Part 26 (1/2)
”It is love and interdependence that cause all the misery of the world; they would be the very first things I should relegate among the minor influences, did I wield the sceptre for an hour. To women, at least, all unhappiness comes from the superst.i.tion that love--any sort--is all. Of course there would be marriage, but of deliberate choice, and after a long and purely platonic friends.h.i.+p, in which all the horrid little failings that do most to dissever could be recognized and weighed. Free love and experimental matrimony are mere excuses for the sort of sensuality that is shallow and inconstant.”
”Ah! Then you would permit love to your married pair after they had probed each other's minds and mannerisms for a year or two? That is a concession I hardly expected.”
Isabel shrugged her shoulders. ”I am neither an idiot nor blind. Heaven knows I have seen enough of reckless pa.s.sion and its consequences. The equipment of the mortal proves him to be the slave of the race, but at least he need not remain the blind and ridiculous slave he is at present. If I had married that man no doubt I should have loved him more frantically than ever for a time. But that would have pa.s.sed, left me resentful of bondage, of the surrender of self. There, above all, is the reason I shall never marry. Impersonally, I believe in marriage, or rather accept it, but I purpose to stand apart as a complete individual, and subtly to teach others to drag strength out of the great body of force in which we move, until they realize that in time mankind may feed those creative fires, becoming, who knows, stronger than the great first cause itself.”
”And I have been called an egoist,” murmured Gwynne. ”I feel a mere--well--Leghorn--beside this sublime determination to sit upon the throne of G.o.d and administer to both kingdoms. All the same, my fair cousin, I believe that it takes a man and a woman to complete the ego. I incline to the picturesque belief that they were originally united, and halved in some--well, say when Earth and its atmosphere became two distinct parts. No doubt it was a judgment for having accomplished too much evil in that formidable combination. Who knows but that may be the secret of the fall of man; the uneven progress of human nature may be towards the resumption of that state, only to be attained when we have conquered the worst in ourselves and become pure spirit.”
”That fits my own theory, for I believe that the two parts of what should have been a perfect whole were cut in two for their sins, and that reunion will come only when each has absolutely mastered the human evil in him and freed the spiritual, but this he can only accomplish alone--”
”Don't quote Tolstoi to me! He waited until he was old and cold to hurl anathema against the human pa.s.sions. Theories upon love by a man long past his prime are as valueless as those of a girl.”
”It was a theory I had no intention of advancing. I think for myself and pay no more attention to the excessive virtue bred by the years than to that equally illogical repentance or awakening of a woman's moral nature when the man has ceased to charm or has disappeared. That is a mere process, and no augury of future behavior. But you are always at your best when you go off at half-c.o.c.k like that! What I meant was that woman has degenerated, not through pa.s.sion but through ages of the exercise of her pettier and meaner qualities. In some, these qualities lead to malignancy, in the majority, no doubt, to frivolity--still worse, to my puritanical inheritance--and they are utterly commonplace of outlook.
Matrimony keeps these qualities in constant exercise, because the ego loses its independent life, its habit of meditation, and is pin-p.r.i.c.ked twenty times a day. It is by these qualities that woman chains man to the earth, not by her human pa.s.sions. I am quite willing to concede that pa.s.sion is magnificent.”
Gwynne ground his teeth. He had never encountered anything so incongruous as this beautiful vital superbly fas.h.i.+oned girl talking of pa.s.sion in precisely the same tone as she would have talked of chickens.
He felt the primitive man's impulse to beat her black and blue and then make her his creature. As Isabel turned her eyes she was astonished at what she saw in his. Gwynne's eyes were blazing. There was a dark color in his face, and even his mouth, somewhat heavy, and generally set, was half open. She fancied that so he looked when on a platform facing the enemy, and thoroughly awake.
”What are you angry about?” she asked, calmly. ”That I devote myself to my s.e.x instead of to yours? They need me more than any leader they have evolved so far. There are millions of women of your sort. I want nothing that your s.e.x has left to offer. I will find a happiness unimaginable to you, in living absolutely within myself and independent of all that life, so far, has to give.”
Then Gwynne exploded, and forgot himself. He flung himself forward, and catching her upper arms in the grip of a vise shook her until her teeth clacked together. ”d.a.m.n you! d.a.m.n you!” he stammered. ”What you want is to be the squaw of one of your own Indians!”
”Let me go!” gasped Isabel, furious, and in sharp physical pain. ”Do you want to turn the boat over? Have you gone mad? I'll _kick_ you!”
”Good!” said Gwynne, releasing her, and sitting back. ”That is the only feminine speech you have made since I have known you. I make no apology.
You need never speak to me again. Set me ash.o.r.e over there. I can take the train when it comes along.”
”You pinched me! You hurt me!” cried, Isabel in wrath and dismay. ”I hate you!”
”And your sentiments are cordially returned. Will you put me on sh.o.r.e?”
”I don't care what you do. You hurt me! You hurt me!” And Isabel dropped her head into her arms and burst into a wild tempest of tears, like a child that has had its first whipping.
Gwynne laughed aloud. ”We are running into a mud bank,” he said, ”and the tide is going out.”
Isabel made a wild clutch at the tiller ropes, and brought the boat back into the channel. But she could scarcely see, and Gwynne with a contrition he had no intention of displaying offered to control the launch. She vouchsafed him no reply, and as she did not steer for the land, he retired to the extreme end of the boat and studied the scenery.
He was determined not to go through even the form of an apology, but he was equally determined upon a reconciliation. In his first attempt to match his wits with a woman's his face became so stony and intense that Isabel recovered in a bound the serenity she had been struggling for, and laughed with a gayety that would have deceived any man.
”We are a couple of naughty children,” she said, sweetly. ”Or maybe people are not quite civilized so early in the morning. You may smoke, if you like, and then I shouldn't mind if you came here and let me teach you to run this launch--it is probably more old-fas.h.i.+oned than any you have undertaken. But as we no doubt shall make many journeys it is only fair that you should do half the work.”
XIX
When they docked at the foot of Russian Hill, Isabel suggested that Gwynne should leave his portmanteau with Mr. Clatt, the wharfinger that lived at the edge of the sea-wall and looked after such launches and yachts as came his way.
”I want you to stay with me if Lyster and Paula will come too,” she said, hospitably. ”They like that sort of thing when they happen to have a nurse. If they cannot come you will have to go to one of the hotels.
In either case you can send here for your suit-case. You had better take the Jones Street car--”
”The track is bust,” said Mr. Clatt, who was a laconic person.