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The Wheel of Life by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

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THE WHEEL OF LIFE

by

ELLEN GLASGOW

New York
Doubleday, Page & Company

1906







By the Same Author

THE DELIVERANCE
THE BATTLE-GROUND
THE FREEMAN, AND OTHER POEMS
THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE
PHASES OF AN INFERIOR PLANET
THE DESCENDANT




CONTENTS


PART I. Impulse

CHAPTER
I. In Which the Romantic Hero is Conspicuous by His Absence
II. Treats of an Eccentric Family
III. Apologises for an Old-fashioned Atmosphere
IV. Ushers in the Modern Spirit
V. In Which a Young Man Dreams Dreams
VI. Shows That Mr. Worldly-Wise-Man May Belong to Either Sex
VII. The Irresistible Force
VIII. Proves That a Poor Lover May Make an Excellent Friend
IX. Of Masques and Mummeries
X. Shows the Hero to Be Lacking in Heroic Qualities
XI. In Which a Lie Is the Better Part of Truth


PART II. Illusion

I. Of Pleasure as the Chief End of Man
II. An Advance and a Retreat
III. The Moth and the Flame
IV. Treats of the Attraction of Opposites
V. Shows the Dangers as Well as the Pleasures of the Chase
VI. The Finer Vision
VII. In Which Failure Is Crowned By Failure
VIII. "The Small Old Path"
IX. The Triumph of the Ego
X. In Which Adams Comes Into His Inheritance
XI. On the Wings of Life


PART III. Disenchantment

I. A Disconsolate Lover and a Pair of Blue Eyes
II. The Deification of Clay
III. The Greatest of These
IV. Adams Watches in the Night and Sees the Dawn
V. Treats of the Poverty of Riches
VI. The Feet of the God
VII. In Which Kemper Is Puzzled
VIII. Shows That Love Without Wisdom Is Folly
IX. Of the Fear in Love
X. The End of the Path


PART IV. Reconciliation

I. The Secret Chambers
II. In Which Laura Enters the Valley of Humiliation
III. Proves a Great City to Be a Great Solitude
IV. Shows That True Love Is True Service
V. Between Laura and Gerty
VI. Renewal





PART I


IMPULSE




CHAPTER I

IN WHICH THE ROMANTIC HERO IS CONSPICUOUS BY HIS ABSENCE


As the light fell on her face Gerty Bridewell awoke, stifled a yawn with
her pillow, and remembered that she had been very unhappy when she went
to bed. That was only six hours ago, and yet she felt now that her
unhappiness and the object of it, which was her husband, were of less
disturbing importance to her than the fact that she must get up and
stand for three minutes under the shower bath in her dressing-room. With
a sigh she pressed the pillow more firmly under her cheek, and lay
looking a little wistfully at her maid, who, having drawn back the
curtains at the window, stood now regarding her with the discreet and
confidential smile which drew from her a protesting frown of irritation.

"Well, I can't get up until I've had my coffee," she said in a voice
which produced an effect of mournful brightness rather than of anger, "I
haven't the strength to put so much as my foot out of bed."

Her eyes followed the woman across the room and through the door, and
then, turning instinctively to the broad mirror above her dressing
table, hung critically upon the brilliant red and white reflection in
the glass. It was her comforting assurance that every woman looked her
best in bed; and as she lay now, following the lines of her charming
figure beneath the satin coverlet, she found herself wondering, not
without resentment, why the possession of a beauty so conspicuous should
afford her only a slight and temporary satisfaction. Last week a woman
whom she knew had had her nose broken in an automobile accident, and as
she remembered this it seemed to her that the mere fact of her
undisfigured features was sufficient to be the cause of joyful
gratitude. But this, she knew, was not so, for her face was perfectly
unharmed; and yet she felt that she could hardly have been more
miserable, even with a broken nose.

Here she paused for an instant in order to establish herself securely in
her argument, for, though she could by no stretch of the imagination
regard her mind as of a meditative cast, there are hours when even to
the most flippant experience wears the borrowed mantle of philosophy.
Abstract theories of conduct diverted her but little; what she wanted
was some practical explanation of the mental weariness she felt. What
she wanted, she repeated, as if to drive in the matter with a final
blow, was to be as happy in the actual condition as she had told herself
that she might be when as yet the actual was only the ideal. Why, for
instance, when she had been wretched with but one man on the box, should
the addition of a second livery fail to produce in her the contentment
of which she had often dreamed while she disconsolately regarded a
single pair of shoulders? That happiness did not masquerade in livery
she had learned since she had triumphantly married the richest man she
knew, and the admission of this brought her almost with a jump to the
bitter conclusion of her unanswerable logic--for the satisfaction which
was not to be found in a footman was absent as well from the imposing
figure of Perry Bridewell himself. Yet she told herself that she would
have married him had he possessed merely the historical penny, and the
restless infatuation of those first months was still sufficiently alive
to lend the colour of its pleasing torment to her existence.

Lying there, in her French embroidered night dress, with her brilliant
red hair pushed back from her forehead, she began idly to follow the
histories of the people whom she knew, and it seemed to her that each of
them was in some particular circumstance more fortunate than she. But
she would have changed place with none, not even with her best friend,
Laura Wilde, who was perfectly content because she lived buried away in
Gramercy Park and wrote vague beautiful verse that nobody ever read.
Laura filled as little part in what she called "the world" as Gramercy
Park occupied in modern progress, yet it was not without a faint impulse
of envy that Gerty recalled now the grave old house mantled in brown
creepers and the cheerful firelit room in which Laura lived. The peace
which she had missed in the thought of her husband came back to her with
the first recollection of her friend, and her hard bright eyes softened
a little while she dwelt on the vivid face of the woman to whom she
clung because of her very unlikeness to herself. Gradually out of the
mist of her unhappiness the figure of Laura rose in the mirror before
her, and she saw clearly her large white forehead under the dark
wing-like waves of hair, the singular intentness of her eyes, and the
rapt expectancy of look in which her features were lost as in a general
vagueness of light.

Though it was twenty years since she had first seen Laura Wilde as a
child of ten, the meeting came to her suddenly with all the bright
clearness of an incident of yesterday. She remembered herself as a weak,
bedraggled little girl, in wet slippers, who was led by a careless nurse
to a strange German school; and she felt again the agony of curiosity
with which, after the first blank wonder was over, she had stared at the
children who hung whispering together in the centre of the room. As she
looked a panic terror seized her like a wild beast, and she threw up her
hands and turned to rush away to the reassuring presence of grown up
creatures, when from the midst of the whispering group a little dark
girl, in an ugly brown frock, ran up to her and folded her in her arms.

"I shall love you best of all because you are so beautiful," said the
little dark girl, "and I will do all your sums and even eat your sausage
for you." Then she had kissed her and brought her to the stove and knelt
down on the floor to take off her wet slippers. To this day Gerty had
always thought of her friend as the little girl who had shut her eyes
and gulped down those terrible sausages for her behind her teacher's
back.

The maid brought the coffee, and while she sat up to drink it the door
of her husband's dressing-room opened and he came in and stood, large,
florid and impressive, beside her bed.

"I'm afraid I shan't get back to luncheon," he remarked, as he settled
his ample, carefully groomed body in his clothes with a comfortable
shake, "there's a chap from the country Pierce has sent to me with a
letter and I'll be obliged to feed him at the club, but--to tell the
truth--there's so little one can get really fit at this season."

To a man for whom the pleasures of the table represented the larger
share of his daily enjoyment, this was a question not without a serious
importance of its own; and while he paused to settle it he stood,
squaring his chest, with an expression of decided annoyance on his
handsome, good-humored face. Then, having made a satisfactory choice of
dishes, his features recovered their usual look of genial contentment,
and he felt carelessly in his pocket for the letter which he presently
produced and laid on Gerty's pillow. His life had corresponded so evenly
with his bodily impulses that the perfection of the adjustment had
produced in him the amiable exterior of an animal that is never crossed.
It was a case in which supreme selfishness exerted the effect of
personality.

Leaving the letter where he had placed it, Gerty sat sipping her coffee
while she looked up at him with the candid cynicism which lent a piquant
charm to the almost doll-like regularity of her features.

"You did not get three hours sleep and yet you're so fresh you smell of
soap," she observed as an indignant protest, "while I've had six and I'm
still too tired to move."

"Oh, I'm all right--I never let myself get seedy," returned Perry, with
his loud though pleasant laugh. "That's the mistake all you women
make."

Half closing her eyes Gerty leaned back and surveyed him with a curious
detachment--almost as if he were an important piece of architecture
which she had been recommended to admire and to which she was patiently
trying in vain to adjust her baffled vision. The smaller she screwed her
gaze the more remotely magnificent loomed his proportions.

"How you manage it is more than I can understand," she said.

Perry stared for a moment in an amiable vacancy at the coffee pot. Then
she watched the animation move feebly in his face, while he pulled at
his short fair moustache with a characteristic masculine gesture.
Physically, she admitted, he had never appeared to a better advantage in
her eyes.

"By the way, I had a game of billiards with Kemper and we talked pretty
late," he said, as if evolving the explanation for which she had not
asked. "He got back from Europe yesterday you know."

"He did?" Her indifferent gaiety played like harmless lightning around
his massive bulk. "Then we may presume, I suppose, on Madame Alta for
the opera season?"

He met the question with an admiring chuckle. "Do you really mean you
think he's been abroad with her all this time?"

"Well, what else did he get his divorce for?" she demanded, with the
utter disillusion of knowledge which she had found to be her most
effective pose.

Perry's chuckle swelled suddenly into a roar. "Good Lord, how women
talk!" he burst out. "Why, Arnold has been divorced ten years and he
never laid eyes on Jennie Alta till she sang over here three years ago.
There was nothing in it except that he liked to be seen with a
celebrity--most men do. But, my dear girl," he concluded in a kind of
awful reverence, "what a tongue you've got. It's a jolly good thing for
me that I'm your husband or you wouldn't leave me a blessed patch of
reputation to my back."

His humor held him convulsed for several minutes, during which interval
Gerty continued to regard him with her piquant cynicism.

"Well, if it wasn't Madame Alta it was somebody who is voiceless," she
retorted coolly. "I merely meant that there must have been a reason."

"Oh, your 'reasons'!" ejaculated Perry. Then he stooped and gave the
letter lying on Gerty's pillow a filip from his large pink forefinger.
"You haven't told me what you think of this?" he said.

Picking up the letter Gerty unfolded it and read it slowly through from
start to finish, the little ripple of sceptical amusement crossing and
recrossing her parted lips,

RAVENS NEST,
Fauquier County, Virginia,
December 26, 19--.

_My Dear Perry_: Nobody, of course, ever accused you of being
literary, nor, thank Heaven, have I fallen under that
aspersion--but since the shortest road to success seems to be by
circumvention, it has occurred to me that you might give a social
shove or two to the chap who will hand you this letter sometime
after the New Year.

His name is St. George Trent, he was born a little way up the
turnpike from me, has an enchanting mother, and shows symptoms of
being already inoculated with the literary plague. I never read
books, so I have no sense of comparative values in literature, and
consequently can't tell whether he is an inglorious Shakespeare or
a subject for the daily press. His mother assures me that he has
already written a play worthy to stand beside Hamlet--but, though
she is a charming lady, I'm hardly convinced by her opinion. The
fact remains, however, that he is going to New York to become a
playwright, and that he has two idols in the market place which, I
fancy, you may be predestined to see demolished. He is simply off
his head to meet Roger Adams, the editor of _The_--something or
other I never heard of--and--remember your budding days and be
charitable--a lady who writes poems and signs herself Laura Wilde.
I prepared him for the inevitable catastrophe by assuring him that
the harmless Mr. Adams eats with his knife, and that the lady, as
she writes books, isn't worth much at love-making--the purpose for
which woman was created by God and cultivated by man. Alas, though,
the young are a people of great faith!

Commend me to Mrs. Bridewell, whom I haven't seen since I had the
honour of assisting at the wedding.

Yours ever,
BEVERLY PIERCE.

As she finished her reading, Gerty broke into a laugh and carelessly
threw the letter aside on the blue satin quilt.

"I'm glad to hear that somebody has read Laura's poems," she observed.

"But what in thunder am I to do with the chap?" enquired Perry. "God
knows I don't go in for literature, and that's all he's good for I dare
say."

"Oh, well, he can eat, I guess," commented Gerty, with consoling irony.

"I've asked Roger Adams to luncheon," pursued Perry, too concerned to
resent her lack of sympathy, "but there are nine chances to one that he
will stay away."

"Experience has taught me," rejoined Gerty sweetly, "that your friend
Adams can be absolutely counted on to stay away. Do you know," she
resumed after a moment's thought, "that, though he's probably the
brainiest man of our acquaintance, I sometimes seriously wonder what you
see in him."

A flush of anger darkened Perry's clear skin, and this sudden change
gave him an almost brutal look. "I'd like to know if I'm a blamed fool?"
he demanded.

Her merriment struck pleasantly on his ears.

"Do you want to destroy the illusion in which I married you?" she asked.
"It was, after all, simply the belief that size is virtue."

The flush passed, and he took in a full breath which expanded his broad
chest. "Well, I'm big enough," he answered, "but it isn't Adam's fault
that he hasn't got my muscle."

With a leisurely glance in the mirror, he settled his necktie in place,
twisted the short ends of his moustache, and then stooped to kiss his
wife before going out.

"Don't you let yourself get seedy and lose your looks," he said as he
left the room.

When he had gone she made a sudden ineffectual effort to rise from bed;
then as if oppressed by a fatigue that was moral rather than physical,
she fell back again and turned her face wearily from the mirror. So the
morning slipped away, the luncheon hour came and went, and it was not
until the afternoon that she gathered energy to dress herself and begin
anew the inevitable and agonising pursuit of pleasure. The temptation of
the morning had been to let go--to relax in despair from the
fruitlessness of her endeavor--and the result of this brief withdrawal
was apparent in the order which she gave the footman before the open
door of her carriage.

"To Miss Wilde's first"--the words ended abruptly and she turned
eagerly, with outstretched hand, to a man who had hurried toward her
from the corner of Fifth Avenue.

"So you haven't forgotten me in six months, Arnold," she said, with a
sweetness in which there was an almost imperceptible tone of bitterness.

He took her hand in both of his, pressing it for an instant in a quick
muscular grasp which had in it something of the nervous vigor that lent
a peculiar vibrant quality to his voice.

"And I couldn't have done it in six years," he replied, as a singularly
charming smile illumined his forcible rather than regular features, and
brought out the genial irony in his expressive light gray eyes. "If I'd
gone to Europe to forget you it would have been time thrown away, but I
had something better on my hands than that--I've been buying French
racing automobiles--"

As he finished he gave an impatient jerk to the carriage door, a
movement which, like all his gestures, sprang from the nervous energy
that found its outlet in the magnetism of his personality. People
sometimes said that he resembled Perry Bridewell, who was, in fact, his
distant cousin, but the likeness consisted solely in a certain evident
possession of virile power--a quality which women are accustomed to
describe as masculine. He was not tall, and yet he gave an impression of
bigness; away from him one invariably thought of him as of unusual
proportions, but, standing by his side, he was found to be hardly above
the ordinary height. The development of his closely knit figure, the
splendid breadth of his chest and shoulders, the slight projection of
his heavy brows and the almost brutal strength of his jaw and chin, all
combined to emphasise that appearance of ardent vitality which has
appealed so strongly to the imagination of women. Seen in repose there
was a faint suggestion of cruelty in the lines of his mouth under his
short brown moustache, but this instead of detracting from the charm he
exercised only threw into greater relief the genial brightness of his
smile.

Now Gerty, glancing up at him, remembered a little curiously, the
whispered reason for his long absence. There was always a woman in the
wind when it blew rumours of Kemper, though he was generally considered
to regard the sex with the blithe indifference of a man to whom feminine
favour has come easily. How easily Gerty had sometimes wondered, though
she had hardly ventured so much as a dim surmise. Ten years, she would
have said, was a considerable period from which to date a passion, and
she remembered now that ten years ago Kemper had secured a divorce from
his wife in some Western court. There had been no particular scandal, no
damning charges on either side; and a club wit had remarked at the time
that the only possible ground for a separation was the fact that Mrs.
Kemper had grown jealous of her husband's after-dinner cigar. Since then
other and varied rumours had reached Gerty's ears, until finally there
had blown a veritable gale concerning a certain Madame Alta, who sang
melting soprano parts in Italian opera. Then this, too, had passed,
and, with the short memory of city livers, Gerty had forgotten alike the
gossip and the heroines of the gossip, until she noted now the lines of
deeper harassment in Kemper's face. These coming so suddenly after six
months of Europe caused her to wonder if the affair with the prima donna
had been really an entanglement of the heart.

"Well, I may not be as fast as an automobile," she presently admitted.

"But you're twice as dangerous," he retorted gaily.

For an instant the pleasant humour in his eyes held her speechless.

"Ah, well, you aren't a coward," she answered coolly enough at last.
Then her tone changed, and as she settled herself under her fur rugs she
made a cordial inviting gesture. "Come in with me and I'll take you to
Laura Wilde's," she said; "she's a genius, and you ought to know her
before the world finds her out."

With a protesting laugh Kemper held up his gloved finger.

"God forbid!" he exclaimed with a shrug which struck her as a slightly
foreign affectation. "The lady may be a female Milton, but Perry tells
me that she isn't pretty."

He touched her hand again, met her indignant defence of Laura with a nod
of smiling irony, and then, as her carriage started, he turned rapidly
down Sixty-ninth Street in the direction of the Park.

In Gerty the chance meeting had awakened a slumbering interest which she
had half forgotten, and as she drove down Fifth Avenue toward Laura's
distant home she found herself wondering idly if he would let many days
go by before he came again. The thought was still in her mind when the
carriage turned into Gramercy Park and stopped before the old brown
house hidden in creepers in which Laura lived. So changed by this time,
however, was Gerty's mood that, after leaving her carriage, she stood
hesitating from indecision upon the sidewalk. The few bared trees in the
snow, the solemn, almost ghostly, quiet of the quaint old houses and the
deserted streets, in which a flock of sparrows quarrelled under the
faint sunshine, produced in her an odd and almost mysterious sense of
unreality--as if the place, herself, the waiting carriage, and Laura
buried away in the dull brown house, were all creations of some gossamer
and dream-like quality of mind. She felt suddenly that the sorrows which
had oppressed her in the morning belonged no more to any existence in
which she herself had a part. Then, looking up, she saw her husband
crossing the street between the two men with whom he had lunched, and
even the impressive solidity of Perry Bridewell appeared to her
strangely altered and out of place.

He came up, a little breathless from his rapid walk, and it was a minute
before he could summon voice to introduce the cheerful, fresh-coloured
youth on his right hand.

"I've already told Mrs. Bridewell about you, Mr. Trent," he said at
last, "but I'm willing to confess that I haven't told her half the
truth."

Gerty met Trent's embarrassed glance with the protecting smile with
which she favoured the young who combined his sex with his attractions.
Then, when he was quite at ease again, she turned to speak to Roger
Adams, for whom, in spite, as she laughingly said, of the distinction
between a bookworm and a butterfly, she was accustomed to admit a more
than ordinary liking.

He was a gaunt, scholarly looking man of forty years, with broad,
singularly bony shoulders, an expression of kindly humour, and a plain,
strong face upon which suffering had left its indelible suggestion of
defeated physical purpose. Nothing about him was impressive, nothing
even arresting to a casual glance, and not even the shooting light from
the keen gray eyes, grown a little wistful from the emotional repression
of the man's life, could account for the cordial appeal that spoke
through so unimposing a figure. As much of his personal history as Gerty
knew seemed to her peculiarly devoid of the interest or the excitement
of adventure; and the only facts of his life which she would have found
deserving the trouble of repeating were that he had married an
impossible woman somewhere in Colorado, and that for ten years he had
lived in New York where he edited _The International Review_.

"Perry tells me that Mr. Trent has really read Laura's poems," she said
now to Adams with an almost unconscious abandonment of her cynical
manner. "Have you examined him and is it really true?"

"I didn't test him because I hoped the report was false," was Adams'
answer. "He's welcome to the literary hash, but I want to keep the
_caviar_ for myself."

"Read them!" exclaimed Trent eagerly, while his blue eyes ran entirely
to sparkles. "Why, I've learned them every one by heart."

"Then she'll let you in," responded Gerty reassuringly, "there's no
doubt whatever of your welcome."

"But there is of mine," said Perry gravely, "so I guess I'd better
quit."

He made a movement to turn away, but Gerty placing her gloved hand on
his arm, detained him by a reproachful look.

"That reminds me of the mischief you have done to-day," she said. "I met
Arnold Kemper as I left the house, and when I asked him to come with me
what do you suppose was the excuse he gave?"

"The dentist or a twinge of rheumatism?" suggested Adams gravely.

"Neither." Her voice rose indignantly, and she enforced her reprimand by
a light stroke on Perry's sleeve. "He actually said that Perry had told
him Laura wasn't pretty."

"Well, I take back my words and eat 'em, too," cried Perry.

He broke away in affected terror before Trent's angry eyes, while Gerty
gave a joyful little exclamation and waved her hand toward one of the
lower windows in the house before which they stood. The head of a woman,
framed in brown creepers, appeared there for an instant, and then,
almost before Trent had caught a glimpse of the small dark eager figure,
melted again into the warm firelight of the interior. A moment later the
outer door opened quickly, and Laura stood there with impulsive
outstretched hands and the cordial smile which was her priceless
inheritance from a Southern mother.

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