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The Wheel of Life by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

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




At Fortieth Street he was about to turn back again when he was arrested
by the sound of his own name called by a passing voice, and looking up
he saw Perry Bridewell spring from a cab which had hastily driven up to
the sidewalk.

"Wait a bit, will you, Adams?" said Perry, waving one heavily gloved
hand while he reached up with the other to pay the driver. "You're the
very man I'm after," he added an instant later as he turned from the
curbing, "so if you don't mind I'll walk a couple of blocks in your
direction. I'd just got into my dinner clothes," he explained, fastening
his fur-lined overcoat more snugly across his chest, "when I found that
Miss Wilde was going down alone to Gramercy Park. That's where I've come
from, and now I'm rushing back to keep an engagement Gerty has made for
dinner. I'll be hanged if I know where she's taking me--it's all one to
me, half the time I forget to ask whose house we're going to until I
bolt into the drawing-room. Beastly life, this everlasting eating in
other people's houses."

His tone was one of amiable discontentment, but there was a look of
positive annoyance upon his handsome face, and he turned presently to
regard his companion with an enquiry which might have been darkly
furtive had not the luminous publicity in which he moved rendered the
smallest of his mental processes so brilliantly overt. It was
immediately plain to Adams that the jerky sentences were shot out at
random in order that Perry's slow mind might gain a larger space in
which to grope for the word he really wanted. There was something
evidently behind it all, and until the situation should disclose itself
they walked on in an embarrassed and waiting silence. In his top hat and
his mink-lined overcoat Perry presented an ample dignity which his
companion found almost overpowering in its male magnificence. That
hesitation should manifest itself amid such a pageantry of personality
reminded Adams of the beggars in the old nursery rhyme who had come to
town sporting velvet gowns. Everything about Perry Bridewell was built
on so opulent a scale that in thinking of him one found oneself using
almost unconsciously a Romanesque and florid diction.

"There is something you'd like to say to me," suggested Adams presently.
"I'm in no hurry, of course, but isn't this as good a time as any
other?"

"By Jove, that's just what I was thinking," returned Perry, with a burst
of confidence, "but it isn't really anything, you know--that is, I mean,
it isn't anything that--that's real business."

A pretty woman passed suddenly under the electric light, and even in his
embarrassment, which was great, he followed her with the animated glance
which he instinctively devoted to vanishing feminine beauty.

"Thank God, there's no real business between us," retorted Adams, "and
that's why it's a rest to spend a half-hour with you--because you don't
know a piece of literature from a publisher's advertisement."

"We're such old friends, you know," pursued Perry, forgetting the moment
which he had wasted upon the pretty woman, "that when there's a thing on
my mind I feel--well, I feel a--a deuced queer fish not to tell you."

Adams laughed good naturedly.

"For heaven's sake don't remain long in a fishy sensation," he
rejoined. "Let's have it out and over. By the way, may I ask if it
concerns you or me?"

Perry shook his head as he tugged nervously at his fair moustache. "Look
here, old man," he said at last, "I know, of course, that Mrs. Adams is
as innocent as a baby--Gerty's just like her and there are plenty of
women made that way. It's the men who are such confounded brutes," he
commented with pensive morality.

"Oh, is that it?" responded Adams, and he turned upon the other a look
that was coolly interrogative. "Come, now, we'll take it quietly. You're
one of the best friends I have, and I want to know what they're saying
about my wife."

"It's that damned Brady!" exclaimed Perry, while he felt for his
handkerchief, and blew his nose with violence.

"All right--it's that damned Brady?" repeated Adams.

"If I didn't think more of you than of any man on earth I'd be shot
before I'd tell you," protested Perry, and added with a desperate rush
under fire.

"He had too much champagne last night--though, as for that matter, I've
seen him upset by a cocktail--and afterward at billiards he told Skinker
that--that Mrs. Adams--you understand, old chap, it's all his rot--was
going to supper alone with him to-night--in his rooms after the opera.
Of course he was drunk and I wouldn't bet a cent on his word even when
he's sober. He's the kind of fool that tells of his conquests at the
club," he wound up with scathing contempt.

For a moment Adams, looking away from him, stared silently into a shop
window before which he stood--intent apparently upon the varied display
of antique silver. Then he turned squarely to Perry Bridewell and broke
into a short, hard laugh.

"Well, Brady lied," he said. "I promised Mrs. Adams that I would bring
her home from the opera." It was no hesitation in his own voice, but the
joyful relief which shone at him from Perry's face that brought him
suddenly to a stop. "You were a first-rate fellow to come to me," he
went on more quietly. "Of course, you know, our Western conventions are
much more elastic than your New York ones. All the same--"

"I merely wanted to let her know the kind of man he is," explained
Perry. "What do women understand about the men they meet--why, we all
look pretty much alike upon the surface." Then his righteous anger got
the better of his philosophy and he broke out in a heartfelt oath. "Damn
him! I'd like to thrash him clean out of his skin!"

"I am glad you told me," was all Adams said, but there was a reserved
strength in his voice which made the explosive violence of the other
sound the merest bravado. As he spoke the light flashed in his face, and
Perry saw that it was the face of an old and a tired man. There was a
shrinking in his eyes as of one who has stumbled unexpectedly upon a
revolting sight.

Of the many and varied emotions which had entered Perry's life, the
cleanest, perhaps, was his loyal regard for Roger Adams. It had begun
with his college days, had strengthened with his manhood, and had
lasted, in spite of the amiable contempt in which he held all
literature, with a constancy which had certainly not belonged to his
affairs with representatives of the opposite sex. Now as he looked at
Adams' haggard face under the electric light, he felt the tugging of a
sympathy so strong that it seemed to hurt him somewhere in his expansive
chest.

"Look here, old chap, come and dine with me at Sherry's," he burst out,
"and I'll telephone Gerty that I've thrown over that beastly dinner."

To offer something to eat to the afflicted was the solitary form in
which consolation appeared to him invested with solidity; and so earnest
was the generous impulse by which he now felt himself to be prompted,
that before Adams could reply to the invitation he had begun already to
run over mentally the courses he was prepared to order. For a colossal,
a consolatory, an unforgettable dinner he was determined that it should
be--such a dinner as he permitted himself only upon the rare occasions
when one of his intimate friends had lost heavily in stocks or been
abandoned by his wife. "Come to Sherry's," he urged again, halting in
the ecstatic working of his mind, "and I promise you that we will make
an evening."

But the sly incarnate devil which lurked in Adams in the form of an
ironic spirit asserted itself with an explosion which shook the
plethoric gravity with which Perry contemplated an orgy of indigestion.
The universal scheme appeared planned to fulfil the law of a Titanic
humour, and his own credulity and Connie's indiscretions showed suddenly
to Adams as mere mote-like jests which circled in a general convulsion
of Nature's irony.

"Well, you are a capital fellow," he stammered, after a moment, while
the spasm of his unholy laughter rocked him from head to foot. "I--I'd
like it of all things--but I can't. The fact is it is all so funny--the
whole business of life."

Even as he uttered the words he realised that to Perry they would convey
an infamous lightness, but at the thought his hysterical humour
redoubled in its energy. It was as if he stood outside--afar off--and
watched as a god the little tangled eccentricities of earth. And they
_were_ little, even though Perry should continue to regard the situation
with such large magnificence.

By the time, however, that he had parted from Perry Bridewell and turned
in at his own door, the gravity of the occasion had grown almost
oppressive in his reflections. Connie had gone an hour before--he was
too late to have detained her upon a pretext--and while sitting
speechless before the dinner he could not eat--his heated imagination
wove visions of horror in which his wife was entangled as a fly in a
spider's web. What if Connie were really possessed by the influence of
some drug which rendered her incapable of willing rationally? What if he
missed her at the entrance to the opera? Or what if--most desperate
supposition--she should, in the event of his finding her, refuse to
accept his manufactured excuse to recall her home? She was capable, he
knew, of any recklessness, but he had never for an instant conceived her
as walking open eyed into dishonour, and he felt again the awful, if
partly comforting conviction that she was not herself--that an infernal
drug was working in her and bending her to some particular uses of the
devil. Why had she wasted her beauty and even her life? he wondered
bitterly--and did the moment's mad exhilaration compensate for the slow
deliberate eating away of her moral consciousness? He recalled again the
violent flutter of her manner, the excitement as of intoxication in her
voice, the yellow tinge which had crept gradually over the ivory of her
skin; her spasmodic movements and the ineffectual lies which deluded
neither of them for an instant. The tragedy of life rose before him as
vividly as the humour of it had done an hour ago--a tragedy which was
hideous because it was ignoble, in which there was neither the beauty of
resignation nor the sublimity of defiance. Had there been the
least--even the smallest redeeming honesty in the situation he felt that
he might have faced it, if not with positive sympathy yet with a
tolerant, a merciful comprehension. Love he might have understood--for
women needed it, he knew, and he was burdened by no delusion concerning
the place he occupied in Connie's horizon. But before the breathless
chase of excitement in which she lived, the frenzied invocation of
pleasure that filled her thoughts, he found himself groping blindly for
some meaning which would explain the thing it could not justify.

The hours dragged so heavily that by ten o'clock he put on his overcoat
and snow-shoes and went out again into the street. He was possessed at
the moment by a growing fear of missing Connie, and as he walked toward
the opera house he had sense of a premonition almost occult in power
that the terrible destiny which had her in its clutch was gathering
energy for some pitiless catastrophe With characteristic patience he
searched his own conscience, the incidents of his daily life, and held
himself rather than his wife to account. After all, he was the stronger
of the two, and yet when had he put forth his strength or his pity on
her behalf? In the closer human relations mere indifference showed
suddenly as sin, and the sluggish spirit which had controlled his
married life appeared in his memory as a form of moral apathy. Was a
human soul so small a thing that it could perish at his side and he be
none the Wiser? What was his boasted intellect worth if it could
paralyse the human part of him and exhaust the fount of his compassion?
In his widening vision he saw that in the spirit of things humanity is
one and indivisible, a single organism held together by a common pulse
of life. To live or to die apart he realised, is beyond the scope of an
individual destiny, for in the eye of God each man that lives is the
keeper not of his own but of his brother's soul.

The self reproach which moved in his heart impelled him so rapidly upon
his way that when he reached the doors he had still an hour to wait
before the opera ended. Remembering that if he were so fortunate to find
Connie he must take her home, he went to a livery stable for a carriage,
and then coming back, walked nervously up and down upon the frozen
pavement. His mind was divided between the fear that she might leave by
another entrance--that he might miss her altogether--and the more
horrible dread that in seeing her he should be unable to prevail upon
her to come away. She might, he felt, demand a reason, exact from him
the meaning of his unexpected appearance; there was even a hideous
possibility that she might fly into a temper.

The wind was bitter and he went into the lobby, where a few men were
hurrying out to secure their carriages. Then at last came the crowd in
evening dress, and it seemed to him that the acuteness of his perception
was reinforced by an almost unnatural power of vision. Out of the moving
throng the face of each woman stood forth distinctly as if relieved by a
spectral illumination; and he saw them clearly one after one, fair or
dark, plain or beautiful, until from among them there shone toward him
the elaborately arranged blonde head of Connie, under a winking diamond
which shed over her an unbecoming light. He had hoped to the last that
she would be with several others, but he perceived when she came out at
Brady's side, with her babyish chin tilted upward and her thin features
working in a forced and unhealthy animation, that they were alone and
would probably be alone for the remainder of the evening.

Standing beyond the entrance, and watching her unseen, while she paused
for an instant in the crowded lobby, Adams felt again the strange stir
of emotion he had experienced when he looked at her the evening before
under the lamplight in his study. In a single vivid instant he saw her
winking diamonds, her rouged cheeks, the nervous flutter that shook her
fragile figure, and the consuming fire which was destroying the
appealing prettiness of her face. Then he looked deeper still to the
naked terrified soul of her, caught in a web from which, because of her
weakness, there could be no escape.

There was no room in his heart now for any other feeling than one of
agonised compassion, and as she came through the doorway he touched her
arm and spoke in a voice which had the sound of a caress. "I've just had
bad news, Connie, so I came to find you."

She started violently, her hand dropped from her companion's arm, and
she stood trembling from head to foot like a blade of grass that is
shaken by a high wind. "What do you mean? What is it?" she demanded.

After lifting his hat to Brady he had not noticed him again, and now he
bent upon his wife a look of gentle, if unyielding, authority. "I'll
tell you presently--in the carriage," he said, drawing her wrap more
closely about her throat. "I have one waiting at the corner."

He saw her look at him in a frightened hesitation; saw, too, that even
in the quiver of her alarm she had taken in the unflattering details of
his appearance--- his ordinary business overcoat, the blue silk muffler
about his neck, and even the bespattered condition of his rubber shoes.
For an instant she glanced uncertainly at Brady's immaculate evening
dress showing beneath his open fur-lined overcoat, and knowing her as he
did, Adams read her appreciation of the contrast as plainly as if it had
been written in her face.

But he was not moved by the knowledge of her criticism, nor did it shake
him in the least from that penetrating vision he had attained. The
instinct for battle was alive and quick within him--if Connie was to be
saved he knew that he must fight single-handed with the powers of evil
for her soul. And fight he would--it was the end for which a man was
born--that he might overcome and so justify the spirit about the brute.

Her hand hung at her side, and taking it in his, he slipped it under his
arm with a possessive air, while she made to Brady some hurried excuses
in a trembling voice. For a moment still she hung back, but Adams drew
her gently with him, and after the first few steps, she recovered
herself and walked rapidly to the waiting carriage. Inside she shrank
back immediately into a corner from which, when they had rolled off, she
sent forth a nervous question. "What is it? Tell me what it is?" she
asked.

The tremor that shook her limbs, her utter helplessness before him,
touched his heart with a compassion beside which his old emotion for her
showed as a small and trivial thing. All that was divine in him awoke
and responded to the horror that looked from her face, and he felt
suddenly that until this instant he had never loved her. Now she was
really his because now she needed him; but for him she would stand
alone, deserted and afraid, in that future to which she had turned with
such pitiable and childlike ignorance. She and the fight were both in
his hands, and he was bracing himself to resist until the end.

"I'll tell you if you wish," he said, "but you mustn't let it give you a
sleepless night."

As they turned a corner an electric light flashed into the darkness of
the carriage lighting up her blonde hair and the sparkling diamonds
which made her blue eyes look dull and lifeless. "It is--is it anything
about money?" she asked with a movement toward him.

"It's about nothing more important than that consummate ass you were
with," he answered, laughing as he reached out and took her hand in his
with a friendly pressure. "I've just found out that he's a blackguard,
and I thought you were too precious to be left an instant longer in his
company. We must be careful, dear," he added. "God knows I'll do my best
to help you--but we must be careful"

"Oh!" she cried out sharply, in a high voice. "Oh!" and she shrank from
him as if he had hurt her by his touch. It was all she said, but the
word quivered in his ears with a suppressed emotion. Was it thankfulness
for her escape? he wondered, or was it anger at the part that he had
played?




PART II

ILLUSION




CHAPTER I

OF PLEASURE AS THE CHIEF END OF MAN


On the morning after his meeting with Adams, Arnold Kemper awoke at
three minutes of nine o'clock, and lay for exactly the three minutes
that were needed to make up the hour watching the hand as it moved on
the face of the bronze clock upon his mantel. The clock, like everything
in his rooms, was costly, a little ornate, and suggestive of an owner
whose intention aimed frankly at the original.

Lying in his large mahogany bedstead, with his body outstretched between
soft yet crisply ironed linen sheets, and his head placed exactly in the
centre of the pillows, he waited, yawning, until the expected hour
should strike. If by an effort of will he could have put back the minute
hand for another quarter of an hour he felt that it would have been
pleasant to doze off again, shutting his eyes to the sunlight which
streamed through the window on the Turkish rug, and inhaling agreeably
the aroma of boiling coffee which reached him through the open door of
his sitting-room. With the thought he closed his eyes, stretched himself
again and clasped his hands sleepily above his head; then, without
warning, the clock struck in a deep, bronze-like tone, and with a
vigorous movement, he sprang out of bed, flung his dressing-gown across
his shoulders, and passed quickly to the cold plunge in his
dressing-room. When he reappeared there was a fresh, healthy glow in his
face, and the smile with which he knotted his green figured necktie
before the mirror, stuck his black pearl scarf pin carefully in place,
and twisted the short ends of his brown moustache, was that of a man who
begins his day in a blithe and friendly humour.

In the dining-room, which opened from his sitting-room next door, his
breakfast was already awaiting him, and beside his plate he found
several letters and the morning papers. He read the letters first, but
with a single exception they proved to be bills, and after glancing at
these with a suspicious frown he tossed them aside and turned to the
little square white envelope, which contained an invitation to dine from
a woman whom he detested because she bored him with domestic complaints.
His heavy brows gathered darkly over his impatient gray eyes, and he
pushed the mail carelessly away to make room for his coffee, to which
his man was adding a precise amount of cream and sugar.

"Don't let me forget to answer that, Wilkins," he said, in an annoyed
tone; "the response must be sent this afternoon, too, without fail."

"I don't think you wrote the notes you spoke of yesterday, sir,"
observed Wilkins, with an English accent and a manner of respectful
intimacy.

"Hang it all! I don't believe I did," returned Kemper, as he drew his
chair up to the table and tapped his egg shell. "That comes of letting a
thing you hate to do go over. I say, Wilkins, if I attempt to leave this
room before I've answered those letters, you're to restrain me by
force, do you hear?"

"Yes, sir; certainly, sir," replied Wilkins, as he went out to bring in
the toast.

Kemper laid his napkin across his knees, leaned comfortably back in his
chair, and unfolded one of the morning papers beside his plate. As he
did so he expanded his lungs with a deep breath, while his glance
travelled rapidly to the column which contained the day's reports of the
stock market. He knew already that the Chericoke Valley Central in which
he had invested had jumped thirty points and was still advancing, but he
read the printed statements with the exhaustless interest with which a
lover might return to a love letter he had already learned by heart. His
faith in the Chericoke Valley Central stock was strong, and he meant to
keep a close grip on it for some time to come.

Turning a fresh page presently, his eyes wandered leisurely over the
staring headlines, and came suddenly to a halt before a trivial item
inserted among the Western news. It was a brief notice of his divorced
wife's marriage, and to his amazement the announcement caused him an
annoyance that was almost like the ghost of a retrospective jealousy. It
was quite evident to him that he did not want her for himself, yet he
suffered a positive displeasure at the thought that she should now
belong to another man. After the ten years since they had separated was
she still so "awfully splendid?" he wondered, had she kept her figure,
which was long, athletic, with a military carriage, and did she still
wear her hair in the fashion of a German omelette? "Thank heaven I'm
well out of it at any rate," he commented with feeling. "That comes of a
man's marrying before he's twenty-five. He's turned cynic before he gets
to forty"; and marriage appeared to him in his thoughts as a detestable
and utterly boring institution, which interfered continually with a
man's freedom and exacted from him a perpetual sociability. The most
blissful sensation he had ever known, he told himself, was that of his
recovered liberty; then his sincerity of nature compelled him to an
honest contradiction--he had known one emotion more blissful still and
that was the madness which had prompted him to his unfortunate marriage.

Oh, he had been very much in love without a doubt! and while he sat
peacefully drinking his two cups of coffee, eating his two eggs and his
four pieces of toast with orange marmalade, he remembered, with a
melancholy which in no wise affected his appetite, the first occasion
upon which he had kissed the woman who had been his wife. The memory of
her tall, erect figure, with its dashing military carriage, aroused in
him an agreeable and purely physical regret--the kind of regret which is
strong enough only to sweeten the knowledge of past pleasures; and he
admitted with his accustomed frankness that if he had never kissed her
again he should probably have continued to regard her with a charming,
if impractical, sentiment. But marriage had brushed off the bloom of
that early romance; and as he recognised this, he felt a keen resentment
against nature which had cheated him into believing that the illusion of
love would not vanish at the first touch of reality.

He had lived upon the surface of things and the surface had contented if
it had not satisfied him. It had never entered his thoughts to question
if he had had from life the best that it could offer, but he had
sometimes wondered, in moments of nervous exasperation against small
events, why it was that there could be no end under the sun to a man's
pursuit of the fugitive sensation. When he looked back now over the
breathless years of his life, he saw, almost with indignation, that
whatever punishment fate had held in reserve for him, the avenger had
inevitably appeared in the form his own gratified desire. He had
withheld his hand from nothing; the thing that he had wanted he had
taken without question--impulse and possession had flowed for him with a
rhythmic regularity of movement--and yet in glancing back he could place
his finger upon no past events and say of them "this brought me
happiness--and this--and this." In retrospect his pleasures showed cheap
and threadbare--woven of perishable colours, of lost illusions--and he
felt suddenly that he had been cheated into a false valuation of life,
that he had been deluded into a childish yet irretrievable error.

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