Part 20 (1/2)
”You don't need help,” he commented brutally.
Detached tears rolled over her cheeks. ”I won't cry,” she contradicted the visible act; ”I won't. You take such a cowardly advantage of me.”
The advantage, he reflected, was entirely on her side. Within, he was hard, he had no feeling of sympathy for her; the division between them was absolute. With an angry movement she brushed the tears from her cheeks. ”I hate her,” she said viciously; ”she is a rotten detestable woman.”
”On the contrary,” he replied, ”Mrs. Grove, if you happen to mean her, is singularly attractive. There is no smallness about her.”
”h.e.l.l,” she mocked him, ”it is really too touching. When shall you see her again?”
”Never.” At once he saw that he had made a second mistake.
”How sad--never; I can't bear it. You both must have been wretched at that long hopeless parting. And she agreed to let you go--back to your wife and children.” f.a.n.n.y's voice was a triumph of contempt. ”I ought to thank her; or be magnanimous and send you back.”
”This is all built on a ridiculous a.s.sumption,” Lee reminded her; ”I even forget how we started. Suppose we talk about something else; Mrs. Grove, as a topic, is pretty well exhausted.” f.a.n.n.y, narrow-eyed, relapsed into an intent silence. She faded from his mind, her place taken by Savina. Immediately he was conscious of a quickening of his blood, the disturbed throb of his heart; the memory of delirious hours enveloped him in a feverish mist more real than his wife sitting before him with a drawn brow.
Usually after such scenes f.a.n.n.y had flowered in a tender remorse for their bitter remarks, the wasted opportunity of happiness; but again she left him coldly, unmelted. He was glad--a show of affection would have been unsupportable. But his marriage was becoming precarious; Lee seemed to be without power to execute his firm intentions; a conviction of insecurity settled over him. The sense of a familiar difficulty returned; there was nothing for him to do but order his life on a common pattern and face an unrelieved futility of years. He remembered, with a grim amus.e.m.e.nt, the excellent advice he had given Peyton Morris, Peyton at the verge of falling from the approved heights into the unpredictable. If he had come to him now in that quandary, what would he, Lee, have said? Yet all that he had told Peyton he still believed--the variety of life lay on the circular moving horizon, there was none at hand. But now he comprehended the unmeasurable longing that had, for the time, banished every other consideration from the younger man. It had upset his heredity, his violent prejudices, and his not negligible religion.
Peyton, too, had fallen under the charm of Cytherea; but chance--was it fortunate?--had restrained him. Lee had seen Morris the evening before, at a dinner with Claire, and he had been silent, abstracted. He had scarcely acknowledged Lee Randon's presence. The Morrises had avoided him. Still, that was inevitable, since, for them, he was charged with unpleasant memories.
He collected in thought all the married people who, he knew, were unhappy or dissatisfied: eleven of the eighteen Lee called to mind.
”What is the matter with it?” he demanded savagely, aloud, in his room.
He considered marriage--isolated for that purpose--as a social contract, the best possible solving of a number of interrelated needs and instincts; and, practical and grey, it recommended itself to his reason; it successfully disposed of the difficulties of property, the birth and education of children, and of society. It was a sane, dignified, way to live with a woman; and it secured so much. Undoubtedly, on that count, marriage couldn't be bettered. As it was, it satisfied the vast majority of men and women: against the bulk of human life f.a.n.n.y and he, with their friends, were inconsiderable. But the number of men who struggled above the common level was hardly greater; and he and his opinions were of that preferable minority. The freedom of money, the opportunities of leisure, always led directly away from what were called the indispensable virtues.
Men--he returned to the Eastlake streets on Sat.u.r.day night--except those lost in the monomania of a dream, didn't want to work, they didn't even wish to be virtuous. They turned continually to the bypaths of pleasure, that self-delusion and forgetfulness of drink. Yes, released from the tyrannies of poverty, they flung themselves into a swift spending.
The poor were more securely married than the rich, the dull than the imaginative--married, he meant, in the sense of a forged bond, a stockade. This latter condition had been the result of allowing the church to interfere unwarrantedly in what was not its affair. Religion had calmly usurped this, the most potent of the motives of humanity; or, rather, it had fastened to it the ludicrous train of ritual. That laughable idea that G.o.d had a separate scrutinizing eye, like the eye of a parrot, on every human atom!
Lee changed his position, physically and mentally--he was lying in bed--and regarded religion in itself. It was, in the hunger for a perpetual ident.i.ty, almost as strong a force as the other pa.s.sion. But were they conspicuously other? They had many resemblances. He didn't, by religion, refer to Christianity which, he thought, was but a segregated and weakened form of wors.h.i.+p. It was, for example, against the Christian influence that he was struggling. He meant the sense of profound mystery, the revolt against utter causelessness, which had tormented to no clearness so many generations of minds. He accepted the fact that a formless longing was all that he could ever experience; for him, uncritically, that seemed enough; he had willingly relinquished any hope of an eternity like a white frosted cake set with twinkling candles. But viewed as a tangible force operating here and now, identical--to return to his main preoccupation--with love, it demanded some settled intelligence of comprehension.
What he wanted, he was drawn bolt upright as if by an inner shout, was an a.s.surance that could be depended on, that wouldn't break and break and leave him nothing but a feeling of inscrutable mockery. He wanted to understand himself, and, in that, f.a.n.n.y and the children ... and Savina.
Obviously they were all bound together in one destiny, by a single cause. Why had he stopped loving f.a.n.n.y and had no regret--but a sharp gladness--in his adultery with Savina? He discarded the qualifying word as soon as it had occurred to him: there was no adultery, adulteration, in his act with Savina; it had filled him with an energy, a mental and nervous vigor, long denied to the sanctified bed of marriage. He wanted not even to be justified, but only an explanation of what he was; and he waited, his hands pressed into the softness of the mattress on either side of him, as if the salvation of some reply might come into his aching brain. Nothing, of course, broke the deep reasonable stillness of the night. He slipped back on his pillow weary and baffled.
There, to defraud his misery, he deliberately summoned the memory of Savina, and of delirious hours. She came swiftly, with convulsive shoulders, fingers drawn down over his body; he heard her little cry, ”Ah!” How changed her voice had been when she said, ”I love you.” It had had no apparent connection with the moment, their actual pa.s.sion. It had disturbed him with the suggestion of a false, a forced, note. In a situation of the utmost accomplishable reality it had been vague, meaningless. I love you. It was a strange phrase, at once empty and burdened with illimitable possibilities. He had said it times without number to f.a.n.n.y, but first--how seductively virginal she had been--on a veranda at night. Then, though not quite for the first time, he had kissed her. And suddenly her reserve, her protecting chast.i.ty, had gone out of her forever.
When had the other, all that eventually led to Savina, begun; when had he lost his love? A long process of turning from precisely the orderly details which, he had decided, should make marriage safe. He was back where he had started--the realization of how men deserted utility for visions, at the enigmatic smile of Cytherea. A sterile circle. Some men called it heaven, others found h.e.l.l. His mental searching, surrounded, met, by nullity, he regarded as his supreme effort in the direction of sheer duty. If whoever had it in command chose to run the world blindly, unintelligibly, in a manner that would soon wreck the strongest concern, he wasn't going to keep on annoying himself with doubts and the dictates of a senseless conscience. What, as soon as possible, he'd do was fall asleep.
The crowing of a rooster pierced the thinning night, a second answered the first, and they maintained a long self-glorifying, separated duet.
The wind which had been flowing in at the north window changed to the south-west.
The difficulties of his living with f.a.n.n.y increased the next morning: it was one of the week-days when he didn't go into town after breakfast.
He was dressed for riding, his horse was at the door, when, without previous announcement and unprepared, she decided to go with him. He could hear her hurrying upstairs--it upset her unreasonably to rush--and suddenly, with the audible fall of a boot on the floor, there was the unmistakable sound of sobbing.
Lee went up, half impatient and half comprehending, and found her seated on a bed, leaning her head in an arm on the foot-board. ”Don't wait for me,” she cried in a smothered voice; ”it makes you so nervous. Just go; it doesn't matter what I do. You've--you've shown me that. Oh, dear, I am so miserable. Everything was right and so happy, and now it's all wrong.”
”Nonsense,” he replied tonically; ”it will take Christopher a few minutes to get your saddle on. I'll be outside.” Mounted and waiting for her, his horse stepping contrarily over the gra.s.s beyond the drive, he didn't care whether she came or stayed. When she appeared her eyes, prominent now rather than striking, were reddened, and the hastily applied paint and powder were unbecomingly streaked with some late irrepressible tears.
When they had returned, and through lunch and after, a not unfamiliar stubborn silence settled over f.a.n.n.y. When she spoke it was with an armor-like sarcasm protecting and covering her feelings. He was continually surprised at the correctness of her att.i.tude toward Savina; his wife could know nothing; she was even without the legitimate foundation of a suspicion; but her bearing had a perceptible frostiness of despair. What, he wondered moodily, would next, immediately, develop?
Something, certainly--f.a.n.n.y's acc.u.mulations of emotion were always sharply discharged; they grew in silence but they were expended in edged words.