineyards in the spring.

”You oughtn't to marry me unless you can't help yourself,” he would laugh shamelessly. So we fell deeper in love and not out of our difficulties.

Toward the end of that week, the weather which had been thickening to a storm, brought us to one of those thunderous London days, full of a stifling murk that might have been breathed out by the nostrils of the greasy, hurrying snake that went by in the bed of the river.

Inconsequential lightnings flashed in the smoky vault, from every quarter of which rolled unrelated thunder.

Helmeth came over from Mr. Shane's office in London Wall; the need we had of being together was oppressive like the day which, when we had sought it in the Park, we could hear like some great monster bellowing for its mate. We went out and walked about for a time under the trees, fancying the relief of freshness in the green obscurity that under the ranked trunks, thickened to blackness. No one was about but a few belated nursery maids, scurrying in silhouette against the pale glow of the light pinned down and imprisoned under the thick cloud of foliage.

We were on the Broad Walk, when suddenly a wind tore loose in the firmament. It made a whirling chaos of the murk, it wrung the treetops, but the air along the ground was stagnant as a cistern. Now and then a few great drops spattered on the leaves of the limes. Over a quarter of a mile from us, near the Alexandria gate, the tension of the day snapped suddenly in flame, a bolt had shattered one of the great trees. Straight across the gra.s.s toward us the bolt sped like a ball of light. It skimmed the ground knee high, flame points on its edges, flickered viciously as it drove at us.

There was no time for anything. Helmeth cried out to me once and I stepped within the circle of his arms; we could hear the fire ball sizzling as it cleared the gra.s.s; within a yard of us it went out in a flare of gas and a crack like thunder. Suddenly buckets of rain were precipitated on us, we could hear the slap of them on the pavement as we ran.

I was crying hysterically by the time we came to my room in a cab. I remember Helmeth trying to rid me of my wet things and my clinging to him crying.

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