CHAPTER IX

THE ENERGY OF BEING

Cabs were an infrequent phenomenon in that quarter and a crowd of small boys,--eager, dirty, volatile, with thin bare little legs and miserable little elbows, were gathered around the knock-kneed horse that dejectedly hung its head. They were feeding the animal with dusty grass plucked from between the cobblestones of the pavement. But at Rachel's approach they fell away as if pushed away. The driver in his tall hat bent to receive her order. She gave it without looking at him.

Mad, uncalculating love, too long repressed, struggled in her with a vague sense of shame. But at first the sense of shame was shadowy indeed. Carried out of every perception but the throbbing one of her loss of self in Emil, for a time she heard only his words "my own." "Yes, yours, yours always," the blood proclaimed, and the soul's contradiction sounded small and faint. Then, as the voice of conscience grew stronger, she turned her head from side to side in agony. Chaste and fiercely proud, she told herself she was a humiliated woman. But not his the blame. All that had happened she had invited. By her expression she seemed to be saying, "I will not think."

None the less she did think. She went over the scene from which she had just issued, not once, but countless times, and at each repetition she extracted from it the keenest misery, the most poignant bliss. All the mystery and domination of her passion were written on her face and at intervals sighs escaped her, mingled with breathless, half-articulated words:

"Oh,--he loves me--he loves me--and if it weren't for a certain thing we could be happy."

She paused, again borne out of herself by an animating memory. Once more Emil stood before her with his glance, laughing, kindling, melting. Once more he spoke. As she listened to all the mad, foolish, electrifying things that fell from his lips, life seemed to break forth in her in its plentitude. His words were to her panting heart what rain is to the parched earth. She experienced a feeling at once violent and divine.

And she had repulsed him.

The memory left her almost sobbing. She moved her hands; she lifted her face with its tremulous mouth breathing a caress. For uncounted instants she remained suspended in abysses of tenderness. Then she braced herself with resolution.

"No, no," she said aloud. "It's settled."

The dead, expressionless words voiced finality. Thus the will brought the heart temporarily into subjection.

After innumerable involuntary returns to the scene of the marble works she forced herself to give attention to her surroundings. Feverishly she stared about her with breath suspended and lips a little open like a child after a violent fit of weeping.

As the cab rolled forward, with bare tracts, isolated houses and clumps of trees revealing themselves on either side, to her superalert mind, the city appeared a million-eyed, million-footed monster. Excitedly she nourished the grotesque fancy, seeking in it escape from deeper realization. With its great legs of brick and stone, with its numberless eyes of glass, turbid and bleary, its voluminous, impure breath of smoke, its voice of inconceivable uproar, the city was encroaching on the innocent country. It was devouring it field by field; it was swallowing down the sweet cottages which disappeared from the landscape with miraculous swiftness; swallowing the brooks, the woods, glutting itself and growing big at the expense of the fresh country that never could be restored in all its natural beauty. "Yes, yes, God made the country but man makes the city," she whispered.

As the cab rolled on over more crowded pavements, her consciousness of the scene through which she had just passed was dulled briefly, as pain is dulled in a patient suffering with delirium.

"Ah, how useless is all this bustle and confusion!" she thought irritably. "Surely man could live more simply. But he is dedicated to vanity, he must make a splurge. What was that I said to André this morning? Oh yes--about the energy of being. Man must make a show, if not for his Creator's satisfaction at least for his own. The Creator!" she murmured bitterly, "He knows nothing of us! We pine constantly for a liberty fuller than any we have ever known, and that accounts for all our unwearying expenditure of force. Poor pygmies! Persisting deep in the soul of man, is a vague, undefined sense, 'I am the heritor of the infinite.' And so he works," she continued, "he produces marvels and he thinks his immediate achievement embraces his entire object. But it isn't so. And he opens his heart to passions; but his object is the same. For back of the least labour into which he throws himself, back of the most depraved emotion in which he loses himself, is a vast, mysterious, subconscious searching; and that," she declared, "accounts for everything."

She was soaring now above herself, above the terror of her problem. She was viewing the situation as the universal situation and her thoughts were transfigured, rendered impersonal by the clearness of her perception. She saw life no longer with the eyes of an inexperienced and impassioned woman, but with the eyes of one made wise through extremity of anguish.

"It accounts for all the good that we do and for all the evil that we do," she resumed. "Each chooses a road of escape, perhaps many roads, and follows them madly. But," she concluded, "we never find that larger freedom. We are tormented by the feeling of its imminence, but it retreats ever beyond us. And finally we come face to face with the eternal, basic fact of existence: _I am a prisoner_. That's what we discover. We learn the truth. I learned it that night after the opera. _I am the bird in the box!_"

For an instant she held her head erect, then shrank, a pained and huddled form, against the cushions of the cab.

"Yes, I have my dream like the others," she whimpered. "But it isn't a dream. Love _is_ a mode of escape. It is. It is. And it's my road. But do I follow it?"

The answer was a forlorn shake of the head.

"Emil, my Father, Simon, Emily Short, that girl Betty Holden, even Nora Gage; all--all wiser than I. They follow their instincts, creditable or discreditable, they follow them and they glean at least some satisfaction. While I--"

The full tide of her misery, that which she had tried to evade, inundated her.

"Fool, why am I like that?" she muttered, "for some scruple, which God, if he knows, probably laughs at me for respecting. As Emil said, wasn't it God made us capable of love?"

The tears had not come before. Now she checked them with her handkerchief, but constantly they fell, constantly she gave long deep sighs, heartrending, mournful. Presently a flaming, defiant thought stood out against the background of her misery. There was relief in action, even in the action that is called sin.

"Madam would like to have me get her ferry ticket?"

The greasy red face of the driver was peering down upon her; the cab had come to a standstill. She had entirely forgotten why she was there and it was only by an effort that she understood what he was asking.

Once on the ferry boat, she leaned her elbows on the railing and, as she listened to the talk of the water, she grew calmer. For it was strange, wise talk with a laugh under it. The little choppy waves seemed to be telling her that life was short and sweet. Grey and blue and dun colour, pink and rose red, the waves shouted and sang together. And above the roofs of the receding city, wrapped in the mists of evening and the ascending vapour of traffic, the dull and yet flaming disk of the sun hung suspended.

A passenger disturbed her and she shifted her position. Important little tugs towing huge rafts, and the arms of derricks being convoyed over the water, like helpless giants, came into view; and for a time the ferry boat passed into the sheltering shadow of a great bridge. Emerging from one confused and sparkling distance and disappearing into another, the bridge appeared like a tangible bow of promise between the two cities. The sight of the cable cars and the tiny moving mites that, like insects, slowly crawled over it, comforted her like a friendly omen.

But when they gained the other shore and she entered the station, the locomotives, emitting great volumes of smoke, recalled to her mind her grandfather's fanciful description; and she remembered with a pang how she used to behold the world in an innocent and beautiful fashion. But now she saw deeper, now she understood all.

The rest of the trip she ceased to think. She had entered that land known to every unhappy lover, that land in which the misery, longing and fierce passion that consume his heart, constitute the one reality in a universe otherwise cold and dead.