Part 2

“Four years ago,” he continued, “like lightning out of a clear sky, she told me one day that our life had been an utter failure—that she had ceased to love me, that she had grown to love another man, and there was no use trying to go on.

“Man,” he broke out passionately, “it drove me nearly mad, with the combined madness of grief and jealous rage. I knew I loved her, but until I saw myself losing her I never realized how much she meant to me, how my life was bound up in her. I humiliated myself, pleaded and raved and threatened. It seemed to me a madness that had stricken her. I couldn’t see why such a thing had to be. There we were, happy, I thought, in our companionship. We had our home, our little circle of friends, all the beautiful plans for the future that, we’d made together. Nothing seemed to count—nothing but the fact that she loved some other man and no longer cared for me—that she was living a lie, and that she was not going to live a lie any longer.

“I didn’t know the other man. I never saw him, never learned his name even. I never could visualize him, somehow. But he was there somewhere in the background, with her hopes and dreams focused on him. I couldn’t seem to grasp that phase of it, why she should turn away from me, when she had loved me once, as I know she did. We’d had our differences. Every man and woman living in the intimacy of marriage has them. They were trifling things to me, I don’t even know if it was a mere succession of petty irritations that brought it about. But there it was. And while she was sorry, while she regretted it, there was only the one way out as she saw it. She had to get away from me, to live her own life in her own way. In every bitter discussion that I forced on her when I was lashing out against the impending break I dreaded so, I could see that she was getting farther and farther away from me, that I had no power to stir in her any emotion except resentment, and a little pity.

“So I threw up my hands. I wanted to play fair, as she had played fair. She wanted to be free, and she was financially dependent on me alone. I cherished a glimmer of hope that she’d come to her senses—as I put it—at the last minute. But she didn’t. And so I sacrificed everything, turned it all into cash. I didn’t care. Hell, there was a while I didn’t know what I was doing. I had to get quick action or go mad. She was leaving me, but I didn’t want economic need to drive her into another man’s arms before she was ready. She wanted to avoid that herself. Oh, we talked it over time and again, talked soberly and sensibly when I felt like shutting off the breath in her white throat rather than let her go. That was only white-hot jealousy. I couldn’t help it, but I did control it. When I’d cleaned up everything I had about eighteen thousand dollars in cash, and I’d wrecked the foundation of a fortune. But that seemed nothing beside this other dread thing that was happening. That gnawed at me day and night. And I had to move with caution, to avoid open scandal. I wanted to save her that. Oh, it was maddening! But the time came at last. I kept five thousand and gave her the rest. And I hit the trail. I had to. I’ve been hitting it ever since.

“I never heard from her. I don’t know how she’s faring. I do know that I can’t get away from the hurt of it. I’ve lost something more than my mate. The heart to buck up and make life give me those things I used to value is clean gone. I strewed that five thousand dear across the continent trying to make myself forget. But I didn’t. You can’t knife a man that way without leaving a sore wound. I peg along from day to day. But when I think of doing otherwise, when I think of trying to start all over again, I find myself asking ‘What’s the use?’ If I could shut out all those old memories. But I can’t. My mind keeps eternally on them, like this back eddy, circling around what was and might have been and can’t be. I’m a Samson shorn, without the mercy of perishing when the pillars of my house fell about me.”

Joe stopped and drew the palm of his hand over his forehead. His eyes were glistening. He stared for a minute out over the uneasy gulf, unseeing, over Broderick’s head. And Broderick’s gaze was fixed on him with a queer, half-pitying expression.

“Didn’t you ever go back or write to find out if, after all, your wife might have been the victim of an illusion and only realized it when you stepped out of her life?” Broderick asked carelessly.

Joe shook his head.

“No,” said he. “I didn’t give her up without a struggle, and when I had to I let go completely. I couldn’t persuade myself to make another effort. She knew her own mind, and she held to her determination when it was making me suffer like the damned. She was sorry. But I didn’t want her pity. I wanted her love.”

“You don’t get my point,” Broderick pursued. “If you ask me, I’d say you acted like a fool—any man’s a fool to take a woman’s actions for granted until she’s committed herself irrevocably. You’ve been eating your heart out for four years, and yet you don’t even know but what she’s suffering as much as you do—aching for you to come back. For all you know, the very moment that you were gone and she was free to marry the other man, it may have dawned on her that she didn’t want to, that you filled a place in her life no one else could possibly fill. I don’t think you’ve got a very comprehensive knowledge of women, Joe, or of human nature in general. You two loved each other. All right. That being so, you passed together through that peculiar ecstasy of feeling that burns like a flame at mating, and, like a flame, sometimes burns out—but always leaves smoldering embers. A man and a woman can only have that emotional experience at its full intensity, once. When you have had it, it’s something that no one and nothing can take away. Its impressions can’t be ironed out as you can iron the wrinkles out of a piece of cloth. It’s a bond between a man and a woman as long as their hearts beat. Do you suppose that the hundred and one associations of your life together meant nothing to your wife?”

“They didn’t seem to,” Joe answered sullenly. “She was sick of it all. She thought she saw happiness in another direction.”

“The reason for that you probably know better than I do,” Broderick said. “But if I loved a woman I’d take _nothing_ for granted. Not even if she swore to her feelings on a stack of Bibles. She’d have to prove her words by her deeds before I gave up hope. If she’d been mine once, I’d almost have to know she was finding comfort in another man’s arms before I’d be convinced that her feeling for me was dead. There’d be pain in that, but it would take about that to convince me. And by your own admission you don’t know. You haven’t given her or yourself a fair fighting chance. It’s one thing to act in a whirl of feeling. Things often look altogether different when you’ve dropped back to everyday living. You took your hurt and ran away and nursed it. You didn’t wait to see what happened after you’d done your part. You don’t know but she’s somewhere nursing a grief that overtook her the minute you took yourself beyond sight and hearing of her.”

“No chance,” Joe muttered.

“No chance?” Broderick echoed, with a tinge of scorn in his voice. “The law of probabilities is all on your side. I wish I felt my chances as good. I wish that my chance of happiness had been half as good as yours. Would I throw up my hands and go wandering up and down the earth with pain and uncertainty and self-pity like thorns in my flesh? I should say not!”

“You don’t understand,” Joe answered somberly. “There’s some things a man can’t put into words. He can only feel them.”

“But I do understand,” Broderick insisted. “I’ve been through the mill. A man gets on the grid, and he can only squirm. I know what it is to ache with a pain that isn’t physical. But with me it came of actual unescapable knowledge—the pain of sheer unchangeable hopelessness. _You_ took a lot of things for granted. Seems to me you ran away under fire.”

Joe threw out his hands impotently. “What the devil else could I do?” he demanded harshly. “She had to be free—free to marry the man she wanted. I could have stood on my rights as a husband. What was the use? She’d only have hated me. It wasn’t any light love affair with her. She wasn’t that kind. She wanted happiness—she could only see it in a certain direction—but she wanted it to come decently and honorably. There was no ground for divorce. I had to devise a ground. So I deserted her. As I saw it, there wasn’t anything else for me to do.”

Broderick’s eyes gleamed.

“You’re a man,” he said quietly, “a real man. But a fool for all that, I think. Didn’t it ever occur to you that she might really miss you after those years of intimate living? That your clean sweep of everything might have made a gap in her life that nothing but you yourself could fill in again? A woman’s human—gifted or cursed, as you like to put it—with all the human vagaries of impulse. Sometimes it takes a grand upheaval to make us see things as they really are—to know ourselves.”

Joe got to his feet and threw his arms wide to the sunset, and let them fall by his side.

“Why should I try to fool myself?” he said. “All I want is to forget. That’s all.”

He went into the cabin. We heard the creak of his bunk as he threw himself down. Broderick clasped both hands over his knees and stared at the ground. His brows knitted, as over some problem he strove to solve. After a minute, he looked at me.

“Joe unburdened his soul very completely,” he said. “Does his right name happen to be Galloway?”

“Why, yes, that’s his name,” said I—surprised into admission. “How did you know?”

“I didn’t know,” Broderick muttered. “But I had a hunch.”

He sat for a little while, picking up pebbles and casting them over the bank with a flip of his hand. Then he, too, rose and went into the cabin.

The door stood open beside me, and the small window above my head. Every word they uttered within came distinctly to me. I heard Broderick repeat almost word for word, impatiently, challengingly, the last questioning sentences he had put to Joe.

“Why bother me with your theories,” Galloway answered roughly. “What is it to you? What do you know about these things I’ve been fool enough to talk about?”

“I know all there is to know about it,” Broderick answered slowly. “A great deal more than you yourself know. I’m the other man.”

I drew beyond hearing at that. It lay between the two of them, a matter intimate and grievous, not for casual ears. So I moved to the corner, where only came the indistinguishable drone of their voices, wondering to myself if the devil that rises in men where a woman is concerned would presently set them at each other’s throats. They were strong, passionate men. I was a little afraid for them, for I liked them both.

An hour passed. Dusk merged into darkness. Still they talked, their voices never rising above that repressed murmur. Then the lamp flashed its yellow square through the doorway, and both came out. Joe turned away and walked along the cliff slowly, a dim outline in the night. Broderick stood looking about. Presently he called:

“Oh, Steve!”

“Here!” I answered.

He came and sat down on the ground beside me. The match he laid to his pipe bowl showed his face hard-drawn. His eyes smoldered.

“Did you hear?” he asked.

“I heard you declare yourself,” said I frankly. “Then I moved out of earshot.”

He sat silent for a time.

“Joe doesn’t actively blame me,” he said at last. “But he resents everything. He’s lived within himself so long, bottling up his grief, that he’s morbid. I can’t do anything with him, can’t make him see sense. The thing he ought to do for their own two sakes—write to Norma or go to her and make up—he won’t do. You knew her, it seems. You heard his side of it—absolutely true, so far as it goes. But there’s two sides to everything.”

“Fire away,” said I—for I knew by his tone that he was smoldering inside, that he wanted the relief of talk that would neither be misunderstood nor resented.

“Joe made the same mistake that other men have made and regretted,” Broderick went on, “as near as I can gather. He let his ambition and his business overshadow his wife and his home. I suppose he felt that everything was fixed and secure and final. And that’s a bad thing with any woman young and proud and passionate as Norma Galloway. It was very simple. Joe was getting wholly immersed in his business. He was traveling a lot for his firm. And I happened to wander into her life at a time when she was in a peculiarly receptive state of mind. That sounds commonplace—but I’m not good at analysis. I loved her in my own headlong way. Nothing else mattered to me but her. I knew where I stood. She thought she did. There wasn’t anything sordid or underhand about it. We talked it over from every angle, God knows. She wasn’t happy with him. All her feeling for him seemed dead. She knew I loved her, and she believed she loved me, and that for us two life together meant happiness if we could take it up honorably together. So she told him, and you know how he played his part.”

“I’ve known Joe since we were kids,” I said. “He’s a white man.”

“He is,” Broderick agreed. “Every inch of him. But, as I said, something of a fool where a woman’s heart is concerned. He took too much for granted—let go too easily. He didn’t have anything but her word for it—and a woman’s word is nothing in matters of this sort. One can talk and talk and never get anywhere. It’s deeds that count. He didn’t give her a chance. He never saw me, never even knew my name. I wasn’t looming a big figure before him to drive him insane with impotent jealousy. But when the big upheaval came, he effaced himself as absolutely as if he had been buried. He made no effort to learn how things went.

“And then”—Broderick bowed his head for a second—“then, after he was gone, and there was nothing to do but wait patiently a little while, get a divorce quietly, and marry me, she woke up. It wasn’t me she wanted. It was Joe. She’d loved him in the beginning. When he’d made the complete renunciation, stepped out of her life for good and all, she found something lacking, a place that nobody else could fill, that she wanted him back, that her heart ached to have him back. Oh, you can’t ever tell anything about a woman. And yet, I suppose it was only natural. He’d become a part of her life. I was only an incident. I suppose so many things used to rise up and make her long for him. She’d lived with him. The nearest she’d ever been to me was to kiss me shyly once or twice.

“Anyway, once he was gone, it was all different. The money he gave her she banked and left alone. She would no more have lived on it than she would have let me support her. She used to say that she was being punished for breaking a good man’s heart for a passing whim.”

Broderick lifted his head and laughed harshly.

“Meaning Joe, of course,” he said. “It didn’t seem to occur to her that I was very deeply involved. The most she would let me do for her was to help her get a position. I happened to have a cousin in the millinery business in Utica, and Norma got work there—enough to live decently on. And when I’d tried every means to move her, and failed, I had to get out and get action or go crazy. So I went on the tramp, like Joe, a good deal. I can live anywhere, under any conditions. And there you are.

“But,” he broke out, after a little, “I didn’t let go like he did. I wrote to her. Time and again, at first. Every few months since. That’s how I know where she is, and how she still feels. She’s there yet, pegging away, waiting. She’s his wife, legally, in spirit, every way. She’s been true as steel. And her one solace is that some time he’ll come back, or she’ll find out where he is and win him back and make up somehow for these ghastly years.

“And can you see the tragedy in it?” Broderick went on. “He refuses to act. He won’t do anything. He says he has suffered till he’s numb. And I can’t make him see that she has suffered, too, is suffering yet, as he is. It’s pride. If I were in his place, I’d have no pride. I’d crawl on my hands and knees in the dust back to her if I could create for myself the longing she has for him. It isn’t worth while to be proud and aloof and miserable when all you have to do is reach out your hands for happiness. Two of us can get our feet out of this deadly coil. Why should all three be lonely and miserable? I know he doesn’t want to have it that way. It’s just a stubborn streak. He’s morbid. What has been can’t be helped. But the future, that’s a different matter.”

“You might write and tell her where he is and how he feels about it,” I suggested. “That would be a fine thing to do.”

Broderick laughed hard and mirthlessly.

“I suppose I could,” he said. “But it would be better if he made the first move. However, I know _she_ wouldn’t hesitate. Yes, I dare say it would be eminently proper for me to be the god in the machine—to bring them together with a Heaven-bless-you-my-children—and then fade away. Well, I don’t know. I’ll have to think about that.”

He got up abruptly and walked into the cabin. When I followed, he was in his bunk, the blankets drawn over his head. A few minutes later, Joe came in. What sort of truce they had declared I never knew. Between them as men there was genuine liking. If that matter of a woman had stirred up feeling of any intensity between them, they were men enough to repress it.

So, for a matter of two weeks, the days marched past, filled with the monotonous labor of cutting and piling cedar bolts. The fall days were on us, with their long, gray evenings. My bolt contract was about done, and we took it easy, working short hours. The first man in kindled the kitchen fire, and also built another on the ground before the cabin door. When we had eaten we would sit outside under the projecting eave smoking our pipes before the cheerful crackling logs. It was pretty much as it had been before that night of soul unburdenings—except that we talked a bit less freely, there was more of constraint upon us.

Then one evening, in the first gray of dusk, when we had knocked off early and were sitting outside by the fire, watching the same tubby coaster that had brought Galloway to Coderre go lurching past Skeleton Point into the maw of Hell Gate, I heard the clatter of a buggy on the little-used road that ran between the landing and my camp. In a minute it gained the clearing. I saw the figure of a woman beside the driver. A few seconds later she was clambering out and walking toward us with a firm step. Norma Galloway, just as I recalled her, fair strands of hair wind-blown across her face, deep blue eyes shining, lips a trifle parted, her gaze fixed on Joe.

I turned to look for Broderick. He was all but behind the cabin, and he beckoned me imperatively. I followed. It didn’t matter, anyway. There was only one man looming before her, and he stood rooted to the ground as if he doubted the evidence of his visual sense.

Broderick strode along the cliff. When I caught up with him he was seated on a log, holding his face in his hands.

“You did write, And she came,” I said—for lack of something less obvious.

“Shut up!” he gritted. “I’m not in a talking mood.”

I don’t know how long we sat there. Broderick did not move, nor lift his head. It grew dark. I looked toward the cabin now and then, and once saw the fire break into a yellow gleam when some one stirred it.

“I guess all’s quiet along the Potomac.” Broderick lifted his face at last. “I’ve done my bit. Let’s go back.”

We walked slowly. Nearing the cabin and the soft glow before it, a stick broke in a shower of sparks and sent up a bright flame that threw into bold relief two figures—Joe on a block seat, his wife curled on the earth beside smiled up at him, and then at me. There wasn’t any further explanation needed.

“Ed has gone,” I said—and added a white lie to smooth things. “He told me to wish you luck.”

It seemed to me a shade of relief crossed both their faces. Love _is_ selfish. But I couldn’t blame them.

I gave them the cabin that night and made my bed beside the fire. But I didn’t sleep. No. Broderick loomed too big in my mind.

The back eddy had brought him unwitting to the spot, to straighten a grievous tangle in two lives, to bring peace to unquiet souls. And it might be that the eddy took him away. I don’t know. I’ve often wondered. I know I never saw him, never heard of him again.

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the October 20, 1915 issue of The Popular Magazine.]