Chapter 18

THE ROMANTIC REALIST.

It was the 1st of May when Lawrence at last found himself alone with Claire and decided to speak. The instant he thought of declaring himself he was surprised at his own mental state. A panic seized him, his heart beat unsteadily, his mouth grew dry, and he could think of nothing to say.

They were out on the lake shore. Philip had left them on his last long trip across the plateau before starting for civilization. The warm spring wind blew around them, laden with scent of pine and flower. At their feet the water rippled and cooed little melodies. Claire sat very still, gazing wistfully at the man beside her. Her heart was a lead weight, and her brain ached with the strain of her problem.

It was late afternoon. All day she had wandered with Lawrence in comparative silence, wishing that he would speak, and observing that something troubled him.

Finally she moved uneasily, took her hand from her cheek, and said half-dreamily, "You aren't a bit talkative."

He gulped, swallowed, and laughed. "I'm too busy trying to think of something to say," he told her amusedly.

"Oh!" She was provoked in the extreme. "Have I ceased to suggest conversation? You are very tired of me, then."

"Quite the contrary. So far from it, you paralyze my tongue."

"How complimentary!" she said. "Then I suppose your excessive arguments with Philip denote your weariness of him?"

"They do."

"I suppose, if you were really fond of a person, you would never talk at all?"

"Perhaps. I don't know but that you are right."

She laughed gaily. "Lawrence," she said, "you are certainly amusing when you attempt to be flattering!"

He grew warm and uncomfortable.

"I wasn't trying to flatter. Can't you see that?" He was almost wistful.

"I don't see it. No, if you weren't trying to flatter you were surely doing the unintended in a most intricately original manner."

He shifted his position and did not answer.

"Of course," she said, "although you aren't accustomed to flattering, you've taken to doing it almost constantly."

"Well, why shouldn't I?" he asked curiously.

"Why not, if you care to?" Her reply was as gentle as if she were a submissive object of his whims.

He felt that now was the time to speak, but he could not bring himself to the point. The thought of his blindness killed all confidence.

"Hang it all," he broke out, quite as if it were a part of their previous talk, "blindness certainly does rob one of his will!"

She looked at him apprehensively. "I thought you had decided you were the master of that."

"I had, but it seems I was mistaken."

Claire laid her hand on his arm tenderly. Her eyes were dazzling.

"Lawrence, you must master that, you know."

"Why?" he said thoughtfully. "If I shouldn't, it would mean only one more human animal on the scrap heap!"

"But you don't want to be there."

"Of course not. No one does. I don't imagine any one chooses it."

"If you go there it will be because you choose it."

"I wish I saw things your way," he observed. "At times I feel as sure of success as if it were inevitable, and then suddenly down sweeps the black uncertainty, and I am afraid, timid, and unnerved."

She looked at him sadly.

"Don't you believe in your work, Lawrence?"

"Yes, that is about all I do believe in."

"Then what is the matter?"

"It is that, after all, thousands of men have believed in their work to no avail. One can never know whether he is a fad or a real artist. It isn't only that, either. One's work, when it is his life, requires so much besides to make it possible. It is that which gives me the blue fear you see. I always imagine that the thing I want just then is absolutely essential to my better work. Perhaps it is. I don't know. I know only that I am persuaded that it is. Then I set about to get that thing and I fail."

"But do you always fail?" Claire was unconsciously pleading her own cause.

"Not always. Just often enough to scare me to death when the biggest need of my life seems just out of reach."

"Nonsense, Lawrence," she laughed. "When you were sick you talked as if you could reach out and pull down the stars, if you needed them in an endeavor to complete your life."

"Sometimes I think I could, then the reality of life comes crashing through the walls of my dream-palace, and, behold, I am standing desolate and abandoned, grasping at lights which are even too far away to be seen! I am clawing darkness for something I fancied I could reach, while, as far as I am concerned, it is clear out of space and time."

She sat pensively looking across the lake.

"Yet you keep on reaching, don't you?"

"Yes--and no. I always wish I could. There are times, Claire, when I don't want to be a realist, don't want to face life as it is, when it seems too tawdry to be valuable just as it is; then I reach out into the night and cry, 'Let me be the maddest of dreamers, the wildest of idealists, a knight of fancy seeking the illusive dream!'"

Claire laughed aloud as she said, "And don't you know, dear man, that that is just what you do become at times?"

"I know it. That's the joke of it. All the while I mock myself for being a romancing idiot!"

"What a state of mind!" she exclaimed.

"It isn't pleasant. Then, worse than that, when I attain my star, I spoil it with too much scrutiny."

She started. "What do you mean?"

"Just that. I make a mess of it."

"Still I don't understand."

He thought for a moment, then said sadly: "Take the cherub I carved there"--he nodded in the direction of the house--"I was wild with creative fervor when I did that. I put into it a thousand little thoughts that flashed with imaginative fire. I dreamed things, felt things that should have made a masterpiece beyond all masterpieces, and at last the thing was finished. Still under the heat of enthusiasm, I felt of it, tested it, and found it good. Well, a week later, when the imaginative flame was gone, I went back and looked at it again. It was poor, cold, imperfect, not at all what it should have been. I dreamed a star and made a block of poor wooden imagery."

"But you underestimate your work. To me the cherub is still a star."

He laughed. "It is what others see of good in my work that makes me hope that sooner or later I will do the thing that will stand eternally a star of the first magnitude."

"And you will, Lawrence," she said earnestly.

"Perhaps." He was pensive. "Perhaps not. That is where the rest of life enters in. I want many things; they seem necessary if I am to attain my eternal star. I am afraid I shall never get them!"

"Have you tried?"

"No, I haven't the courage. If they should be beyond my grasp, if obtaining them, they should prove to be wrong and not the real things I need, after all, what then?"

"I don't know." She waited to watch a little colored cloud float by, and then continued: "Isn't the real interest in life the game you play?"

"I suppose it is, but it's hard on other people."

"Why--and how?"

"Suppose," Lawrence said slowly, "you were the one thing I thought I needed."

Claire leaned toward him, her lips apart, her heart beating wildly.

"Suppose I were sure of it, and set about to make you part of my life, well, if I succeeded and then"--he smiled sadly--"found that you were not the necessity, not the answer to my need, what of you? It would be an inferno for you, and none the less equally terrible for me! We couldn't help it. Under such circumstances you would be right in saying that I had been unfair. I don't know, certainly you would be right in charging your possible unhappiness to me."

"Under your supposition, Lawrence," she answered evenly, "if you obtained my love, wouldn't it then be my game, my risk in the great gamble for deeper life? Wouldn't it be my mistake for having thought you were what I needed?"

"What if you still thought you needed me after I was sure that I did not need you?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "I am too fond of life and too eager to know its possibilities to let that hurt me long. Possibly I should weep, be cynical, maybe even do something desperate, but at last I would come up smiling, calm in the faith that my life was deeper, richer for the experience, and that yours was, too. Or if it proved that yours was not, I should be amused at the shallowness of the Claire that was, for having been so simple a dunce as to imagine that you were worth while. I should thank you for teaching the present Claire to forsake that shallow one, and should find you a rung on my ladder of life!"

He laughed merrily. "You are strong in your faith, Claire."

"Yes. This winter and you have made me strong," she answered.

"I have made you strong in it?"

"Yes. Last summer, when you dragged me out of the surf, I was full of a number of ideas I no longer possess."

"But what have I done?"

"You have lived stridently all your life."

"Perhaps so. What of it?"

"I see that is the thing most worth doing."

"What will your husband say to such a doctrine?"

"I don't know. I am not going back to him. We are not the same people we were a year ago, and he would no more love the present Claire than I should love the present Howard."

The sky deepened from pink to crimson, but Claire's eyes were staring blankly on the ground.

"Claire, what do you think is essential to great work?"

"I don't know. To keep at it most likely." She was digging with a little stick in the grass.

"Perhaps you're right," he agreed. "But sometimes I think it is a lot of other things; romantic wandering over the earth, a deep and lasting love, any number of such external factors."

"You don't call love external, do you?"

"I mean a permanent love," he laughed.

"Oh, well, perhaps those are necessary, certainly they would be a help to you, they would be to any one. But, after all, even a woman isn't absolutely essential to a man in order that he create great art."

"I think she is," Lawrence insisted.

"Very well, perhaps she is, but"--Claire laughed skeptically--"I know that she is not the all in all, the alpha and omega, the 'that without which nothing,' that she is so often told she is by seeking males."

"No," he agreed slowly, "in rare cases of great love that may be true, but in most cases it isn't."

"It is more likely that what you, the abstract male, really mean is that you must have some woman as wife and housekeeper."

"Perhaps that is so, although even that needs qualifying."

"I know," she said, "but why not be frank about it both ways; that is precisely her situation as well as his. There ought to be less sentimental rubbish and more plain sense about all of it. Women would suffer less from shattered illusions, they would grow accustomed to reality, and be considerably less idiotic in their romantic caperings."

"I admit it," Lawrence said, smiling; "and yet"--he paused--"I want to be the maddest of romanticists, I want to say those things to the woman I love, I want to think them about her, I want to feel them all, all those dear, false romantic deceptions. I do, in fact, even though my brain agrees with you."

"So should I, and I would." Then she added softly under her breath, "I do."

Lawrence turned a little toward her, his fingers gripping the grass in front of him.

"Claire," he said slowly, "I--I want to say them, think them, believe them about and with you."

She did not move. Over her there swept a great joy, and her thinking stopped. She was feeling all the dear things she had just condemned, and she looked at her lover. He was blind. He could not see what was in her face, and he was not sure that he interpreted her silence correctly. He was waiting, anguishing, for her answer. She realized then what it was he needed more than he himself knew.

"Lawrence," she cried joyfully, slipping into his arms, "I know what you need, beloved!"

He laughed exultantly as he showered kisses upon her eagerly upturned face.

"I guess you do, sweetheart," he consented. "What is it?"

She settled down with a sigh of content, her head against his shoulder, and announced, very much like a child saying what it knows to be wisely true: "You need a woman who is keen enough to think with you and be eyes for you, natural and unspoiled by conventional sham enough to be your heart's answer, self-willed enough to be herself and deny you and your selfishness, and, above all, mother enough to care for you as she would a child. I believe I am that woman, dearest boy!"

He held her tight in his arms and smiled.

"I not only think, I know you are."

For a long time they sat in silence, dreaming, loving, enjoying, and caring nothing for all the rest of the world. At last Claire raised her head from his shoulder and whispered, "Lawrence, before I would be separated from you, I am afraid I would kill!"

He chuckled merrily. "Good!" he said. "That sounds proper. So would I. We are alive because our ancestors killed to live, they fought to mate, so shall we, if need be."

She remembered Philip and shuddered slightly.

"What is the matter, Claire?" Lawrence drew her closer.

She did not answer. She was wondering how to tell him about Philip, and afraid.

"Are you filled with terror at the mere thought of murder!" he asked.

She moved uneasily in his arms. "No, but I can't say I like to even think of such a possibility."

"Don't, then. It isn't very likely to happen," he comforted.

She remained silent, but her pleasure was not untroubled. Her whole impulse was to wait, but her brain kept demanding that she tell him now, and she gathered herself for the effort.

"Lawrence"--she hesitated--"I--I have something I must tell you."

"All right. Go ahead; but confessions never do much good."

She drew away from him tenderly.

"Because my whole being wants to be in your arms, I will not--not while I tell you," she said, sitting beside him. "I want you to hear and think without my body in your arms as a determining factor in your answer."

"Very well. Go ahead. I promise to be an emotionless judge."

"Can you?" she asked quickly.

"No," he said, "but I will."

They both laughed, and she nerved herself to talk.

"It's about Philip," she said timidly.

He started.

"Don't tell me about him, Claire," he said. "It can't do any good, and it's hard for you, I see. Whatever you are or were to Philip doesn't matter to me in the least. The Claire of this morning wasn't my mate. It is only Claire from now on that counts, and she is not in any way bound to Philip for whatever may have occurred in the past."

"Oh, I wish that were true!" she moaned.

"It is true," he asserted.

"But you don't understand. Let me go on, please."

"Surely," he answered. "Say as much or as little as you wish."

She told him then, falteringly, sometimes wondering at his calm, expressionless face as she talked. She was filled with dread, for he sat as still as death, without a word, without a change of expression to show her what he was thinking. She made many corrections to her explanation, and supplied bits of comment in an effort to discover herself how it all had happened. There was nothing of apology in her attitude, however, and she finally concluded with an account of that afternoon in her bedroom, and what she had said to Philip since that day.

"Now," she said at last, "you know all about it. You can do as you please, of course. If you choose to go on, we will have to find some solution together. Philip will not take it easily. Of that I am sure. He is more than likely to become desperate."

She waited. Lawrence did not move. His face was seriously thoughtful, and she was filled with a growing fear that made it harder and harder to wait for him to speak.

When she could stand it no longer, she shook his arm.

"Lawrence, why don't you say something?" she cried.

He read the fear in her voice, and laughed caressingly, as he took her in his arms.

"I thought you knew it wouldn't alter our futures," he said. "I was only trying to think out a just solution unpersuaded by your body in my arms."

"Oh!" She laughed comfortably. He was making fun of her, and she was not averse to it.

"It certainly looks as if Philip were up against a bad future," he went on, amusedly.

"Philip!" she cried, startled. "Are you pitying him all this time?"

"Whom else?" Lawrence demanded. "We don't need pity, do we?"

"Oh, you selfish lover!" she chided. "I have been needing and do need it. Philip worries me."

"I see," he mused. "Well, accept my condolences, and prepare to pass them on to Philip. Poor devil! When you and I are back in our world, he will indeed need pity."

"Suppose he takes steps to see that I don't go back?" she chanced.

"He can scarcely compel you to live with him."

"He can, and he will. He isn't as civilized as he appears. If need be, he would keep me locked up here and make me his by force, or kill me. He told me so."

Lawrence shrugged his shoulders.

"Romantic raving for effect!" he exclaimed. "But if he should happen to try that, well, I think my argument might be as effective as his."

"But how do you propose to stop him? I tell you, he is in earnest." Claire was insistent.

"Why, in whatever way is necessary. If it is my life against his, I'll give him the best I've got."

She looked at Lawrence in wonder. He was as calm as if he had been making small talk at a theater-party.

"Can you plan it so--so carelessly, like that?" she asked.

"Why not? I could hardly allow him to take you by force. I wouldn't choose a fight as a diversion, but once in, I wouldn't stop short of his life. And I wouldn't feel any compunction afterward, either."

"Well," she said quickly, "it won't be necessary."

"I think not." He smiled. "We need say nothing about our plans. Once we get into town, all the world is ours, and we can quietly depart, leaving Philip Ortez a very pleasant memory."

They both laughed heartily.

Neither of them allowed for that vast portion of human character which lies beyond the knowledge of the most keen-visioned. Claire was more familiar with the distinctly male phases of Philip than Lawrence--perhaps a woman always is--but they were too happy to give the matter any real consideration, and, after the fashion of all lovers, they shut out the third person from their little self-bound universe.

The whole world seemed a friendly sphere whose entire action was merely to bring them together, and they were utterly oblivious to Philip and his new attitude. It seemed so impossible that anything serious could arise to separate them from each other.

It was late when Philip returned, and he was instantly aware of the change in his guests. The old, serious silence was gone from Lawrence; he was not the speculative man to whom Philip was accustomed. His talk was light, pleasantly humorous, and very genial. He was, in short, the lover. Claire, too, shone with a new radiance.

Doubt rearose in Philip's heart, and grew rapidly into suspicion. He became less responsive to their chatter. His dark eyes grew somber with misgiving, and love swelled into longing that made him feel sure that Claire was necessary to his life. Without her there could be no living for him. He wondered if she and Lawrence had found love. "If they have," he argued, "there can be but one explanation. Claire is unreliable, vicious, and dangerous." His aching desire to possess her did not lessen, however. It became deeper, in fact, with each succeeding thought of her as a wanton at heart, and he set his teeth over his will, assuring himself that all would be well when Lawrence was gone.

He took to avoiding absences, and to watching furtively for some confirmation of his suspicion. Claire was instinctively cautious, and he saw nothing that could actually be construed against her. He was of that type of man whose love, burning into jealousy, does battle with ideals which stand against his suspicions and demand actual physical proof before retiring and allowing the beast to run riot.

He knew no middle ground. Once he had seen that which would condemn Claire, he would be utterly savage. His soul anguished to bitterness at every thought against her purity and truth. He could not accept her as she was. His suspicion painted her black with the sticky ink of a morbid idealist, while his faith, rising from the same ideals, made her seem almost ethereal. His longing for her was an acute physical pain, and he never allowed his ideals to stop his romancing. He insisted that his desire be stated in masking phrases and deceiving glories of chivalrous prattle. He was so torn by his conflicting emotions and ideals that he was fast arriving at a state where his action would be that of a wounded beast at bay. He did not know and would not admit that his own distorted view of Claire was back of his own condition. True to his type, he carried this war in silence, and sought support for his fast-weakening ideals in argument. He was wise. Defend your faith if you would keep it glowing.