Chapter 14

PHILIP TO THE RESCUE.

It is always the little things in human relations that have the most far-reaching results. Claire might have avoided much trouble with a few well-chosen words to Lawrence, but her own mental state prevented her from speaking.

On his part, Lawrence was so shaken by her outburst that his love for her was driven deep into his subconscious self, and for the time it lay there dormant. After the sudden volcanic upheaval of his entire universe, he was utterly absorbed in the immediate task of reconstructing his faith in himself. The primitive stages of his thinking did not allow for any relation between himself and the woman who had released the dam of self-abasement. She was unavoidably at hand, reminding him of her speech, and that alone delayed what otherwise would have been an unconscious process.

Claire was not able to forget the intense desire which, she now realized, had prompted her terrible diatribe. Humiliation held her in its throes, and she was reserved, distant, and unnatural toward him.

Philip saw it all, and his mind was filled with conjectures which made him less and less charitable toward Lawrence, more jealous, and more hopeful of a happy issue of his love for Claire. She turned to him eagerly for companionship. Instinctively she sought refuge from her own thoughts--and from Lawrence--by talking to Philip.

The morning after the incident between Lawrence and Claire there had been an austere reserve in the cabin. Claire had fled from the oppressive gloom into the open. Outside Philip joined her, and they walked together in silence. He was determined not to ask Claire what had happened, although he was extending her a silent sympathy which she felt and a little resented.

Lawrence, left alone in the cabin, gave small heed to their departure. He had risen with a frightful headache and a fever. He lay on the bed and thought of his situation, his past life, and his future chances, in bitter, heartrending, self-condemnatory sarcasm which made his condition even less tolerable than it would have been otherwise.

"I am a miserable groveler at the feet of humanity," he thought, "clutching at shrinking shoestrings for a piece of bread in pity's name. If I could see, God, if I only could!"

He thought of all the little things which his blindness made it absolutely necessary for others to do for him, and his excited mind magnified them into colossal proportions. If his landlady in New York had removed a spot from his clothes, as she had often done, that was a proof of his despised state. He fell to imagining that he was unkempt, dirty, disgustingly unclean, and that people had tolerated it because they had pitied him. At last, with a cry of anguish, he thought: "And my work, too, it is a botched mess which they are amused at and do not dare to tell me the truth about. It, too, is a jest that the world is having at my expense." He remembered praise and prizes that he had won in contests with other students, and he was too excited to see the folly of his answer: "That was charity, the award of kindness to me. I know now what they thought--that for a blind man the thing was nearly enough correct to be interesting and quite amusing."

His body felt hot, and he went outside to prowl about in the wind and snow, like a despairing beast. His mind kept up its terrible work, and he did not notice the continual drop in temperature. Round and round the cabin he walked, instead of going into the forest, as he would have done the day before. In his mind was a sudden doubt of his own ability, and he said that Claire had been right to keep him in. She was more aware of his pitiable weakness than he. At last, however, from sheer weariness he went inside. He was chilled through, but instead of rebuilding the fire and warming himself, he rolled up in a blanket and lay on the bed, chilling and burning by turns.

In the mean time Claire and Philip were discussing the man in the cabin. Philip had finally broken the silence by saying: "Claire, you needn't feel so about whatever has happened. Remember he is blind and must be treated less critically than other men."

She knew that that was just what had made Lawrence so deadly white when she had spoken, and it filled her with sickening pain. She answered unsteadily: "That isn't true. It isn't Lawrence, anyway, it's myself who should be condemned."

Philip was thoughtful. "It is like you to take the blame on yourself. You are so kind-hearted that way."

In her present state, his words seemed like a reproach. "Philip, don't," she said sadly. "I know better than that."

He persisted. "No, you do not. You are too sympathetic, and you let your heart get the better of you."

"I wish you wouldn't talk that way," she repeated. "You wouldn't, if you knew the truth."

"Of course, I do not know what happened," he said, "but I do know you--even better than you know yourself."

"Do you know what I've done?"

"No, and I do not care. It was right, I am sure. The queen can do no wrong." He was intensely serious.

"Isn't there any common sense left in you, Philip?" she railed. "Have you gone clear back into medieval nonsense in your feeling toward me? I tell you, you are indulging in foolishness."

"Am I?" He smiled. "Well, if that is the best I have to give--"

"I don't want you to give me anything."

"But I cannot help it, neither can you."

"I have killed a man's love before this," she answered bitterly.

"But you cannot kill mine. I love you, whether you love me or not. I am proud to acknowledge my unreturned love."

"As you please." Claire stopped suddenly. "Are we apt to get anywhere with this subject?" she asked ironically.

"I don't know. I earnestly hope so."

She looked at Philip thoughtfully. Perhaps the truth about her own weakness might cure him.

"Suppose I allowed you to love me, and you found that you had won a woman whose passions were her whole life. Suppose she should prove to be a mere bundle of sex, all polished over with other people's ideas, a social manner, and a set of morals which she did not really feel, which were deceiving ornaments hiding her soul. What would you think of your prize?"

"I should not love such a woman. I could not."

"But suppose you were deceived and thought her other than she was."

"I hardly expect such a thing to happen. Why suppose?"

"Because if I were your wife you might find it to be true."

Philip laughed aloud. "Claire, how preposterous! Are you trying to kill my love for you with such terrifying pictures of depravity?"

"I wasn't trying to do anything. I just wanted to know."

"Have you been answered?"

"Yes, you are like all of your type; you are in love with what your own desire chooses as an ideal, and then you shout, 'Behold, I am not a sensual lover!'"

He stared at her in amazement. "What sort of a thing do you think I am?"

She laughed carelessly. "A man. And what do you think I am?"

"A very strange woman, but a dear one," he said earnestly.

"Why strange, Philip?"

"Because you talk of love as Lawrence might."

She winced. "He would know," she said. "He does know, perhaps." She was talking to herself, and her voice was pathetic.

Philip's eyes grew fierce with anger. "What do you mean?"

"Not what your very ideal mind thinks," she said coldly.

He flamed scarlet, and looked away. "Claire," he said softly, "will you never have done stirring up suspicions no man could avoid, and then condemning them?"

"I didn't stir them up," she mocked.

"Who did, then?"

Claire was undergoing a developing reconstruction, but that she did not know. She thought she was degenerating, and the immediate result was to make her careless and ironical.

"Oh, the devil, perhaps," she hazarded.

"What are you, Claire?" Philip demanded hoarsely.

Suddenly her suffering broke into tears. To his utter amazement, she began to cry unrestrainedly.

Over and over she sobbed: "I don't know, I don't know."

For a moment Philip stood motionless, bewildered, then his love and natural tenderness swept over him, and he said tenderly, "Don't, Claire, please."

She only cried harder, weakened the more by his pity. He took her in his arms as he would a child, and comforted her. She was tempted to struggle, but her need for sympathy prevailed, and she did not resist him. He held her in his arms, pouring out his love, his anxiety, his tenderness, and in her momentary condition she listened and made no protest. In her aching mind she kept repeating, "I have killed Lawrence's love with my bestial talk"--and she wanted love. She did not think of her husband. He was too far away. In her present attitude she exalted Lawrence to the unattainable, and, without formulating the thought, she was willing to lie in Philip's arms and take what he could give. They were two of a kind, she thought scornfully. In her bitterness, the bleak, snow-covered land, with its drooping pines, seemed in its cold monotony a fitting background for two such worthless derelicts.

In the Spaniard's mind was but one thought--to comfort Claire and restore her to her usual self. Vaguely he knew that love was already promised by the unresisting body in his arms, but there was no thought of immediately pressing his suit. He petted and talked until she stopped crying, then he stood her on her feet, and said, with a tender laughter in his words: "There, you are all right again. We would better go in. You are cold."

Silently she walked beside him back to the cabin. She was indifferent, she thought, as to whether he did or did not continue his appeals for love. She was under her own deep, unexplained, emotional control which led her forward. She was finding herself, but before she would be safe she would have to throw off a mass of traditional views, beliefs, and teachings. If Philip chose to press his suit while her knowledge of herself still seemed vile and abnormal, she would be surely his. Claire thought herself lost. She had revealed her terrible state to Lawrence, killed his love, filled him with abhorrence, and struck at his life's source.

With silent turmoil in her brain she entered the cabin beside Philip. When she saw Lawrence, a sharp pain went through her. He was white as death save for the red spots that marked his fever. She took off her coat and snow-cap hurriedly.

"Lawrence," she said softly, going toward him.

He lifted his head slightly.

"What is it, Claire?"

"I want to do something for you. You're ill."

His face clouded. "No, thanks," he said. "You've done too much for me already."

"Won't you do anything for yourself?" she begged.

"I'll be all right. It's just a cold, I guess."

Philip came and stood looking down at Lawrence scrutinizingly, while Claire went to the fire and heated water.

"I am going to fill you up with quinin," he announced. "It is never missing from my medicine-chest."

"All right," Lawrence laughed. "It isn't bitter compared to what I'm filling myself with."

"Are you not making a fool of yourself?" Philip asked plainly.

"Yes. I know it. That doesn't keep me from doing it, though."

Claire turned and looked at them, her eyes sternly reproachful toward Philip.

"One can't help thinking," she said. "I can't."

"I shouldn't want you to," Lawrence returned. "Indeed, I'm grateful to you for making me think, too."

"She started you off, did she?" Philip smiled.

Lawrence did not answer, and Philip sat down by the fire where he could watch Claire as she worked.

After a time Lawrence said thoughtfully: "If one could establish some sort of a relation between himself and the ultimate first cause of all this blind snowstorm we call life, things might get shaped with some measure for perspectives."

"Yes," Philip assented. "I manage to establish one, though I confess it isn't clearly logical."

"What is it?" Lawrence asked.

"Simply having faith; hope, if you prefer it."

"But faith in what, and what do you base it on?"

"Oh, on my experience."

"I wonder if we really matter at all to the rest of the scheme," Claire voiced.

"I am inclined to think not," replied Lawrence. "We matter only to ourselves, and what we can do with the universe around us."

"We matter to God, I think," said Philip. "I don't mean in the old accepted sense; but we must matter to Him in some way, perhaps as your statue here matters to you."

Lawrence chuckled weakly. "It mattered tremendously when I was doing it. Now it doesn't in the least matter. I shouldn't care if you burned it as firewood."

"But you must care," Claire protested, feeling that he was losing interest in his work because of her.

"I don't see why. I haven't any real assurance as to its value. It may be good, more likely it isn't; in any case, I have turned it loose to shift for itself. It can survive or not; its doing so is immaterial. Perhaps as immaterial as my existence is to the Great Artist who conceived the botched job called me."

"But, Lawrence, why insist that you don't matter to Him?"

"Oh, because I am scarcely aware of Him at all; indeed, I am not aware of Him, and I am sure He isn't aware of me."

"You have not any way to prove that," declared Philip.

"True, except that I can imaginatively comprehend the size of time and space, and all that is therein. I know my own size, and I can readily imagine that the creator of the whole is no more aware of me than I am, say, of a small worm that may be in the heart of my cherub there."

"We do seem pretty small in the face of the stars," said Claire.

"Yes, and so impossible," added Lawrence. "I didn't realize until to-day how utterly impossible I really am."

"But, impossible or not, here you are," Philip laughed.

"Yes, here I am and there I may be, but in either place I am not especially possible. You are; you can go out and make a definite, independent impression on life; that makes you possible in that you are forcing recognition of power and capability. I can't do that. The impression I make is one of incapability. For myself I am impossible, and for others more so."

"Which has nothing to do with God," said Philip, in his tone a touch of distaste.

Lawrence recognized it and became silent.

Claire made him take the quinin and heated bricks for his feet. Philip went out to cut wood for the fire, leaving her alone with the sick man. She was so full of her own wickedness, as she conceived it, that she dared not tell him her thoughts. She wanted to explain that she loved him, that she had loved him all along, but she could not. She looked at him, and felt sure that he had now no love for her.

Lawrence was trying to follow out in his mind a searching inquiry as to his relation to life. "If I could only establish that," he thought, "I could get myself straight and there would be something to start from. If I knew which way to move!" But he was unable to do any coherent thinking. His head ached, his lips burned with fever, and his body kept him busy with the sensation of pain. It seemed to him that illness made his state more detestable, but it also offered him a chance of escape from the whole drab business. He was quite sure that he wanted to escape, and he would not have believed it if any one had told him that he would resist death to the uttermost; yet deep within him was that will to live which had made him the creative artist. It was working, unknown to him, now, toward the reconstruction he so needed.

He turned restlessly, and muttered something about his foolishness. Claire came and sat beside him silently. She was wondering what would happen if she should tell him of her discovery of herself.

"Claire!" Lawrence spoke. "Is it possible for any one to get his life platform built so that it will stand without that first great plank?"

"What plank?"

"God."

"I don't know."

"It seems to me that you couldn't have shaken me so yesterday if I had been built up right."

"Lawrence," she said piteously, "I didn't mean to do that, to say that."

He waved her words aside. "Never mind, Claire, it did me good. I was not realizing, quite, just what I was. I'm finding it out, and when I get right I'll be all the better for it."

"But you don't know why I did it."

"Yes, I do, but it doesn't matter, anyway. What was behind your words doesn't count so long as you told the truth."

"But it does count, and I didn't tell the truth."

"I'm afraid you did. Please don't try to cover it with kind fibs now."

"I sha'n't, but you don't understand."

"Well, Claire, it doesn't matter, as I said. What is it to me what you do or don't do, so long as you bring me face to face with more truth?"

She thought he was telling her that he cared nothing for her. She did not blame him, yet there was a tiny streak of pride that said, "At least Philip finds me worth while."

"It is simply my own salvation that is involved," Lawrence went on.

"Well, I hope you find it," she said simply.

"I must find it to live," he answered.

"And how do you propose to find it?"

"I don't know. I wish I did."

"You might find it, as you once said, in creative work."

"No, that isn't a salvation. I must have a platform from which to work. Don't you see that, Claire?"

"I don't understand anything about it."

"Pardon me, I didn't intend to force this upon you."

"That isn't what I mean, Lawrence." Her eyes were moist. "What I meant was that you live above me entirely."

"Nonsense," he said wrathfully. "You talk like a silly girl, Claire."

"Do I? Well, I am perhaps less worth while than you think."

"Oh, I guess not," he returned carelessly.

She covered her face with her hands.

"I know you are worth all that I think you are," he continued. "But I am afraid that just now I am too interested in my own salvation to think of you at all correctly."

"Yes," she observed wearily.

She was thinking of Philip as he had comforted her that morning, and his tenderness, compared to this cold statement from Lawrence, seemed attractive beyond measure. She admitted that all hope of Lawrence's loving her was dead, and she said to herself: "It is what I wanted. I can go back to my husband." But she did not want to go back to Howard. She received this discovery calmly. She would never go back. But why shouldn't she? She could not tell for certain. She thought it was because she had found herself unworthy, but deep within her was the knowledge that she no longer loved him. It would be useless to go back to him in any event. He could never be the same to her after hearing of her long months with this blind man in the wilderness.

What months they had been! She thought them over, day by day, and she saw what might have been a great joy sink, after a glimpse, into utter darkness. Before her she saw the endless gray years beside Philip. Yes, she would stay with him. At least he loved her, and she could help him. If she did not love him, what of it? She would be an able wife to him. She could keep him from ever knowing that her heart was away with Lawrence, who would be back in the world at home and have forgotten her.

"Claire!" Lawrence was speaking. "We have certainly reaped a strange harvest from our months of sowing in the wilderness."

"Yes."

"Whatever brought it about?"

"I don't know."

"Perhaps it was fate, that you should teach me where I stand in life."

"Perhaps."

"And perhaps you, too, will find that I have been of some value when we are separated."

"It may be."

"I wish things might have gone differently."

"They didn't."

"No, and they can't. Well, let them be as they are."

"I guess we'll have to, Lawrence."

A few minutes later, when she looked at him, he was asleep.