Part 25

The day did not long delay when, under the influence of drink, he suddenly seized her and kissed her. She did not resist; but the shock of the contact, instead of inflaming him, instantly restored him to his senses. He was conscience-stricken; also he saw the impossible complications he was precipitating. In shame and fright--in fright more than shame--he fled from her presence.

So far as outward effect is concerned, the action is everything, the motive nothing. But so far as inward effect is concerned, the action is nothing, the motive everything. In action Basil and Courtney were essentially the same--equal partners in intrigue. But her motive of seeking strength through love availed to hold her steady, even to lift her up; while his motive of sensuality ever less and less refined and redeemed by love was thrusting him down and down.

*XXIII*

Richard and Courtney were walking up from the laboratory together. In his abrupt fashion Richard broke the silence with: "I wonder if it isn't Helen that's hanging back and not Gallatin. She's innocent as a baby, but her experience with her father must have taught her about that one thing."

"What one thing?" asked Courtney, startled out of her abstraction.

"Drinking. Helen must have noticed how Gallatin's mopping it up these days."

"Nonsense," said Courtney sharply. She was much irritated--as human beings are extremely apt to be, when some matter they are making determined efforts to ignore is forced on their attention.

"He was so drunk this morning that he had to go out and take the air. That's what made me think of it."

Drunk! She winced at that bald revolting word. She flamed at what she tried to think was an injustice. "This morning?" cried she. "Why, that's absurd. I'd have noticed it."

"You're another innocent. He carries a package well--always did." There Richard laughed at memories of his and Gallatin's "wild-oats" days of which he fancied Courtney knew nothing--and he would have been panic-stricken had he thought there was danger of her finding out about them. "Yes," he went on, "Gallatin's been going some for several weeks now. But this daytime drinking is a new development."

"I'm sure you're mistaken," said Courtney, her irritation showing in her color now. "You both drink at supper."

"He about six to my two. I never take more than two. And every once in a while I see Jimmie or Bill carrying a case of bottles to or from his apartments. I can understand a boy's doing that sort of thing. A boy wants to try everything. But how a grown man can keep on at it is beyond me. Still, he hasn't much mind. He never says or thinks anything he hasn't got from somebody else. But--women'd never notice that." This last sentence half to himself, not at all for her hearing.

Courtney was all a-quiver with anger. For, his shrewd observation on Basil's mentality compelled her to admit to herself another truth, indeed a whole swarm of truths, she had been hiding from herself--how Basil's conversation, when they were all together and the subject was necessarily other than love, no longer seemed brilliant or especially interesting even; how at the shop he made an extremely poor showing, was now pupil, and rather backward pupil, to her who almost daily had to cover up his blunders; how in helping her with the gardening he never went beyond either approving her ideas or offering suggestions already stated in the books; how she was constantly coming across things she had thought original with him only because she happened not to have read the books that contained them or to have known the phase of life in which they were familiar commonplaces. Angry though an untruth about anyone or anything we love makes us, that anger is as equanimity itself beside the anger roused by a disagreeable truth.

As they neared the house she quickened her pace, hurrying not so much from Richard as from her own thoughts--the thoughts his words had startled from unexpected lurking places as a sudden light sets bats to whirling. Courtney was loyal through and through; also, she clung to Basil like a shipwrecked sailor to a life raft. The stronger the waves of adverse destiny or of doubt, the fiercer she clung to her life raft. In face of the clearest proof from without against Basil, she would have shut her eyes and held fast to him. Yet with devilish malice and merciless persistence circumstances were now constantly taking her blind resolute loyalty by surprise and forcing upon her exhibitions of him as a shallow and sensual person. A proud, intelligent woman's love could reconcile itself to either of these--to a shallow man whose passion was simply symbol of deep and sincere love; or, to a sensual man whose grossness was the coarse rich soil that sent up and nourished high intelligence, fascinating and compelling. But no woman worth while as a human being could continue to love a shallow man treating her as mere "symbol of the sensual side of life" because he was incapable of appreciating any but physical qualities, and then simply as physical qualities.

It was with a heart defiantly loving, defiantly loyal, that she met Basil at eleven that night to admit him. He had not appeared either at the house or at the laboratory during the afternoon or for supper or afterwards. So, she had not seen him since Richard's "attack on him behind his back"--for, she had succeeded in convincing herself that Richard's accusations were an outcropping of prejudice against him. She felt humble toward him because she had listened without bursting out in his defense--this, though to defend would have been the height of stupid imprudence. As he entered the door she softly opened, he lurched against her, stumbled over the rug, saved himself by catching hold of her and almost bringing her down. A wave of suspicion, of sickening fear and repulsion shuddered through her. But she frowned herself down, took him firmly by the arm.

"Be careful," she whispered. "The floor was polished only yesterday."

He mumbled something affectionate and without waiting for her to close the door, embraced her. From him exhaled the powerful odor of mixed tobacco and whisky that proclaims the drunken man to the most inexperienced, to those blindest of the blind--the blind who dare not see. She gently released herself. Several times of late he had come to her in almost this condition; she had forced herself to deny, to excuse, to minimize. Now, however, it was impossible for her to risk admitting him; and also, she suddenly realized she had reached the breaking point of her courage to keep up her self-deception. "You must go at once," she said.

"Why?" he demanded in a hoarse whisper. His befuddled mind reverted to Helen as if Courtney knew about her. "What right have you got to be jealous, if I'm not?"

She did not puzzle over this remark. "Basil, you must go at once because you've been drinking too much." The danger was too imminent to be trifled with in diplomatic phrases.

He stood, swaying unsteadily, his head hanging. "If you think so--" he muttered.

She urged him gently toward the door.

"I--I beg your pardon," he mumbled. "I--I guess you're right."

He backed two steps. As soon as he was clear of the door she closed and locked it. Slowly she went upstairs, dropped wearily into bed. She lay quiet a few minutes, staring at the arc of the night lamp. Then on an impulse from an instinct that could not be disobeyed, she rose, took a dark dressing gown, wrapped it round her. She glided along the hall, descended the stairs, opened the lake-front door. Closing it behind her, she stood at the edge of the veranda. The sky was black; a few drops of rain were falling. She made an effort, ran down the steps, hurried across the lawn and along the path to the Smoke House. The entrance door to the apartment stairway was open. She hesitated, slowly ascended. He did not appear at the sound of her steps. His bedroom door was open. She glanced in. His bed was turned down, his pajamas lay ready upon the folded-over covers. But he was not there. She went on to the door of his sitting room. It too was open. At the table desk and facing the door he sat, half-collapsed on the chair, one hand round a tall glass of whisky and water, the bottle and a carafe at his elbow. Though her mind was on him, her eyes took in and forced upon her every tiny detail of the room; she had made it over that his surroundings might always remind him of her. He lifted his heavy head, blinked stupidly at her. She noted his face with the same morbid acuteness to detail--his swollen eyes, his puffy lips, the veins in his forehead, his brows knitted in a foolishly solemn expression. Never had he seemed so homely, since her first glance at him when he came there a stranger.

After a moment of dazed sodden staring at her, he remembered his manners, rose not without difficulty and stood, stiff and unsteadily swaying. "Give me some of the whisky," said she, advancing. "I feel sort of queer." She dropped to the chair he had just left and took up his glass. "May I have your drink?" she asked, and without waiting for a reply drank eagerly. Color returned to her cheeks, and her eyes became less heavy and dull. "I'm better--very much better," she declared, as she set the glass down empty.

He had seated himself lumpishly on the sofa. They remained silent, gazing out through the open window into the darkness and hearing the soothing musical plash of rain on lake. In upon them poured a freshness rather than a breeze and the pleasant odor of drenching foliage. "As I lay there thinking," she said presently, "it came to me that I mustn't let this night pass without seeing you and making it smooth and straight between us."

The shock of her appearing had for the moment beaten down his intoxication. It was now boiling up again, heating his nerves and his imagination, though he seemed sober and self-possessed. "All right," said he. "I know you didn't mean to insult me, and I'll forget it."

She gazed quickly at him in amazement, started to speak, checked herself.

"But I want to tell you," he went on, his tone and gestures forcible-feeble, "I want to tell you this business of my being shut out has got to stop. You must arrange for Vaughan to come down here to live, and for me to take his rooms up at the house."

This demand seemed to her as utterly unlike him as the dictatorial tone in which it was made. To condemn him--no, more--not to love him the more tenderly--because he was in this mood of distracted desperation would be unworthy of the love she professed. She crushed down her sense of repulsion, went to him, laid her cheek against his hair. "My love," she murmured. "We mustn't ever forget that we have only each other. We'll never let any misunderstanding come between us, no matter how blue we get." And she turned his head and kissed him.

With an intoxicated man's fickleness, he switched abruptly from anger to sentiment. His eyes became moist and shiny. A sensual drunken smile played round his heavy mouth. She saw though she was trying hard not to see. He reached round and drew her toward his lap. She gently resisted, while she was nerving herself to submit--would it not be a very poor sort of love that would let itself be chilled by a mood--a mood in which all love's warmth, all love's gentleness were needed as they are not needed when everything is pleasant and easy?

The tears of self-pity welled into his eyes. "God, how low I've sunk!" He got himself on his uncertain legs, arranged his features into a caricature of an expression of dignified command. "I want you to send Helen--Miss March--away," he said, waving his finger at her. "She's a pure woman. She mustn't be contaminated."

She gazed at him in horror. "Basil!" she gasped.

"Yes--I mean it. Oh, you understand. I'm not fit to 'sociate with her--and neither are you."

With a wild cry, she turned to fly. He lurched forward, caught her by the arm. "But we're just about fit for each other," he said. "And that's the truth--if I am drunk." He nodded at her. "I should say, 'That's the truth _because_ I am drunk.' It's giving me the courage to speak out a few things that've been gnawing at my insides for weeks." And his fingers clasped her arm like steel nippers.

"Basil! You're hurting me."

"That's what I feel like doing." And in his eyes as in his fingers there was revealed the sheer sensual ferocity that drink had freed of the shame which at other times held it in restraint.

She hung her head. In a low voice she stammered, "You're making me feel there isn't any love for me anywhere in your heart."

"Love?" he said, swaying to and fro and opening and closing his eyes stupidly. "Love. Oh, yes there is. Yes, indeed. Sometimes I think not, but it isn't so. It's because I love you that I go crazy at the thought that I'm sharing you."

"_Sharing me!_" She wrenched herself free, put her arm over her eyes as if she could thus hide from herself the sight of his soul which in drunken abandon he had completely unmasked.

"Don't be frightened," he maundered on. "I'm a man of honor--'honor rooted in dishonor' as Tennyson says. I'll not go. I'll submit to it--all right. Love gives a man a stomach for anything."

She wished to fly, but her legs would not carry her. She had to stay--and listen.

"How I've been dragged down! How a woman can drag a man down! Not Helen--no--she's an angel. But those good women never are as fascinating as you others.... Love?" He beamed upon her like a drunken satyr. "Let's love and be happy. To hell with everything but love."

As she listened and looked she, for the first time since they had been lovers, felt that she had sinned--had sinned without justification. The judgment of guilt dazzled and stunned her as the sun's full light eyes from which the scales have just fallen. She stood paralyzed, yet wondering how she could remain erect under the weight of her vileness--for, her sin seemed as heavy and as vile as ever celibate fanatic asserted. When her lover moved to embrace her, she, with the motion of shrinking from him, found she had strength and power to fly. She rushed from the room, he stumbling after her, and crying "Courtney! Don't get jealous and go off mad----"

*XXIV*

She knew the truth at last--the whole truth--what he was in mind and in heart, what his love was, what he in his inmost soul thought about her, about himself. The man who could believe he was sharing her could not but be shallow indeed, stupid, and also incapable of understanding the meaning of the word love; the man who could keep on with a woman he believed he was "sharing," must be sunk in a wallow of sensuality--and as weak as low. She knew the truth. Hearing she might have disputed and in time denied. But there was, and would be, no evading the records stamped clear and indelible upon her memory by that sensual, maudlin face. To falsify those records was beyond even a proud, lonely, loving woman's all but limitless powers of self-deception in matters of the heart. The coarseness of that self-revelation of his was the liquor; but the revelation itself was the man. He did not love; he lusted. He did not love; he despised--her and himself. He did not love--and he never had loved.

There is in every one of us a chamber where vanity and hope live and ever conspire to deceive, and if possible, destroy us. From that secret chamber she now wrenched an amazing secret. She discovered that from the beginning--yes, from the beginning--she, determined to satisfy the craving of elemental flesh and blood, had been lying to herself about Basil Gallatin. Passion had taken sly advantage of her loneliness and her longing for sympathy and companionship; it had beguiled her imagination into creating out of the very ordinary materials of his true personality the lover she had been adoring. One by one she took out and reexamined all her memory plates of him. Now, a memory plate is like any other photographic plate; it has a surface picture and it also yields to a close scrutiny a thousand details which do not appear upon the surface. Long before she finished, she was realizing that she had all along, with the deliberate craft of self-deception, been hiding from herself the trick her feelings were practicing upon her intelligence. Basil--pleasing manners and dress, amiable disposition, animalism agreeably disguised by education--Basil had been plausible enough to pass muster with her, ready and eager to be deluded because of her craving for love. True, he had posed to a certain extent. But he was not really responsible for the fraud. The blame was hers--all hers.

But disillusion no more destroys a love longing than lack of food and drink destroys hunger and thirst. High above moans of shame over the pitiful collapse of her romance rose the defiant clamors of hunger and thirst. They had been lovers, he and she; and that fact in itself was a bond which a woman, at least a woman of her temperament of fidelity, could not easily break. She feared when he, sober and a gentleman once more, sweet and winning, came to her and pleaded for forgiveness she would forgive--would in her loneliness and heart hunger take what she could get rather than have nothing and the ache of nothingness. It is--at least, it has been, up to and into the present time--second nature to woman to depend upon a man, to select some one man, the best available, and stake everything upon him. Basil Gallatin was that man for her. And--not in novels, but in life--before any woman, however high minded, goes away to utter aloneness from a man who cares for her, he must have disclosed some traits more abhorrent than any such human traits as those of Basil. Yes--human. Was it his fault that he had not given her the kind of love she wanted? Was it not probably her fault that he had not been inspired to that kind of love? Perhaps, too, the love of any man, could it be seen in the nakedness of drunkenness, would be much like Basil's. "I'm only a woman," she said. "I mustn't forget that. I've no right to expect much." And then she shuddered; for in her very ears was the sound of those cold rains falling day and night upon her loneliness and despair.

She saw herself accepting; for, a great deal less than half a loaf is better than no bread. And if she accepted, she must adapt herself--must force herself to acquire a liking for what she must eat or go altogether hungry. She saw herself wending down and down--to the level at which he had from the beginning thought her arrived. She looked all around. Nothing--no one--to save her. For, what could she hope from Richard?--from any man? Was not Basil giving about the best man had to offer woman in the way of association? There was the Richard sort of man--an abstraction--an impossibility. There was the Shirley Drummond sort of man--a human incarnation of Old Dog Tray--equally impossible. There was the third sort of man--the Basil sort, somewhere between the two impossibilities. Life must be lived, and with human beings. Of the three available kinds of associates, was not the Basil sort the most livable? Rather Basil than being frozen to death by a Richard or bored to death by a Shirley. The conclusion seemed cynical; but there was no cynicism in the sad woman who faced that conclusion.

She did not go down to breakfast; and Basil, she learned, kept away also. When he did not appear at dinner she knew he had determined to wait until he should surely see her alone. The emotion that stirred in her because his place at the table was vacant gave her more and sadder light upon how little the heart heeds the things that impress the mind and the self-respect. About the middle of the afternoon she was at the small antique desk in the corner of her sitting room, trying to write a letter. But the charm of the day, the beauty of full-foliaged trees, of lake and cloudless sky seen through the creeper-framed window, would not let her write. As she gazed, her unhappiness calmed and all her senses flooded with the joy that laughs in sunbeams, in light and shadow floating on the grass, in flight and song of birds, in grace and color and perfume of flowers, the joy that mocks at moral struggle and flutters alluringly the gay banner of the gospel of eat, drink and be merry.

As she took her pen to go on with the letter, Lizzie appeared in the hall doorway. "Mr. Vaughan asked me to tell you," she said, "that he'd gone out and might not be back for supper."

"Very well," said Courtney, not turning round. It flitted across her mind that this was an extraordinary message for Richard to send--Richard who came and went as he pleased and sent no word when he was not coming to dinner or supper. "Where's he gone?" she asked--an extraordinary question from her to match the extraordinary message from him.

"He was in a hurry and didn't say," replied Lizzie. "I'll find out."

"Oh, no. It doesn't matter."

Lizzie went, and in her dreaming and thinking Courtney soon forgot the incident. Again Lizzie's voice interrupted--"Mr. Vaughan's gone to see old Nanny."

"Nanny!" said Courtney. She never thought of the old woman except as the memorandum of her pension check appeared every three months in the household accounts.

"Yes. She's dying. She sent for him. Such dreadful roads too."

Courtney's pen halted on its way to the ink well. The room seemed to her to have become terribly still.

"She sent him word," Lizzie went carelessly on, and her voice seemed to come from a distance, through a profound hush, "that she had something on her conscience and couldn't go without clearing it. I reckon she's gone clean crazy."

It was not fear that made nerve and muscle tense. It was not self-control that held her motionless. The peril was upon her; there was no time to waste in emotion. All along, she had pretended to herself that Nanny knew nothing, had at worst a dim suspicion. Now, she realized that she had always feared the old woman had seen and had heard. And those words of Lizzie's made it impossible for her to doubt what was about to occur. No time for terror, for hysteria or fainting or futile moaning. Her whole being concentrated on the one idea, What shall I do? Calmly she said to Lizzie, "Has he gone?"

"Ten minutes ago--maybe fifteen."

"Did he take the motor?"

"Yes, ma'am. She's near dead. He went in a great hurry."

Idle then to think of overtaking him, of bringing him back with a story that Winchie was missing, was perhaps drowned in the lake. Her mind--it had never been clearer or steadier--gave Richard up for the moment, turned to another phase. "Where is Mr. Gallatin?" she asked.

"Out on the lake. Winchie's with him--fishing."

"When they come in, please tell him I wish to see him at once." The events of last night were as if they had not been. Wounds closed up like magic; once more it was she and Basil her lover united against the whole world.

"I can call him from the wall," suggested Lizzie.