Chapter 4

He had never been gregarious. Thus far he had not had a single intimate friend, man or woman. He knew many people and knew them well. They liked him and some of them sought his friendship. These were often puzzled because it was easy to get acquainted with him, impossible to know him intimately.

The explanation of this combination of openness and reserve, friendliness and unapproachableness, was that his boyhood and youth had been spent wholly among books. That life had trained him not to look to others for amusement, sympathy or counsel, but to depend upon himself. As his temperament was open and good-natured and sympathetic, he was as free from enemies and enmities as he was from friends and friendships.

Women there had been--several women, a succession of idealizations which had dispersed in the strong light of his common sense. He had never disturbed himself about morals in what he regarded as the limited sense. He always insisted that he was free; and he was careful only of his personal pride and of taking no advantage of another. What he had said to Alice about marriage was true--as to his intentions, at least. A poor woman, he felt, he could not marry; a rich woman, he felt, he would not marry. And he cared nothing about marriage because he was never lonely, never leaned or wished to lean upon another, abhorred the idea of any one leaning upon him; because he regarded freedom as the very corner-stone of his scheme of life.

The nearest he had come to companionship was with Alice. With the other women whom he had known in various degrees from warmth to white-heat, there had been interruptions, no such constant freedom of access, no such intermingling of daily life. Her he had seen at all hours and in all circumstances. She never disturbed him but was ready to talk when he wished to listen, listened eagerly when he talked, and was silent and beautiful and restful to look at when he wished to indulge in the dissipation of mental laziness.

As she loved him, she showed him only the best that there was in her and showed it in the most attractive of all lights.

While he was still wavering or fancying that he was wavering, the Managing Editor sent him to “do” a great strike-riot in the coal regions of Pennsylvania. He was there for three weeks, active day and night, interested in the new phases of life--the mines and the miners, the display of fierce passions, the excitement, the peril.

When he returned to New York, Alice had ceased to tempt him.

* * * * *

One midnight in the early spring he was in his sitting room, reading and a little bored. There came a knock at the door. He hoped that it was some one bringing something interesting or coming to propose a search for something interesting. “Come in,” he said with welcome in his voice. The door opened. It was Alice.

She was dressed much as she had been the first time he talked with her--a loose, clinging wrapper open at the throat. There was a change in her face--a change for the better but also for the worse. She looked more intelligent, more of a woman. There was more sparkle in her eyes and in her smile. But--Howard saw instantly the price she had paid. As the German had suggested, she had “got on up town.”

She was pulling at the long broad blue ribbons of her negligee. Her hands were whiter and her pink finger nails had had careful attention. She smiled, enjoying his astonishment. “I have come back,” she said.

Howard came forward and took her hand. “I’m glad, very glad to see you. For a minute I thought I was dreaming.”

“Yes,” she went on, “I’m in my old room. I came this afternoon. I must have been asleep, for I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I hope it isn’t bad luck that has flung you back here.”

“Oh, no. I’ve been doing very well. I’ve been saving up to come. And when I had enough to last me through the summer, I--I came.”

“You’ve been at work?”

She dropped her eyes and flushed. And her fingers played more nervously with her ribbons.

“You needn’t treat me as a child any longer,” she said at last in a low voice; “I’m eighteen now and--well, I’m not a child.”

Again there was a long pause. Howard, watching her downcast face, saw her steadying her expression to meet his eyes. When she looked, it was straight at him--appeal but also defiance.

“I don’t ask anything of you,” she said, “we are both free. And I wanted to see you. I was sick of all those others--up there. I’ve never had--had--this out of my mind. And I’ve come. And I can see you sometimes. I won’t be in the way.”

Howard went over to the window and stared out into the lights and shadows of the leafy Square. When he turned again she had lighted and was smoking one of his cigarettes.

“Well,” he said smiling down at her, “Why not? Put on a street gown and we’ll go out and get supper and talk it over.”

She sprang up, her face alight. She was almost running toward the door. Midway she stopped, turned and came slowly back. She put one of her arms upon his shoulder--a slender, cool, smooth, white arm with the lace of the wide sleeve slipping away from it. She turned her face up until her mouth, like a rosebud, was very near his lips. There was appeal in her eyes.

“I’m very, very glad to see you,” Howard said as he kissed her.

* * * * *

And so Howard’s life was determined for the next four years.

He worked well at his profession. He read a great deal. He wrote fiction and essays in desultory fashion and got a few things printed in the magazines. He led a life that was a model of regularity. But he knew the truth--that Alice had ended his career.

He was content. Ambition had always been vague with him and now his habit of following the line of least resistance had drifted him into this mill-pond. Sometimes, he would give himself up to bitter self-reproach, disgusted that he should be so satisfied, so non-resisting in a lot in every way the reverse of that which he had marked out for himself. If he had been chained he might, probably would, have broken away. But Alice never attempted to control him. His will was her law. She was especially shrewd about money matters, so often the source of disputes and estrangements. Two months after she reappeared, she proposed that they take an apartment together.

“I saw one to-day in West Twelfth Street at seventy dollars a month,” she said, “and I’m sure I could manage it so that you would be much better off than you are now.”

He viewed this plan with suspicion. It definitely committed him to a mode of life which he had always regarded as degrading both to the man and the woman and as certain of a calamitous ending. So he made excuses for delay, fully intending never to yield. But although Alice did not speak of her plan again, he found himself more and more attracted by it, caught himself speculating about various apartments he happened to see as he went about the streets. She must have been conscious of what was going on in his mind; for when, a month after she had spoken, he said abruptly: “Where was that apartment you saw?” she went straight on discussing the details as if there had been no interval. She was ready to act.

The apartment was taken in her name--Mrs. Cammack, the “Mrs.” being necessary to account for him. They selected the furniture together, he as interested as she and very pleased to find that she had the same good taste in those matters that she had in dress. She took all the troubles and annoyances upon herself. When she invited him to assist in the arrangement, it was in matters that amused him and at times when she was sure he had nothing else to do. It is not strange that he got a wholly false idea of the difficulties of setting up an establishment.

After a month of selecting and discussing, of pleasure in the new experience, pleasure in Alice’s enthusiasm and excitement and happiness, he found himself master of five attractive and comfortable rooms, his clothing, his books, all his belongings properly arranged. The door was opened for him by a cleanlooking coloured maid, with a tiny white cap on her head.

As he looked around and then at the beautiful face with the wistful, gold-brown eyes so anxiously following his wandering glance, he was very near to loving her. Indeed, he was like a husband who has left out that period of passionate love which extends into married life until it gives place to boredom, or to dislike, or to some such sympathetic affection as he felt for Alice. “It is just this that holds me,” he thought, in his infrequent moods of dissatisfaction. “If we quarrelled or if there were any deep feeling on my side, I should not be in this mess. I should be”--Well, where would he be? “Probably worse off,” he usually added.

Certainly he could not have been freer, for she never questioned him; and, if she was ever uneasy or jealous when he came in late--for him--without telling her where he had been, she never showed it. She had no friends, and he often wondered how she passed the time when he was not with her. Whenever he inquired he got the same answer: She had been busying herself with their home; she had been planning to save money or to make him more comfortable; she had been reading to improve her mind and to enable herself to start him talking on subjects that interested him.

No matter how unexpectedly he looked in upon her life or her mind, he found--himself.

One day she said to him--it was after two years of this life: “Something is worrying you. Is it about me? You look at me so queerly at times.”

“Yes,” he answered. “It is about you. Tell me, Miss Black-Hair, do you never think of getting old?”

“No,” she smiled. “I shall wait until I am twenty-five before I begin to think of that.”

“But don’t you see that this sort of thing must stop sometime? It is unjust to you. When I think of it, I reproach myself for permitting us to get into it.”

“I am happy,” she said, looking straight at him, terror in her eyes.

“But you have no friends?”

“Who has? And what do I want with friends?”

“But don’t you see, I can’t introduce you to anybody. I can’t talk about you to the people I know. I am always having to explain you away, always having to act as if I were ashamed of this, my real life. At times I am Anglo-Saxon enough to be really ashamed of it. And I ought to be and am ashamed of myself.”

“Don’t let’s talk about it. You and I understand. Why should we bother about the rest of the world?”

“No, we _must_ talk about it. I have been going over it carefully. We must--must be married.”

He laid his hand upon hers. She blushed deeply and lowered her head. A tear dropped upon the front of her gown and hung glittering in the meshes of the white lace. She crept into his arms and buried her face upon his shoulder and sobbed. He had never seen her even look like tears before.

“We must be married,” he repeated, patting her on the shoulder.

She shook her head in negation.

“Yes,” he said firmly, mentally noting that this was the very first time he had ever caught her in a pretense.

“No.” Her tone was as firm as his. She lifted her head and put her cheek against his. “It makes me very proud that you ask it. But--I--I do not----”

“Do not--what?”

“I do not want--I will not--risk losing you.”

“But you won’t lose me. You will have me more than ever.”

“Some men--yes. But not you.”

“And why not I, O Wisdom?”

“Because--because--do you think I have watched you all this time, without learning something about you? The way to keep you is to leave you free. I do not want your name. I do not want your friends I do not want to be respectable. I want--just you.”

“But are we not as good as married now?”

“Yes--that’s it. And I want it to keep on. I never cared for anybody until I saw you. I shall never care for anybody else. I never shall try. I want you as long as I can have you. And then----”

“And then,” Howard laughed or rather, pretended to laugh, “and then, ‘Oh, dig me a grave both wide and deep, wide and deep.’ How like twenty-years-old that is.”

She seemed not to hear his jest and presently went on: “Do you remember the evening before I left, down there at Mrs. Sands’s?”

“The night you proposed to me?” Howard said, pulling her ear.

She smiled faintly and continued: “I thought it all out that night. I intended to come back just as I did. I went deliberately. I----”

Howard put his hand over her lips.

“O, I am not going to tell anything,”, said she, evading his fingers. “Only this--that I understood you then, understood just why you would never marry. Not so clearly as I understand it now, but still I--understood. And you have been teaching me ever since, teaching me manners, teaching me how to read and think and talk. And more than all, you’ve taught me your way of looking at life.”

Howard held her away from him and studied her face, surprise in his eyes. “Isn’t it strange?” he said.

“Here I’ve been seeing you day after day all this time, have had a chance to know you better than I ever knew any one in my life, have had you very near to me day and night. And just now, as I look at you, I see the real you for the first time in two years.”

“I have been wondering when you would look at me again,” said Alice with a small, sly smile.

“Why, you are a woman grown. Where is the little girl I knew, the little girl who used to look up to me?”

“Oh, she’s gone these two years. She proposed to you and, when you refused her, she--died.”

“Yes--we must be married,” Howard went on. “Why not? It is more convenient, let us say.”

Alice shook her head and put her cheek against his again and clasped his fingers in hers. “No, my instinct is against it. Some day--perhaps. But not now, not now. I want you. I want only you. We are together out here--out beyond the pale. Inside, others would come in and--and surely come between us. I want no others--none.”

VII.

A LITTLE CANDLE GOES OUT.

Howard was now thirty years old. Park Row had long ceased talking of him as a “coming man.” While his style of writing was steadily improving, he wrote with no fixed aim, wrote simply for the day, for the newspaper which dies with the day of its date. Some of his acquaintances wondered why a man of such ability should thus stand still. The less observant spoke of him as an impressive example of the “journalistic blight.” Those who looked deeper saw the truth--a dangerous facility, a perilous inertia, a fatal entanglement. Facility enabled him to earn a good living with ease, working as he chose. Inertia prevented him from seeking opportunities for advancement. Entanglement shut him off from the men and women of his own kind who would have thrust opportunities upon him and compelled him.

Howard himself saw this clearly in his occasional moods of self-criticism. But as he saw no remedy, he raged intermittently and briefly, and straightway relapsed. Vanity supplied him with many excuses and consolations. Was he not one of the best reporters in the profession? Where was there another, where indeed in any profession were there many of his age, making five thousand a year? Was he not always improving his mind? Was he not more and more careful in his personal habits? Was he not respected by all who knew him; looked upon as a successful man; regarded by those with whom he came in daily contact as a leader in the profession, a model for style, a marvel for facility and versatility and for the quantity of good “copy” he could turn out in a brief time? But with all the soothings of vanity he never could quite hide from himself that his life was a failure up to that moment.

“Why try to lie to myself?” he thought. “It’s never a question of what one has done but always of what one could have and should have done. I am thirty and I have been marking time for at least four years. Preparing by study and reading? Yes, but not preparing for anything.”

On the whole he was glad that Alice had refused to marry him. Her reason was valid. But there was another which he thought she did not see. He was deceived as to the depth of her insight because he did not watch her closely. He had no suspicion how many, many times, in their moments of demonstrativeness, she listened for those words which never came, listened and turned away to hide from him the disappointment in her eyes.

He did not love her--and she knew it. She did not inspire ambition in him--and she knew it. She simply kept him comfortable and contented. She simply prevented his amatory instincts from gathering strength vigorously to renew that search which men and women keep up incessantly until they find what they seek. She knew this also but never permitted herself to see it clearly.

He was pleased with her but not proud of her. He was not exactly ashamed of his relation with her but--well, he never relaxed his precautions for keeping it conventionally concealed. He still had a room at his club and occupied it occasionally. He laughed at himself, despised himself in a--gentle, soothing way. But he excused himself to himself with earnestness despite his sarcasms at his own expense. And for the most of the time he was content--so well, so comfortably content that if his mind had not been so nervously active he would have taken on the form and look of settled middle-life.

There was just the one saving quality--his mental alertness. All his life he had had insatiable intellectual curiosity. It had kept him from wasting his time at play when he was a boy. It had kept him from plunging deeply into dissipation when youth was hot in his veins. It was now keeping him from the sluggard’s fate.

* * * * *

On the last day of January--six weeks after his thirtieth birthday--he came home earlier than usual, as they were going to the theatre and were to dine at seven. He found Alice in bed and the doctor sitting beside her.

“You’ll have to get some one else to go with you, I’m afraid,” she said with good-humoured resignation, a trifle over-acted. “My cold is worse and the doctor says I must stay in bed.”

“Nothing serious?” Howard asked anxiously, for her cheeks were flaming.

“Oh, no. Just the cold. And I am taking care of myself.”

He accompanied the doctor to the door of the apartment. At the threshold the doctor whispered: “Make some excuse and come to my office. I wish to see you particularly.”

He grew pale. “Don’t let her see,” urged the doctor. He went back to Alice, sick at heart. “I must go out and arrange for some one else to do the play for me,” he said. “I shall spend the evening with you.”

She protested, but faintly. He went to the doctor’s office.

“She must go south at once,” he began, after looking at Howard steadily and keenly. “Nothing can save her life. That may prolong it.”

Howard seemed not to understand.

“She must go to-morrow or she’ll be gone forever in ten days.”

“Impossible,” Howard said in a dull, dazed tone.

“At once, I tell you--at once.”

“Impossible,” Howard repeated. He was saying to himself, “And only this afternoon I wished I were free and wondered how I could free myself.” He laughed strangely.

“Impossible,” he said again. And again he laughed. The room swam around. He stood up. “Impossible!” he said a fourth time, almost shouting it. And he struck the doctor full in the face, reeled and fell headlong to the floor. When he recovered consciousness he was lying on a lounge, the doctor’s assistant standing beside him.

“I must go to her,” he exclaimed and sat up. He saw the doctor a few feet away, holding a cloth odorous of arnica to his cheek. Howard remembered and began, “I beg your pardon,”--The doctor interrupted with: “Not at all. I’ve had many queer experiences but never one like that.” But Howard had ceased to hear. He was staring vacantly at the floor, repeating to himself, “And I wished to be free. And I am to be free.”

“You must go back to her. Take her south tomorrow. Asheville is the best place.”

Howard was on his way to the door. “We shall go by the first train,” he said.

“Pardon me for telling you so abruptly,” said the doctor, following him. “But I saw that you weren’t--that is I couldn’t help noticing that you and she were--And usually the man in such cases--well, my sympathy is for the woman.”

“Do you think a man voluntarily lives with a woman because he hates her?” Howard asked, with an angry sneer. He bowed coldly and was gone.

As he looked at Alice he saw that it was of no use to try to deceive her. “We must go South in the morning,” he almost whispered, taking her hand and kissing it again and again, slowly and gently.

The next day but one they were at Asheville and two weeks later Howard could not hide from himself that she would soon be gone.

* * * * *

Her bed was drawn up to the open window and she Was propped with pillows. A mild breeze was flooding the room with the odours of the pine forests and the gardens. She looked out, dilated her nostrils and her eyes.

“Beautiful!” she murmured. “It is so easy to die here.”

She put out her hand and laid it in his.

“I want you, my Alice.” He was looking into her eyes and she into his. “I need you. I can’t do without you.”

She smiled with an expression of happiness. “Is it wrong,” she asked, “to take pleasure in another’s pain? I see that you are in pain, that you suffer. And, oh, it makes me happy, so happy.”

“Don’t,” he begged. “Please don’t.”

“But listen,” she went on. “Don’t you see why? Because I--because I love you. There,” she was smiling again. “I promised myself I never, never would say it first. And I’ve broken my word.”

“What do you mean?”

“For nearly four years--all the years I’ve really lived--I have had only one thought--my love for you. But I never would say it, never would say ‘I love you,’ because I knew that you did not love me.”

He was beginning to speak but she lifted her hand to his lips. Then she put it back in his and pushed her fingers up his coat-sleeve until they were hidden, resting upon his bare arm.

“No, you did not.” Her voice was low and the words came slowly. “But since we came here, you have loved me. If I were to get well, were to go back, you would not. Ah, if you knew, if you only knew how I have wanted your love, how I have lain awake night after night, hour after hour, whispering under my breath ‘I love you. I love you. Why do you not love me?’”

Howard put his head down so that his face was hid from her in her lap.

“After the doctor had talked to me a few minutes, had asked me a few questions,” she went on, “I knew. And I was not sorry. It was nearly over, anyhow, dear. Did you know it? I often wondered if you did. Yes, I saw many little signs. I wouldn’t admit it to myself until this illness came. Then I confessed it to myself. And I was not sorry we were to part this way. But I did not expect”--and she drew a long breath--“happiness!”

“No, no,” he protested, lifting his face and looking at her. She drank in the expression of his eyes--the love, the longing, the misery--as if it had been a draught of life.

“Ah, you make me so happy, so happy. How much I owe to you. Four long, long, beautiful years. How much! How much! And at last--love!”

There was silence for several minutes. Then he spoke: “I loved you from the first, I believe. Only I never appreciated you. I was so self-absorbed. And you--you fed my vanity, never insisted upon yourself.”

“But we have had happiness. And no one, no one, no one will ever be to you what I have been.”

“I love you.” Howard’s voice had a passionate earnestness in it that carried conviction. “The light goes out with you.”