Part 10

I could not help it. I did not know I was going to do it. I know now that she had stopped resisting before this. She let me kiss her.

Slowly this fact made itself felt in my mind and in my heart. She had let me kiss her, but she had been unable to respond. And I remembered what she had said, hours or years ago, and the poignant sadness of it--

“Something has died in me. I don't believe I can ever love a man again.”

I lowered her head against the pile of pillows. I held the thick braid of her hair for a moment, then let it fall over her shoulder. I looked into her eyes, hoping against hope that I might find a responsive light there.

Then I sank back on my chair, and covered my face with my hands.

She reached out and laid her hand on my arm.

For a little time we sat that way. I could not look at her. I could not say anything. I was glad of the gentle touch of her hand.

It was she who broke the silence.

“Oh, Anthony,” she breathed. “If I only could!”

Then we were still again.

But this would not do. I was all egotism--I, who had so wished to help her.

Finally I looked up, and took her hand in mine and stroked it. I even smiled at her. At least, it seemed to me that I smiled.

It was one of those moments that come, in our times of greatest bewilderment, when for a space we see clearly. I suddenly felt that I could think again.

“I don't know what is to become of us, Heloise dear,” I said. “You have been close to the end of your life. But I think that you will have to let me help you. For I know now that I shall not want to live unless I can help you. And I shall not leave you alone in Peking. I think you will have to bear with me, at least until I can know that you have got back into the current of your life and work.”

She compressed her lips, and her dear eyes glistened. Then I felt her fingers tighten around mine.

“Anthony,” she said, low and uncertain, “I would do anything. I would love you if I could. I would go to you without love if I thought I could make you happy, or even help you. You gave me hope by helping me to work. Now, in spite of the dreadful facts of my life that I know so well to be true, you are stirring me to hope again. But all the time I know that the dreadful facts are there, that they will be there when this hope is faded.”

“I think,” said I, “that we can triumph over those dreadful facts.”

“Oh, Anthony,” she murmured, “if you only knew how dreadful they are. I wondered before whether I ought to tell you. I lay awake here night after night, trying to think it out--whether I ought to tell you. And then even worse news came. It was too much for me. I gave up, Anthony. It seemed to me, only a few hours ago, that the kindest thing I could do--the kindest thing I could do to you, dear--would be to leave this world. I brought only trouble into it. I thought it would be best to leave it.”

She paused. She looked past me, toward the window. Her brows were knit. She was very sober. And her reticence, that I had always felt, was gone. She continued:

“And now I've made a failure even of that. And here I am again, disturbing your life, a burden--”

I leaned forward and took her other hand and looked at her. She faltered. She stopped. I held her two hands firmly. For a moment I considered telling her that I knew her story. Then I knew that I could n't tell her. To-morrow, perhaps; but not now. This hour was hers and mine. Crocker had no place in it. I would not so much as have his name spoken. Further than this, my mind, that had failed me so miserably of late, was working again; and a plan was forming there.

I could not yet see all the way. But from moment to moment I could feel my habitual confidence in my mental processes coming back to me. I was beginning to believe, as I always used to believe, that I should prove equal to the situation, as it might develop. And the first thought of renunciation was coming to me like a clear light.

It is obvious, of course (even in this tense moment the fact became reasonably clear to me) that where personal desire is the major premise, logic is impossible.

It was time I came; in some degree to my senses.

She must have seen something of all this in my face, when I bent forward and took her two hands so firmly and looked into her eyes.

“Heloise dear,” I said, “you are not going to die. You are going to live. For the present you are going to let me help you start at rebuilding your life. You will do this because I love you, and because it is unthinkable that I should not help you. One way or the other”--I repeated this phrase with a peculiar emphasis that, I could see, puzzled her--“one way or the other I am going to help you. It may be that I can never stir you to love me. I shall do this if I can, Heloise; but it may be that I shall not succeed. I am glad that I have”--my voice broke here, so confusing is love--“have kissed you, but I shall not kiss you again. Not again, dear. We shall work this out, however. You and I, one way or the other, we shall work it out.”

“But Anthony,” said she. “You must let me tell you! It is--I am not free--there is--”

“You shall not tell me to-night,” I said to her. “You shall tell me nothing. I will not permit it. I will not listen. Free or bound, however dreadful the facts may seem--these things are nothing. Nothing!” My voice rose a little, I fear, at this point. “They can not possibly concern us now, you and me. For one way or the other--”

“But, dear, you don't understand--you don't know!”

“I know enough,” said I. “I know all that need concern me and the woman I love more than my life, more than my work, more than everything else in the world and the sky.”

She seemed almost to shudder at this.

“Anthony! Please, dear!” She was whispering these broken sentences. “This is all wrong! Please!”

Her voice trailed off. I was still bending forward, all eager and flushed with the great thoughts that were stirring within me. Her eyes seemed almost to cling to mine. She stirred a little, but did not turn away. Her hands were still in mine.

It seemed to me that I ought to surrender her hands and sit back in my chair.

Her eyes were glistening wet, the outlines of her mouth softened from the sadness that had been there. It almost seemed to me that she was drawing me forward with her hands.

Certainly something--some quality of the spirit, perhaps, was draw ing me nearer and nearer to her. I knew that my head was bending closer. I thought of resisting, but I did not resist.

My lips met hers.

Her hands slipped out of mine, and slowly--oh, so slowly!--slid up on my shoulders.

Then her arms were about me, and my arms were about her; and our hearts were beating together, very fast.

“Listen!” she whispered, all breathless, turning her head.

Some one was knocking at my door.

I stood up, irresolute. I was bewildered. She looked wan and weak, lying back there against the pillows. I was choking back the sobs that nearly came.

“Oh, Heloise,” I managed to say. “I meant not to. Forgive me, dear!”

But she was not looking at me. “See who it is,” was all she said.

So I went through to my own room, closing the connecting door behind me. I hurriedly brushed my hair, then opened the door.

It was the physician from the English mission. He was a young man, who looked at me coolly and with some curiosity.

I told him what had happened.

He weighed the morphine bottle in his hand, and pursed his lips over it.

“She must have taken between ten and twenty grains of the stuff,” said he, musingly.

“That, of course, is incredible,” said I.

He shook his head and replied in a casual tone for which I hated him.

“Oh, no. An overdose will act that way with some people. The system simply refuses to assimilate it or even retain it.”

I reported to him what I had done. He then went in and looked at Heloise and asked a few questions.

Occasionally his eyes flitted about the shabby room. Then he would dart little glances at her and at me.

He was a depressing person, this young physician. It was clear enough the impression he got of us.

Heloise felt it keenly. I saw that little droop of sadness coming about her mouth.

Then he told me that I had done about everything he could have done, that she would be all right in a day or so, and that she had had a rather lucky escape.

He left a little medicine, and went away. We both felt that he did not care to have us call him again; and we each knew that the other felt this, though we did not put it in words.

Finally I said, after I had sat by her for a time in moody silence--

“It is very late, dear. I rather think you will sleep to-night, in spite of the coffee and all.”

“Yes,” she said, “I think I will. And you, Anthony”--she caught my hand--“I don't like to see you look so tired.”

“I shall sleep,” I replied. Then I kissed her forehead, and went into my own room, leaving the door ajar in order that I might hear if she called.

We did sleep, both of us. At least, she says she did. And she looked rested this morning, when I took the breakfast tray from the waiter and carried it to her. She was up, and dressed.

I have realized since that I did not succeed at all in my efforts to hide the serious mood that took possession of me from the moment I woke. She caught it. Every now and then she flashed an odd, puzzled glance at me.

Finally, when we had finished and I had put the tray in my room, she broached the subject that was uppermost in both our minds.

“Before we go any farther, Anthony dear, I am going to tell you--”

I stopped her.

“But Anthony, you must let me speak. You are giving up everything for me, and you don't even know--”

“I know all I wish to know now, dear.”

“But this is very important. I can't forgive myself, when I realize that you don't know what I have done--”

I could n't stand this. I simply took her two shoulders in my hands and made her look squarely at me; and I spoke with a sudden uprush of feeling.

“Dear, dear girl,” I said, “I'm not interested in what you have done. I am interested in what you are.”

“But Anthony, if I am not worthy--”

It hurt me to hear her speak in this way. I was thinking swiftly, bitterly, of certain episodes in my own life. I was thinking of the men I knew, and what they had done. I thought of Crocker and his outrageous code. I thought of my own latest episode of the sort--with the little girl at “Number Nine”--and of the queer masculine twist in my own thinking that had led me to consider myself “unmanly” because I had run away from that girl when she wanted me to stay.

No, I could not bear to have her speak or even think so of herself. So I said, still holding her there before me:

“Men are accustomed to judge women, Heloise. You say that I must know what you have done. Has it occurred to you that I ought to tell you--very humbly, dear--what _I_ have done?”

She looked really puzzled at this.

“Why,” she said, “I don't know--I never thought. T have always heard that men were--well, different.”

“You have heard that--from men,” I replied sadly, and turned away.

She caught my arm. “But apart from all that, Anthony,” she broke out, “there is one thing that you _must_ let me say. You _must!_” She hesitated, caught her breath, then plunged desperately along with it. She was not looking at me now. Her color was rising; and her voice low.

“I have--a--husband--” she said.

“Yes.” I interrupted her. “I am going to talk to him now.”

I went straight into my own room and got my hat and stick.

She followed me as far as the doorway. I saw her leaning there, all limp and white.

“You knew!” she was murmuring, as if to herself. “You _knew!_”

“I don't believe I shall need my overcoat,” said I, glancing out at the sunlight on the roofs. God knows why I said just that at such a moment. I added--

“Wait here, Heloise. It will be all right. But the time has come to stop drifting. We are going to stop drifting now, you and I--and he. Good-by, dear, for now.”

I knew I must hurry. I simply could not talk this out with her now. I felt that I could not endure it. I doubted if she could. Besides it would get us nowhere so long as the question of Crocker himself should be left unsettled to menace our two lives.

I opened the door.

She came on into the room, reaching her hands out toward me. She seemed actually weak, trembling.

“Oh--Anthony!” she breathed, staring at me with something that was almost fascination in her eyes, as if she were now seeing me for the first time.

I could not trust myself at all. I hurried out, closing the door behind me. I ran down the stairs.

It was the thought of the telephone that had come to me with such force on the preceding evening. I knew now that it was not necessary to keep up this terrible waiting for him. It would be easy enough to call him up; then I could go to him and still feel that I was not leaving Heloise at the mercy of a chance visit from him while I was away.

It took a long time for them to get him to the telephone, over there at the _Wagon-lits_--fifteen or twenty minutes, I should say.

Finally I heard his voice.

“How are you, Eckhart?” he said, in the easy, offhand way that men employ one with another. “How have you been?”

I thanked God, under my breath, that he was in condition to talk. I simply could not have endured further delay.

“I've been all right,” said I. “I want to see you, Crocker, in regard to a very important matter.”

“Surely. Any time you say.”

“Suppose I come right over there to the Wagon-lits.”

“All right. I'll wait for you in my room. Good-by.”

“Good-by, Crocker.”

Then I went out into the little Chinese street, and once again headed toward the big hotel in the Legation Quarter.

April 14, (continued).

|CROCKER opened his door at my knock.

He was half dressed, with a quilted gown drawn about his big frame.

He gripped my hand. I permitted this, which was perhaps an odd thing to do; but it came about so easily and swiftly that I could not think how to prevent it without appearing merely childish.

Then I went on into the room, and stood, with some sense of inner tension, while he drew an easy chair to the table and with a paper cutter pried open a box of cigars.

He has changed, even in the fortnight since our parting in the railway station at Yokohama. He is putting on weight pretty rapidly, and his face distinctly exhibits the ravages of drink. It was pale this morning. His eyeballs were crisscrossed with red veins, and there was an incipient puffiness under them. His hands were unsteady, too; I noted that fact when he opened the cigars. And afterward, when he dropped on the sofa and settled back against the cushions, he extended his right hand as I had seen him do once or twice before, back at Yokohama, and make an unsuccessful effort to hold it still. Then he let it fall across his knee, and for a moment stared gloomily at the carpet.

I observed, too, that he was more nervous. He moved with a jerky abruptness. And when he glanced up at me, it was suddenly, with a perceptible start, as if I had spoken sharply, though in reality I had not spoken at all. It made me think of the torturing confusion of moods that was racking his nervous system, and of the merciless voices of unrest that were so evidently whispering every moment at his inner ear. A few days ago I would not have observed his condition with any sympathetic understanding; but now that I, too, have been torn between the exaltation of love and the degradation of jealousy, I can only shake my head in a sad sort of wonder at the mysterious strength of these forces that drive men and women together, and apart, and that linger even after a mismating and a subsequent separation to stir and bewilder the spirit.... Yes, I can, in a way, feel with Crocker now. To live with memories of magical hours passed with a woman one has since lost--elusive, poignant memories, that come in the still hours of night to triumph over the brutal facts of the day that is gone and the day that is to come--this is the stuff of tragedy.

My feelings soared far, as I sat there--all in a moment. I was thinking of strong passions and of elemental things. It came to me, oddly, that I had never really understood certain of the great poems and the greater music dramas. I told myself that I must seize the first opportunity to hear “Tristan” again. I would understand if now. Yes, surely... there was the surging, heartbreaking climax of the “Liebestod,” for example--it was surging in my feelings now, and in my brain. I could hear the swelling of the violins. And I knew all at once that it was not the mere heartbreak of Isolde and her Tristan that surged and swelled with them, I knew that it was the universal story of man and woman everywhere. Underneath the trivial vulgarity of the daily newspaper, with its commonplace recital of petty dramas and pettier tragedies, I suddenly knew, surge and swell the hopes and dreams and casual disasters of a million Tristans and a million Isoldes. It is men like Crocker and myself, I thought, and women like Heloise, who enact, all unconsciously, tossed helplessly about on great billows of feeling, the heroic drama of life.

It was the inner man that dwelt on these stirring things. The outer me was declining a cigar, and taking the easy chair, and for a moment letting my eyes w ander about the room. It was going to be pretty difficult to broach the subject. I could see that. Yet it had somehow to be done.

There was a bottle half full of whisky on the table, and glasses. Evidently the embargo had been raised. I could not help staring at that bottle for a moment. And, though he did not raise his eyes, I felt that Crocker knew what was in my thoughts.

His suit-case, with the cover thrown back, rested on a chair by the wall. The contents were rumpled about; but among them, right on top, I saw a knife-handle of Japanese lacquer and silver projecting from a lacquered sheath with a silver tip.

He caught me looking at it, sprang up--with an abruptness that made me jump--and slammed down the cover of the suit-case.

Then he came back to the sofa with a short laugh that was plainly designed to cover inner embarrassment, and poured out a good three fingers of the whisky. He drank it neat.

“Have some?” he said.

I shook my head.

“It settles my stomach,” he continued, with an air of apology. “I have n't been at all well lately.”

I watched him while he poured out another, and tossed it down.

He lighted a cigar.

“Where you stopping?” he asked. “Have n't seen you around here, have I?”

I shook my head.

“There's another hotel here, then?” said he. And his eyes narrowed craftily.

“Oh, yes,” I replied, “two or three.”

Then I hesitated. But after all, why evade the man? I had come to his room with precisely the opposite intent. So, with a nervous abruptness not unlike his own, I gave him the name of my hotel--and Heloise's. And at the same time I watched him closely to see if it conveyed anything to him.

Plainly it didn't. He merely blew out a long spear of smoke, followed it for a moment with his eyes, and then glanced down at the cigar that he was turning slowly round and round between his fingers.

But he could not sit quietly for any length of time. He got up again, with that same jerky abruptness, and, muttering something about the room being close, strode to the window and threw it open.

He knew that he was acting rather uncivilly, for he turned to me then and said, with a fairly good imitation of a casual manner--“Mind a little air?”

“Not at all,” I replied. It was depressing to be talking thus about nothing, knowing so well what was in his heart and what was in mine. But I only mumbled the stereotyped phrase, “Not at all.”

He took another drink--neat again. Then he drummed on the table with the fingers of one hand.

If there is one thing above another that I abominate, it is that kind of idle drumming. He made it worse by whistling softly between his teeth a crude song of the streets. I knew that I must keep myself in hand, but could not help fidgeting a little in my chair.

Nervously self-centered as he was, my discomfort quite escaped him, of course. What stopped his whistling and drumming appeared to be a sudden thought that came to him with the tune.

He looked down at me. His eyes narrowed again. He opened his mouth, then abruptly closed it on the words that were so close to utterance.

When he did speak, I felt certain that his question was not the one he had meant at first to ask.

“How's the phonograph business?” he said, and tried to smile.

“It's all right,” I replied shortly.

He sat down on the edge of the sofa, elbows on knees, and smoked fast.

“What sort of place is that hotel of yours?” he inquired, after a little.

“Middling. Not so good as this.”

“Near by?”

“Not far.”

“I suppose any rickshaw man would know the way,” he mused.

He fell silent again. Then, finally, he put the question that was on his mind, not looking at me, trying to speak casually; but his voice was not quite steady, and I could see the cigar shake in his hand:--

“Have you happened to see a woman over there--young, good looking, rather slender, blue eyes? Could n't say what name she'd be using.”

In a flash I knew that this was my opening. And on a great wave of relief--for we had to come to the issue--I leaned back in my chair and said, “There is such a woman there. She is using the name of Crocker.” Then I watched him.

I have never seen a man's face go so blank. His jaw dropped--literally. And his eyes were wide.

I found myself returning his gaze, and nodding rather emphatically. I kept on nodding.

Then I said, holding his eyes with mine--

“See here, Crocker, I know all about that. You told me yourself. Have you forgotten?” Slowly the recollection came to him. “Oh, yes,” he replied, “at Yokohama.”

“And you told Sir Robert at Nagasaki. Have you forgotten that?”

This seemed to sting him. “How do you know I did?” he asked sharply.

“He told me. We talked you over. I asked him about the legal possibility of placing you under some sort of restraint.”

Curiously, this didn't anger him. He merely looked puzzled. I wonder if I am doomed to remain ineffectual to the last--an odd, scientific little person, to be humored by the practical men of this rough-and-ready world, even in their least practical moments.

“I don't get you, Eckhart,” said he. “What have you to do with my affairs?”

“At this moment--everything,” I answered him, feeling suddenly very sad.

Sad, because it came to me that you can not talk intelligently with another human being without a common language. And this, I knew all at once, Crocker and I did not have. I had thought of many things that I should say to him; now I had lost confidence in all of them, for I realized that the word which means one thought to me would mean another and different thought to him. Each of us would have to interpret words and phrases in the light of his own mental images. And the mental images of each were outgrowths of his individual philosophy of life.

Yes, my arguments, that had, on the way over, seemed so potent, would not do now. In order to reach that mind of his, I must think in his terms and not in my own. And I tried, desperately, to piece together something like his code, as I sat there.... That man is a free and dominant creature, half god, half beast; that a small, sheltered section of womankind is of superior, almost divine stuff, designed to comfort and elevate man on his god side, to bear his children and, under his own general government, “keep his house,” while the other and greater section of this same womankind is mysteriously of poorer stuff, and is worthy only to do his rougher work at such a wage as can be wrung from him or (in a pitifully matter-of-fact way) to cater to the vices of his beast side--something like this was surely Crocker's sort of philosophy.