Part 25 (2/2)
Gwynne laughed outright, and for the first time without resentment; he was tired of having California ”rammed down his throat.” Isabel's eyes were dancing with so purely youthful and feminine a triumph that he could not but feel indulgent.
”I am growing reconciled to my lot. Here I am and here I remain.”
”Yes, you are much happier,” said Isabel, softly. She half closed her eyes and looked a trifle older. ”It worried me dreadfully at first to know that you were unhappy, and that it was my fault.”
”Unhappy!” exclaimed Gwynne, reddening haughtily. ”I have not been mooning about like a homesick a.s.s--”
”Oh, your outside was as tranquil as your pride demanded--and it was splendid! But I couldn't help knowing--feeling. A thousand little things appeal so directly to a woman's intuitions.”
”Indeed! I am delighted to learn that you possess the common intuitions of a woman.”
”Am I unwomanly? Masculine?” asked Isabel, anxiously.
”Not in the ordinary sense; but you are much too strong. No woman should be as strong--as, well--as psychically independent as you are. It is as flagrant a usurpation of prerogative as a pretty complexion on a man.”
”I only say one prayer: 'Give me strength. Give me strength.'”
”For what, in heaven's name? What use have you for so much strength? You have forsworn matrimony. You disclaim the intention of going forth and entering the great battle of the intellects--having, as you say, no talents. You have isolated yourself from love, so you need no uncommon supply of strength to meet suffering. You will always have money enough, and you appear to have been born with the gift of making it. Even if you elect to be the leader of fas.h.i.+on in San Francisco, your equipment need not be of unadulterated steel. But I cannot fancy why you entertain any such ambition.”
”That is the least of my ambition--although I intend to become the most notable woman in San Francisco, not only because I must gratify a healthy natural ambition in some way, and because I want my life to have a sufficiency of incident in it, but because it is a part of my general scheme.”
”What is this precious scheme?”
”You would not understand if I should tell you. Men have no time for subjectivities--except poets, psychological fictionists, and the like, who do not seem to me men at all. Now, one reason I have liked you from the first, in spite of many things that made my American blood boil, is that you are a man, a real masculine arrogant dense man, with no feminine morbid tendency to a.n.a.lyze your ego, in spite of your Celtic blood. I met too many of that sort in Europe.”
Gwynne, with his elbows on his knees, regarded the bottom of the boat and colored guiltily, while congratulating himself that for all her insight and cleverness she had barely penetrated his outer envelope. She had thought him merely homesick, when his ego had been tottering, his soul racked with doubt and terror; when he had spent long hours in self-a.n.a.lysis; until the law had come to his rescue and reinvigorated his brain. At the same time a wave of sadness swept over him. How little human beings knew one another, no matter how intimate. As he raised his eyes he seemed to see Isabel across a chasm as vast as the Atlantic; and he was reminded that he knew her as little as she him. She had confessed to the throes of what she believed to have been a great pa.s.sion, but when he had rehea.r.s.ed the story away from the influence of her curious cold magnetism and the sinister setting of its recital, he had recognized it for what it was, the first violent embrace of an ardent unshackled imagination with positive experience, in which the ego had played an insignificant part. Her immediate recovery upon beholding the disintegrating clay, without one regret for the vanished soul, or even for the magnetic warmth of the living sh.e.l.l, suggested to his groping masculine intelligence, totally unaccustomed to a.n.a.lysis of woman, that her attack had been little more personal than if the man had infected her with the microbe of influenza. Surely a woman that had loved a man well enough to kiss him must have been stabbed with pity for the ardent vigorous life thrust out into the dark. Then he felt a quick resentment that anything so stainlessly statuesque as this girl--for all her trim tailoring and large black hat--should have been even superficially possessed by any man.
”Did that Johnny ever kiss you?” he asked, abruptly.
”Of course,” replied Isabel. ”Did I not have to, being engaged to him?
Not that there was much chance, for I never saw him alone between four walls. Perhaps that was one reason that side of love seemed to me much overrated. I was happiest when sitting alone in a sort of trance and thinking about him.”
”Humph!” said Gwynne.
The mist was gone. The east was a vast alcove of gold in which the hills were set like hard dark jewels. The creek was narrowing. On either side, and far on all sides, stretched the marsh. The guileless duck disported himself on the ponds, but Gwynne, for once, was insensible to its subversive charms, felt no regret that he had forgotten his gun. He came and sat closer to Isabel, wondering if she felt as young as he did in the wonderful freshness and beauty of the dawn. She certainly looked very young and fresh and girlish, not in the least fateful, as when she turned her profile against a hard background and forgot his presence.
”I think I could quite understand anything you cared to tell me,” he said, smiling into her eyes. ”Please give me your reasons for cultivating the character of a Toledo blade. Is it your intention to marshal all the clans of all the advanced women and lead them against the more occupied and disunited s.e.x? I am told that it is a standing grievance in Rosewater that you will not join that Literary--Political--Improvement--and all the rest of it Club. I should think with your ambitions and--well--masterful disposition, you would a.s.sume its leaders.h.i.+p as a sort of preliminary course.”
”I intend to be a whole club in myself.”
”Appalling! But what _do_ you mean by that cryptic a.s.sertion? I told you that I could understand anything you chose to explain, but, as they say out here, I am not good at guessing.”
”I am working out a theory of my own. It has been demonstrated that labor, capital, all the known forces, are far stronger when concentrated and organized. I believe in concentrating all the faculties about a will strong enough not only to conquer life but all the inherited weaknesses that beset one daily within. That is a minor matter, however. I believe that our higher faculties were given to us for no purpose but to create within ourselves an individual strength that will add to the sum of strength in the world. It is not necessary to proclaim this strength from the house-tops, nor to search for windmills--a positive enemy it would leap at automatically--nor even to seek to improve the world by all the tried and generally futile devices. It is enough to be. I alone may not add greatly to this subjective strength of the world; but think what life would be did each individual succeed in making himself but one degree less strong than G.o.d himself! It may be my destiny to make propaganda without noise; but if not, the achievement of absolute strength in myself will move the world forward to its millennium one-millionth part of a degree at least. For that will be the real millennium--when there shall be no despicable weakness in the world, no moral rottenness, when each individual shall rely upon himself alone, independent of the environment from which the majority to-day draw everything good and bad, their happiness or misery. Nothing will ever purge human nature but the triumph of the higher faculties, a triumph accomplished by an unswervingly cultivated and jealously maintained strength.”
”I don't deny that your millennium has its points, but would that not be rather a hard world? What of love, the interdependence of the s.e.xes, and all the other human relations?”
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