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The Wheel of Life by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

E >> Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow >> The Wheel of Life




The next morning he rushed off indignantly to upbraid Adams.

"The girl's starving, I tell you--we can't let her starve," he exclaimed
in an agony of remorse.

"Oh, yes we can," returned Adams with a cheerful brutality which enraged
the younger man. "Starving isn't half so bad as writing trash. But you
needn't look at me like that," he added, "she doesn't come here any
longer now. She told me fiction was the field she meant to dig in."

"Well, you'll kill her among you," was Trent's threatening rejoinder;
and filled with a righteous fury against literature he went back again
to knock at the door of Christina's empty room. Once his mother came up
also, but the girl, it appeared, was always out now, while the rejected
manuscript thickened each morning upon the threshold. Several times Mrs.
Trent arranged a little tray of luncheon and sent it up stairs by the
old negro servant, but the message brought back was always that
Christina was not at home. And then gradually, as the weeks went by, the
dignity and the pathos of her struggle were surrounded in Trent's mind
by a romantic halo. Her beauty borrowed from his poetic fancy the
peculiar touch of atmosphere it lacked, and his thoughts dwelt more and
more upon her slender, girlish figure, her smooth brown hair, and the
flower-like sweetness of her face.

Then just as he had grown almost hopeless of ever seeing her again, he
found her one evening in the elevator as he went up to his mother's
rooms. The touch of her cold little hand on his sent a sudden shock to
his heart, and while he looked anxiously into her face, he saw her go
deadly pale and bite her lip sharply as if to bring back her
consciousness by the sting of pain.

"You are ill," he said eagerly; "don't deny it, for haven't I eyes? Yes,
you must, you shall come with me in to mother."

Even then she would have turned proudly away, but with his impulsive,
lover's sympathy he led her from the elevator upon the landing on which
he lived. "She is waiting for you--she wants you," he urged with
passion; "and can't you see--oh, Christina, I want you, too!"

But his fervour only left her the more cold and shrinking, and she shook
her head with a refusal that was almost angry.

"How dare you? Why did you make me come out?" she asked. "I must go
back--I am not well--oh, I must go back!"

Over the angry tones of her voice he saw her entreating eyes shining
like wet flowers, and as he looked into them it came to him in a
revelation of knowledge that the meaning of everything that had been was
made clear at last. He knew now why he had succeeded where Christina had
failed--he knew why Laura had refused his love, and why, even in his
misery, her refusal had left his heart untouched. And beyond all these
things, he realised that now his boyhood was over and that from the
experience of this one moment he had become a man.




CHAPTER II

THE DEIFICATION OF CLAY


Not until a month after the announcement of Laura's engagement did she
come face to face for the first time with the ugly skeleton which lies
hidden beneath the most beautiful of dreams. The spring had passed in a
troubled rapture; and it was on one of the bright, warm days in early
June that she found awaiting her on the hall table when she came in from
her walk a letter addressed in a strange handwriting and bearing a
strange foreign postmark. Beside this was a note from Kemper explaining
a broken engagement of the day before; and she read first her lover's
letter, which ended, as every letter of his had ended since the
beginning of their love, "Yours with my whole heart and soul, Arnold."

With an emotion which repetition could never deaden, she stooped to kiss
the last sentence he had written, before she turned carelessly to take
up the strange foreign envelope, which she had thrown, with her veil and
gloves, on the chair at her side. For a moment she pondered
indifferently the address; then, almost as she broke the seal, the first
words she read were those which lay hidden away in the love letter
within her hand, "Yours with my whole heart and soul, Arnold."

In her first shock, even while the blow still blinded her eyes, she
turned to seek wildly for some possible solution; and it was then that
she discovered that the letter, in Kemper's handwriting, was addressed
evidently to some other woman, since it bore the date of a day in June
just three years before she had first met him. Three years ago he had
declared himself to belong, heart and soul, to this other woman; and
to-day, with no remembrance in his mind, it seemed, of that former
passion, he could repeat quite as ardently the old threadbare avowal.
How many times, she asked herself, had he used that characteristic
ending to his love letters?--and the thing appeared to her suddenly to
be the veriest travesty of the perfect self-surrender of love.

She was a woman capable of keen retrospective jealousy, and as she sat
there, beaten down from her winged ecstasy by the blow that had struck
at her from the silence, she told herself passionately that her life was
wrecked utterly and her brief happiness at an end. Then, with that
relentless power of intellect, from which her emotions were never
entirely separated, she began deliberately to disentangle the true facts
from the temporary impulses of her jealous anger.

"I am wounded and yet why am I wounded and by what right?" she demanded,
with a pathetic groping after the self-condemnation which would acquit
her lover, "he has lived his life, I know--I have always known it--and
his letter has only brought forcibly before me a fact which I have
accepted though I have not faced it." And it occurred to her, with the
bitter sweetness of a consoling lie, that he could not have been false
to her three years ago, since he was not then even aware of her
existence. To dwell on this thought was like yielding to the power of
an insidious drug, and yet she found herself forcing it almost
deliriously against her saner judgment. "How could he wrong me so long
as I was a stranger to him?" she repeated over and over. "On the day
that he first loved me, his old life, with its sins and its selfish
pleasures, was blotted out." But her conscience, even while she
reasoned, told her that love could possess no power like this--that the
man who loved her to-day, was the inevitable result of the man who had
loved other women yesterday, and that there was as little permanence in
the prompting of mere impulse as there was stability in change itself.
So the voice within her spoke through the intolerable clearness of her
intellect; and in her frantic desire to drown the thing it uttered, she
repeated again and again the empty words which her heart prompted. Yet
she knew even though she urged the falsehood upon her thoughts, that it
was less her argument that pleaded for Kemper than the memory of a look
in his face at animated instants, which rose now before her and appealed
disturbingly to her emotions.

Three ways of conduct were open to her, she saw plainly enough. Wisdom
suggested that she should not only put the letter aside, but that she
should banish the recollection of its existence from her life. But,
while she admitted that this would be the most courageous treatment of
the situation, she recognised perfectly that to act upon such a decision
was utterly beyond her strength. Though she were to destroy the object,
was the memory of it not seared indelibly into her brain? and would not
this memory return to embitter long afterward her happiest moments?
"When he kisses me I shall remember that he has kissed other women and I
feel that I shall grow to hate him if he should ever write to me again
in those lying words." But she knew intuitively that he would use the
same ending in his next letter, and that she would still be powerless to
hate him, if only because of his disturbing look, which came back to her
whenever she attempted to judge him harshly. "I might really hate him so
long as he was absent from me, and yet if he came again and looked at me
in that way for a single instant, I know that, in spite of my
resolution, I would throw myself into his arms." And she felt that she
despised herself for a bondage against which she struggled as hopelessly
as a bird caught in a fowler's net.

Of the two ways which remained to her, she chose, in the end, the course
which appeared to her to be the least ungenerous. She would not read the
letter--the opening and the closing sentences she had seen by
accident--for, when all was said, it had not been written for her eyes;
and it struck her, as she brooded over it, that there would be positive
disloyalty in thus stealing in upon the secrets of Kemper's past. No,
she would place it in his hands, she determined finally, still unread;
and in so doing she would not only defeat the purpose of the sender, but
would prove to him as well as to herself that her faith in him was as
unalterable as her love. After all to trust was easier than to distrust,
for the brief agony of her indecision had brought to her the knowledge
that the way of suspicion is the way of death.

And so when he came a little later she gave the letter, at which she
had not again looked, into his hands. "Here is something that reached me
only this morning," she said. "It is not worth thinking of, and I have
read only the first and the last sentence."

At her words he unfolded the paper, throwing a mere casual glance, as he
did so, upon the thin foreign envelope, which appeared to convey to him
no hint of its significant contents.

Then, after a hurried skimming of the first page, he turned back again
and carefully studied the address in a mystification which was pierced
presently by a flash of light.

"By Jove, so she's heard it!" he exclaimed; and the instant afterward he
added in a kind of grudging admiration, "Well, she's a devil!"

The incident appeared suddenly to engross him in a manner that Laura had
not expected, and he stooped to examine the postmark with an attention
which gave her, while she watched him, a queer sense of being left out
quite in the cold.

"But why, in thunder, should she care?" he demanded.

"She?" there was no trouble in her voice, only an indifferent question.

"Oh, it's Jennie Alta, of course--she's perfectly capable of such a
thing." Then, reaching out, he drew Laura into his arms with a
confidence which had the air, she thought, of taking the situation
almost too entirely for granted--of accepting too readily her attitude
as well as his possession of her. "My darling girl, what a regular brick
you are!" he said.

Though she realised, as he spoke, that this was the reward of her
silence and her struggle, she told herself, in the next breath that, in
some way, it was all inadequate. She had expected more than a phrase,
and the very fact that the note of earnestness was absent from his voice
but made her desire the sound of it the more passionately. Again she
felt the baffled sensation which came to her in moments of their closest
intimacy. Had his soul, in truth, eluded her for the last time? And was
there in the profoundest emotion always a distance which it was forever
impossible to bridge? Yet the uncertainty, the very lack of a fuller
understanding only added fervour to the passion that burned in her
heart.

"It's all over now, so we may as well warm ourselves by the failure of
her deviltry," he observed presently, as he flung the crumpled paper
into the fire. "I'm downright sorry she'll never know how little harm
she's done."

"It might, I suppose, have been worse," suggested Laura.

"Well, I suppose so--and you mean me to believe that you didn't even
read it?" he enquired with tender gayety.

She gave him her eyes frankly as an answer to his appeal for faith. "Why
should I? I love you," she replied.

For an instant--a single sufficing instant--he met her look with an
earnestness that was equal to her own. The man in him, she almost cried
out in her exultation, was touched at last.

"May God grant that your confidence will never fail me," he rejoined a
little sadly.

"When that comes it will be time to die," was her answer.

Taking her hand in his he held it in a close pressure for several
minutes. Then the earnestness she had arrested fled from her touch, and
when he spoke again she could not tell whether his words were uttered
sincerely or simply as the outcome of his sarcastic humour.

"If you were a flesh-and-blood woman instead of an eccentric sprite," he
remarked, "I suppose you'd want me to make a clean breast of the whole
affair, but I can't because, to tell the truth, I've forgotten
everything about it."

"Then you didn't honestly love her, so it doesn't matter."

"Love her! Pshaw!" Though he laughed out the words there was an angry
flush in his face. "Do you think I'm the kind of man to love a mere
singing animal? And besides," he concluded with a brutal cynicism which
repelled her sharply, "I'm of an economical turn, you know, and the love
of such women comes too high. I've seen them eat up a fellow's income as
if it were a box of Huyler's." The words were no sooner uttered than his
mood changed quickly and he was on his feet. "But I didn't mean to give
you the whole morning, sweetheart, I merely looked in to say that I
wanted you to come out with me in the car this afternoon. There's a fine
breeze blowing."

For a thoughtful moment she hesitated before she answered. "I told Roger
Adams that I should be at home," she returned, "but I dare say he won't
mind not seeing me."

"Oh, I dare say," he retorted gayly. "Well, I'll pick you up, then, on
the stroke of five."

As he left the room she went over to the window, and when he came out a
little later, he turned upon the sidewalk to glance up at her and wave
his hand. She was happy, perfectly happy, she told herself, as she
looked eagerly after the last glimpse of his figure; but even while she
framed the thought into words, she was conscious that her heart throbbed
high in disappointment and that her eyes were already blind with tears.

When Adams sent up his card, at twenty minutes before five o'clock, she
lingered a few moments before going downstairs in her motoring coat and
veil. In response to her embarrassed excuses, he made only a casual
expression of regret for the visit he had missed.

"It's a fine afternoon--just right for a run," he remarked, adding after
a brief hesitation. "It's the proper thing, I suppose, to offer you
congratulations, but I'm a poor hand, as you know, at making pretty
speeches. I wish you happiness with all my heart--that's about all there
is to say--isn't it?"

"That's about all," she echoed, "and at least if I'm not happy I shall
have only myself to blame."

The silence that followed seemed to them both unnatural and constrained;
and he broke it at last with a remark which sounded to him, while he
uttered it, almost irrelevant.

"I've never seen much of Kemper, but I always liked him."

"I know," she nodded, "you were chums at College."

"Oh, hardly that, but we knew each other pretty well. He's a lucky chap
and I hope he has the sense to see it."

"There's no doubt whatever of his sense!" she laughed. Then, growing
suddenly serious, she leaned toward him with her old earnest look. "No
one has ever known him, I think, just as I do," she went on, "because no
one understands how wonderfully good he really is. He's so good," she
finished almost triumphantly, as if she had overcome by her assertion a
point which he disputed, "that there are times when he makes me feel
positively wicked."

Having no answer ready but a smile, he gave her this pleasantly enough,
so that she might take it, if she chose, for a complete agreement.
Though his heart was filled with repressed tenderness, there was nothing
further now that he could say to her, for he realised as he looked into
her face, that there was little room in her happiness either for his
tenderness or for himself. An aversion, too, to meeting Kemper awoke in
him, and so, after a few minutes of trivial conversation, he rose and
held out his hand.

"I'm very busy just now, so I may not see you again for quite awhile,"
he said at parting, "but remember if ever you should want me that I am
always waiting."

A little later, as he walked up the street in the June sunshine, he saw
Kemper's new automobile spinning rapidly from the direction of Fifth
Avenue.




CHAPTER III

THE GREATEST OF THESE


For a minute after Kemper had passed in his car, Adams turned back and
stood looking down the long street filled with pleasant June sunshine.
In the distance a hand-organ was grinding out a jerky sentimental air,
and beside him, at the corner by which he stood, a crippled vender of
fruit had halted his little cart of oranges and apples.

A year ago Adams might have told himself, in the despair of ignorance,
that since Laura had given her love to Kemper she was lost to him
forever. But he had learned now that this could not be true--that she
was too closely knit into his destiny to separate herself entirely from
it; and there came to him, while he stood there, a strange mystic
assurance that she would some day feel that she had need of him again.
His love had passed triumphantly through its first earthly stages, and
in the large impassioned yearning with which he thought of her there
was, so far as he himself was conscious, but little left of a sharper
personal desire. All desire, indeed, which has its root in the physical
craving for possession seemed to have gone out of him in the last few
months; and since the earliest dawn of that deeper consciousness within
his soul, he had almost ceased to think of himself as an isolated
individual life.

To let go the personal was to fall back again on the Eternal; between
the soul and God, he had learned in his deepest agony, there is room for
nothing more impregnable than the illusion of self. As Roger Adams--as a
mere separate existence, he was a failure. The things which he had
desired in life he had not possessed; the things which he had possessed
he had ceased very soon, in any vital sense, to desire. Of his life's
work, so big at the beginning, he saw now that he had made but a small
achievement--a volume of essays on the writings of other men and a few
years editing of a magazine which had absorbed his strength without
yielding him the smallest return of fame. On every side, from all
avenues of hope or of mere impulse, there had crowded upon him, he
admitted smiling, but disappointment and disillusion. He had played for
happiness as every man plays for it from the cradle, he had staked his
throw as boldly, he had made his resolves as desperately, as any of his
fellows, and yet at the end of his forty years he had not a single
object to put forward as his reward. Nothing remained to him! As the
world counts success he could show only failure.

But the larger vision was still before him, and he knew that all these
thoughts were the cheapest falsehood. In spite of appearances, in spite
of the outward emptiness of his existence, he had not failed; and in the
hour that he had put life aside he had for the first time in his whole
experience begun really to live. In surrendering his own small
individual being he knew that he had entered into the possession of a
being immeasurably larger than his own.

He looked at the fruit vender smiling, and the man's answering smile
came to him like the clasp of fellowship. "Did he, too, understand?" was
Adams' unspoken question, "had he, also, found the key that unlocked his
prison?" and there flowed into his heart something of the rapture with
which Laura had cried: "I've grown to the light!" In each exclamation
there was ecstasy, but in hers it was the short, troubled ecstasy of the
senses, which hears its doom even in the hour of its own fulfilment;
while from his finer joy there shone forth that radiant energy, in which
is both warmth and light, both rest and action, which illumines not only
the soul within, but transfigures and refines the mere dull ordinary
facts of life.

As he stood there the car passed him again, and Laura and Kemper both
turned, smiling, to look back at him. When Laura's long white veil was
lost, with a last flutter, in the sunshine, he nodded to the fruit
vender, and crossing to Broadway started in the direction of his home.

He had asked Trent to dine with him--the boy looked fagged he thought,
and it might do him good to talk freely about his play. Then he recalled
several letters that he had put aside for the sake of seeing Laura; and
retracing his steps, he went back to his office and sat down before his
desk. It surprised him sometimes to find how little irksome such
uninteresting details had become.

They talked late over their cigars and coffee, and when at last Trent
rose, with a laughing reminder of his mother, and went out into the hall
to put on his overcoat, Adams passed by him, after a final handshake,
and entered his darkened study at the end of the hall. He heard the
door close quickly as Trent left the house, and his mind was still full
of the boy's dramatic ambitions, as he paused beside his desk and bent
down to raise the wick of the green lamp. He had fallen into the habit
of sitting up rather late now, and there was a paper on his blotting-pad
which he was preparing for the coming issue of his magazine. After
glancing hastily over, he found that the last few sentences were
rearranging themselves in his thoughts, and he had set himself patiently
to the redraughting of the paragraph, when a slight sound at the door
caused him to look up suddenly with the suspended blue pencil still, in
his hand. It was too late for the maids, he knew--they had already gone
to bed before Trent left--and he knew also that the person who entered
at this hour must have opened the outer door by means of a latch-key.
The soft, slow movement outside sent a nervous shiver through him; he
was aware the next instant that he gripped the pencil more closely in
his hand; and then, rising to his feet with a breathless impulse to be
face to face at once with the inevitable moment, he made a single step
forward, while he watched the knob turn, the door open slowly, and
Connie cross the threshold and pause confusedly as if blinded by the
lamplight.

The pencil dropped from his hand; he heard it fall with a thud upon the
carpet; and then he heard nothing else except the beating of his own
arteries in his ears. Time seemed to stop suddenly and then to whirl
madly forward while he stood rooted to his square of carpet, with his
useless hands hanging helplessly at his sides. It was the supreme
instant his life that was before him, and yet he was as powerless to
meet it as the infant in the womb to avert the hour of its birth. Dumb
and petrified by very force of the will within him, he waited immovable
on the spot of carpet, while his eyes saw only the visible wreck of the
woman who stood upon his threshold. His dreams of her had been visions
of horror, but the most pitiable of them had fallen far short of the
reality as he saw it now. From her streaked blonde hair, already
powdered with gray, to her exhausted bedraggled feet, which seemed
hardly to support her trembling body, she stood there, terrible and full
of anguish, like the most tragic ghost of his imaginary horrors. Face to
face with each other they were held speechless by the knowledge that
there was no word by which the past might be justified or the future
made any easier for them to meet; and as in all great instants of life
the thing that was said between them was uttered at last in an unbroken
silence.

Then as they stood there a slight sound changed the atmosphere of the
room. The shade of the lamp, which Adams had raised too high, cracked
with a sharp noise and fell to the floor in broken pieces; and at the
shock Connie gave a hysterical shriek and lifted to Adams the frightened
glance of her ignorant blue eyes.

"I--I had nowhere to go and I am very tired," she said, in her old tone
of childish irritation, "I don't think I was ever so tired in my life
before."

Her voice snapped the icy constraint which held him and he knew now that
he was ready to face the hour on its own terms. His will was as the
strength of the strong, and he felt standing there, that he would ask
no quarter of his fate. Let it be what it would, he knew that it was
powerless to close on him again the door of his prison.

"Then you did right to come back; Connie," he said quietly, "you did
right to come back."

His words rang out almost exultantly, but the moment afterward he was
terrified by their immediate effect--for Connie--throwing herself
forward upon the floor, burst wildly into one of her old spells of
weeping, calling upon God, upon himself, and upon the man whom she had
loved and hated. The frenzied beating of her small, helpless hands, the
streaming of her tears, the quiver of her wrecked, emaciated body, the
convulsed agony that looked at him from her face--these things made
their appeal to that compassion by which he lived, and he found that the
way which he had thought difficult had become to him as familiar as the
breath he drew.

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