Part 13

Another explanation of Miles’ conduct brought a curious sort of consolation and corrective. This was that he simply wanted to be free--but did not have the strength. The opportunity had been placed in his way to leave, and, feeling himself ultimately unequal to marriage and its burdens and limitations, he believed he ought to take it. His love still held him tenuously to her and the children, his sentiment for their past together, his need for a woman’s support--whatever it was--and he could not find the courage to make the break. He had probably been strengthened in entertaining this purpose by the knowledge that somebody had turned up from Thornhill, and she would be taken care of. Much as that base notion offended her, this last theory was frankly pleasing. It was better than the thought of betrayal with another woman.

By the time she had reached this state of enlightenment she was so skilled in reading poor Miles’ motives that she felt as though she had acquired supernatural powers of clairvoyance. The summer was more than half gone.

But she had not thought exclusively of Miles. She had the children to care for and teach a whole new set of fascinating things, and she had her painting. The opportunity presented by these untrammelled days was not to be lost over heart-burnings, and a new power and certainty had come to her. She wasted less time carrying her attempts to the last degree of finish. She was trying by experiment after experiment to get the feel and solidity of the earth and to express her warm daily contact with it.

She had been very timid toward Osprey where painting was concerned. She had resolved never to speak to him about it and to keep out of his way while she was at it. One ought not to expect to rent the cottage of a famous painter and have advice thrown in. But it was he who sought her in the orchard one morning and made comments for which she was grateful, because she understood them and could profit by them, and also because they were not uncomplimentary.

“Most of us,” he said, “gamble frightfully in choosing art as a career. That’s why there are so many hopeless artists. We mistake an urge for a talent, and the devil of it is there is no sure way of knowing whether we’re on the right road or not. But I think you are. In the first place you have the steady enthusiasm and not just mere plugging industry. In the second place you are a self-teacher. Everybody worth a hang is that.”

They were the first really golden words she had ever heard, and she was certain afterward that simply hearing them had improved her work miraculously--made her surer of the knowledge she had gained and helped her to discard excrescences.

Osprey had few visitors. Perhaps twice a year a gathering of extraordinary individuals with whom he had consorted at various periods and in many parts of the world crowded into the house, took possession of it, kept up a racket until morning and departed, leaving him with a few more intimate cronies, some to recover from the effects and others simply to prolong the reunion. These entertainments occurred usually in the early spring or fall, the seasons of change when people come together most spontaneously. And they were spontaneous. He had no use for set affairs.

On rare occasions women drove out to see him, for luncheon or tea; and he himself went to town about once a month, seldom remaining longer than over night. He seemed to have cultivated not only the love of solitude, but the power to enjoy it for long periods.

There was one visitor, however, who arrived often. Moira saw his heavy blue roadster drawn up beside the lawn three times during the first month of her stay, and she wondered who the impressive man was, with short grey curly hair, and the easy bearing of accomplishment. She was not surprised to learn later that he was somebody--no less a person, in fact, than Emmet Roget, the producer, a man who was both a power in the business phase of the theatre and an artistic radical in his own right.

The friendship between these two men appeared to be less extraordinary now than it had been in past years, but it was still a friendship in which a certain inequality was apparent. The rôle of Roget toward Osprey, during three-fourths of their adult lives, had been that of a detached but watchful guardian. A dozen years ago Osprey had been something of a riderless horse, a centre of explosions, the victim of unexpected mishaps and misunderstandings, constantly involved with a woman, and taking his affairs with desperate seriousness, careless of his talent and his time. Much of this relationship he skilfully suggested to her himself, in his humorously philosophic moments.

As he put it, he was born somewhere between his thirty-eighth and his fortieth year, and began to live his life in a sense backward; for though he went on having experiences it was always something in his life before his thirty-eighth year that he seemed to be living over in these experiences, and relishing where he previously had suffered. The actual occasion of the change had been a painful separation from the last of his devastating loves, and more or less complete celibacy since. The result was a fresh joy in work, a really enormous volume of production ... peace and contentment and plenty.

The life of Emmet Roget had been exactly the antithesis. He was penniless in his youth. No sooner had he reached New York--to which initial step Osprey had assisted him--than he began to have means for his needs. At twenty-nine he left Europe, after having immersed himself in as much of French culture as an able young foreigner can obtain with diligence and enthusiasm, and studied the beginnings of the German theatre movement. A season was spent directing a Denver “little theatre,” but the provinces offered too little future and freedom. Once more in New York, Roget was designing sets and directing productions. In his late thirties he was instituting new methods into the theatre which were hailed and copied abroad.

Many regarded Emmet Roget as primarily a “man for the future,” yet to him the present seemed invariably kind. Unlike his friend, nothing touched him; but whatever he touched gained from his personality, took on fascination and beauty. Hard at the core, immovable and unimpressionable, he was yet acutely sensitive, capable of profound appreciations, for music, for colour, for a scene, a woman--and surprisingly human in his contacts. No doubt it was this intuitive appreciation, coupled with early friendship, which had made him cling to Osprey through many hopeless seasons and experiments.

The first two or three times that Roget visited him that summer, Osprey did not refer to his new tenants except casually. Later, however, when he had had a half dozen talks with Moira, he introduced the subject to his friend at the dinner table.

“That’s rather a remarkable young woman I’ve got down there in the orchard,” he said. “Did I tell you that she painted?”

“I believe so--something of the kind,” replied Roget. He had met with his share of disillusionment among his own protégés, and he was not given to more than passing interest in the mere fact that a young woman painted.

“Well,” pursued Osprey, “I’ve got something to show you after dinner.”

When they had finished he led the producer to a picture on the studio wall and switched on a light he had put up to illuminate it.

“That’s one of hers,” he said. “I think there are extraordinarily good things in it as well as bad. At all events, I liked it so well I bought it.”

Roget studied the picture for a moment, but without enthusiasm.

“Yes,” he said. “Obviously you’ve influenced her already, or she’s known your work for some time.”

“I don’t think it’s so obvious,” protested the other. “There’s personal insight in that modelling, and it has a back to it. Anyway, she’s young. Fact is, there’s something really unusual about the girl. I fancy she had things her own way at one time. The marks are there, overlaid by experience since.”

“Of course,” laughed Roget quietly, “it makes a difference if you know the young lady.”

“Hang it, my dear fellow, the girl is poor. Has two children, and a husband who may be talented and may be a fool. But he’s certainly no support.”

“Charity and art do not mix, old man.”

“The hell they don’t,” replied Osprey testily. “But as you say, one must see for oneself. You are going to make Mrs. Harlindew’s acquaintance, and whatever you think of charity, you will buy a picture from her as a favour to me. Not too soon, you understand, and not too obtrusively. She shied at me frightfully when I bought this one. I had to tell her that I had made quite a collection of the work of promising beginners for reasons of my own.”

Roget found his friend nearly always transparent. Ten years ago he would have said there was considerably more than the mere fervour of the artist in this championship. But he had since become acquainted with a wholly new side of the man, and it was difficult to believe him capable of losing his head over a pretty bride who happened to rent his house.

“You say she is married?” he contented himself with asking, dryly.

A flicker of humorous comprehension passed over the other’s face.

“Yes,” he replied shortly, “but the fellow neglects her.”

Roget’s manner became once more indulgent.

“Well, I shall try to buy this picture. I don’t know what to do with it after I get it. There are mighty few pictures worth buying. Perhaps not more than twenty in the world.”

He dismissed the subject and sat down at Osprey’s piano. His study of the instrument had come late, in young manhood. Lacking any great musical scholarship or conventional training, he nevertheless played whatever he had heard that pleased him, with extraordinary tenderness and effect.

XXIV

For Moira the summer grew increasingly fruitful, and, in a reflective way, full of satisfactions, despite the continued absences of Miles. A profound sympathy came over her, which she did not remember to have experienced before, for the average discontented wife, who had to endure this sort of thing with empty hands and no refuge of the spirit in which to lose herself.... That could never be the case with her.

It is true that she would have been less serene were it not for the fact that she had found companionship that answered a real want. Osprey had none of the qualifications of the teacher, and his criticisms struck deep. If she had been younger and greener they might only have puzzled and not helped her, but now she welcomed surgery and destruction. Her own hard years of unaided application rendered her capable of understanding his language remarkably well, and she was ready to discard and forget everything she had ever known.

Their discussions were often continued after brushes were laid aside. She accepted invitations to tea in the studio or sat on his terrace on warm nights after the children were asleep. The long drawn out culmination of her relationship to Miles had given her the habit of self-analysis, and she laughed somewhat over the appeal that Osprey made to her as a man. She could not deny that it was the same that originally had drawn her to her husband. She dealt here with a greater Miles, wiser and more experienced. Nevertheless, she sensed in him the type that was not self-sufficient, that required sympathy of a subtle kind, and required it, when found, with an intensity that in this case was beginning to prove hypnotic to her. Unquestionably Potter Osprey was gradually becoming a necessary part of her life, and this was not her fault but his. She had hinted at, more than revealed, the state of affairs between herself and Miles. It was impossible not to do so, appearances being what they were; and the older man’s complete understanding coupled with hesitation to advise, was a soothing remedy to her hurts.

The attraction which was growing between herself and Osprey was totally different from her feeling for his friend, Roget, with whom she had become acquainted. The distinguished producer treated her with bantering equality from the start. It was as if they recognized a likeness to each other in essential strength, and the hesitation, almost anxiety, which Roget had felt over the painter’s passionate adoption of Moira’s cause disappeared on knowing her. He began to think of the whole affair as a pleasant and lasting alliance for his friend, of some sort, and he little doubted of what sort it would be. Obstacles there were, which he did not concern himself with. Once a possibility took life in Roget’s brain, obstacles did not exist. He had seen too many large ones swept aside.

To Moira, the obstacles were more significant, and yet they had diminished amazingly in the last three months. The prospect that Osprey would take their friendship seriously did have about it a quality of dark adventure which made even her steady pulses jump uncomfortably. But to the young woman who sees her marriage being slowly broken up before her eyes, while she is helpless to restore it, everything is touched by the shimmer of madness. And she asked herself what could have been more mad, more out of all normal reason, than her whole life? Moreover, she had a firm support now, one that gave her the strength to adventure--her art. The intimation had visited her at last that she might triumph in it; and, having reached that certainty, she felt it a more present help than coffers heaped with gold.... The picture which Roget had tried to buy she laughingly refused to sell him, but he had countered with a problem in stage design which he promised to accept if it offered a suggestion to work on. Here was a beginning, at least.

Her children ... it was strange how she felt toward them, how little she feared for them. Certainly they were to be shielded, but also they were not to be deceived about the life into which they had been brought. The truth would not hurt them.

It was late in September that Moira received the letter from Miles saying that he had left and would not return. The letter was a mixture of unhappy self-accusation, and charges against her for various shortcomings, chief of which appeared to be that she had become self-sufficient and had accepted assistance from others. She thought he might have spared her that, as well as the taunt about her preoccupation with Osprey.... She had expected a parting shot of some kind, yet when it came it was a painful blow, and she spent a week brooding over it and wholly beside herself.

During this week Osprey saw nothing of her, and when she came up the hill one evening to join him, he revealed in his eagerness what the deprivation had meant. He led her to a seat, fussed about her comfort and lighted her cigarette.

“I’ve been ill,” she said. “I go off and hide when that happens, like an animal. Now I’m well.”

“Ill?” he asked, disturbed. He reflected that he should have been less squeamish and forced a visit upon her. He had never done just that. Invitations, dropped at chance meetings or at the end of discussions while they worked had been enough. This time he had gone a little further, approached her door on an impulse twice, but stopped before making his presence known. “But,” he resumed, “Nana didn’t tell me about your being ill. Did she take care of you?”

Moira knew what was in his mind. While she had been ill, her husband had not been at home.

“Well,” she confessed lightly, “ill is not strictly true. I’ve been just out of sorts. I had some news, but it doesn’t matter.”

“Good. I’m glad you’re feeling better. Particularly, as Nana tells me, you’re expecting a guest to-morrow.”

“Yes, an old friend, a Mr. Blaydon. An old schoolmate, really, who has been very kind to us.”

“I wonder if you wouldn’t bring him and Mr. Harlindew to dinner to-morrow night? I shall be delighted to have you all; and as for Nana, she suggested it herself.”

Miles had always been included in Osprey’s formal invitations, whether present or not, and had, in fact, attended once and contributed not unpleasantly to the evening.

“I’m afraid I can’t promise for my husband,” said Moira slowly.

“H’m. That’s too bad. But I can count on you and your friend, Mr. Blaydon, anyway?”

“I should love to bring him,” she replied and paused.... It was better, she thought, to have matters understood.... “My husband ... won’t come back here,” she went on. “He has left me.”

“It was that,” he asked kindly, “the news you had?”

“Yes, he wrote me a letter.”

Osprey spoke quietly but she was conscious of the emotion in his voice.

“And you will accept that? You will not seek him, try to bring him back?”

“No,” she replied. “Too much has happened before this. It is over.”

“You poor girl. You’ve suffered over it.”

“I put a good deal into it.... But this had to happen. Miles must have no ties.”

Osprey’s animation returned and he spoke in a more impersonal tone.

“Perhaps you’re right. I think the young man has not grown up in spite of his years. But he may find himself. They have a kind of strength, fellows like that, a kind of terrible strength that no one suspects. I’ve seen his type before. The fact is,” he added, with a half-serious smile, “I’ve been something of the sort myself. It’s often hard to locate the origin of a fool’s folly, but I think in my case it was an experience I had when I was a boy. It wasn’t a peccadillo with me. It haunted me for years, so much that I can’t talk freely about it to this day. It made life a desperate adventure; it was at the back of most of my troubles....” He laughed. “I seem like an old fool to be telling you all this. And truly my nightmares appear absurd to me now.”

Moira laughed a little bitterly. “Something happened to me too when I was young.... But I am free.... I tore myself free from it.”

“I thought so,” he said gently. “There is a great difference in our ages, but if I may say so, we seem to have--well, had something alike to face in life. No, I do not mean just that--it’s presumptuous. I have never, I think, before met any woman quite like you. Strength and the genius for insight, such as yours, rarely meet in the same body.”

A hungry intensity in his words escaped him unawares. Though he had spoken nothing of significance, the feeling that shook him reached her through the dusk with sinister force. She had felt the same thing before and had had a momentary impulse to run, to break free from it. She did not want to be subjected to another tyranny of her emotions.... Yet she had reasoned with herself. Here was a future that could in every sense be ideal, a man with whom she had everything in common and whom she knew she could trust....

A moment later he changed the subject and she was glad.

“By the way,” he said, “why not have your guest stay over, if he will? You know I’ve extra bedrooms, and there is no reason why he should not occupy one as long as he likes.”

It was a point that had worried and embarrassed her, and she was inexpressibly pleased that he had thought of it.

“You’re too good,” she said fervently, “and I would love to keep him.”

They chatted on over impersonal shallows until the time came for her to return to the cottage.

XXV

As she left him that night she wondered if her conscience troubled her. She was certainly encouraging Osprey. Standing in her own sitting room, she recalled vividly how, when he took her hand in good-night, she had felt the fierce stream that poured through him, and her very silence had given him permission to unburden himself. She was thankful for his restraint. Moreover her silence had been the result of pleasure, and not mere lack of words. How little she had known of anything quite so contained and yet so overpowering in Miles.... She could respond to that, she knew: she had only to yield a little and she could respond.

The thought of Osprey in this personal sense, of some one beside her husband in a personal sense, caused her to realize how much importance she had gone on attaching to Miles. How ridiculous and womanly of her! she reflected. Miles had taken his departure, and yet she had not until now seemed quite to believe in it. Perhaps even yet she did not believe in it. She had told Osprey that it was over; she kept repeating to herself that it was over. Everything pointed to it, Harlindew’s own unequivocal statement and her angry resentment of the manner of his desertion, particularly his letter. But in her real consciousness she had continued to expect his return ... during the whole of her talk with Osprey, Miles had been present as a reality--a definite bar--in her thought.

But now a new thing happened to her. She suddenly faced her whole life spread out before her as on a single canvas, or rather as a continuing panorama--and not just one small segment of it. Miles had not been her whole life; he had been but a part. He might have continued to be that part indefinitely and still not become her whole life. She had been magnifying him until she had lost sight of the rest, all that other strange web of adventure and catastrophe which had included her birth, her childhood, her love for Hal, her tragic discovery, her runaway, her struggle to help herself.... That would go on, no matter what happened, whether Miles returned or stayed away, and it would go on according to her own terms.

The notion of herself as an entity, surviving, growing, separate and alone, filled her for the first time with a curious excitement. It released so many fresh and irresistible currents within her. She began to think more consciously of other men, of Potter Osprey in particular. She rose and went out into the orchard. The painter had had constructed a table and seats for them earlier in the summer, and she sat down in one of the gaily painted stationary benches which gave the children so much pleasure. They recalled to her his scores of other attentions; the flowers and delicacies of one sort or another which he had sent down regularly by Nana, his numerous subterfuges to help her with money, the little comforts that he had added to the house, his presents to young Miles and Joanna. These things, of which her husband--most younger men indeed--would never have thought, were dear to her. And once he had hinted, in a joking manner, of “leaving her the cottage” in his will.

“You can’t tell--I may be knocked off some day,” he had said. “I’ve become such an absentminded countryman that I’m always a little surprised to find myself alive after crossing a New York street.”

She had turned such overtures off with pleasantries, which they deserved, and yet she had entertained them; they had wooed her and become a part of her dilatory dreaming. As she sat there in the caressingly cool night she felt this keenly; she felt a sense of permanency and peace under the protecting boughs of the orchard. She could not remember such a feeling since long ago at Thornhill.

She rose reluctantly and went into the house. Unquestionably she had reached a point where she could regard Osprey’s passion without disturbance; and yet she longed for a temporary refuge from it, knowing that at any moment they might be brought together by some turn of the conversation such as that to-night and his reserve would give way. She wanted to escape that contingency for a long time, to think out her relationship to the future. But she had no reasonable means or excuse to flee. Her plans had not been made for the winter, and according to their informal agreement she was to remain in the cottage another month.