Claire Part 15

He laughed. "I thought perhaps you were tired," he said.

"She ought to be," remarked Lawrence from his chair, and in her present state she imagined in his voice a tenderness, a worry for her, and a distrust of her.

She took up the kettle, and hung it on its hook in the fireplace. "I never in my life imagined myself cooking over an open fire in this way,"

she said as she turned toward the little storeroom adjoining.

"You like it?" Philip asked carelessly.

She felt sure that his eyes had read her heart and that he was looking toward the future, his future with the wanton mistress he had found.

She could have screamed, "I hate you! I hate you!" but she said only, "It's great fun for a while; I wouldn't fancy it as a permanent thing."

"It surely must be different from the conveniences of your home."

"Rather," she laughed as she began cutting from the smoked meat that hung in the storeroom.

Now it was Lawrence who was speaking. "I guess she'd surprise us if we could supply her with a chafing-dish. I'd like to see her at work over one in my studio with the bunch around waiting hungrily for results."

Would these men never stop saying things that made her want to scream?

What was the matter, that all at once the beauty of her day should be smashed into a discolored memory of self-hatred? Was there nothing in all the world but sordid thoughts of oneself and of men who, causing them, said things to make them worse?

After they had eaten she went to bed as soon as possible, leaving the men to smoke before the fire. She had pleaded weariness, and they had laughingly told her to get to sleep. They were out there now, talking in subdued tones so as not to disturb her--as if their voices did not ring through her suffering mind like clarions of evil! What should they say if she should suddenly spring before them and shout out her mad fancies?

For a moment she had the wildest of impulses to laugh aloud, then suddenly she turned on her face as she recalled the emotion that had swept her when she saw Philip looking at her over Lawrence's head. Sleep finally stopped her tears.

The two men went to bed, and there was silence in the cabin. Lawrence was smiling, as he felt Philip's body there beside him in the darkness.

"I could kill you now," he was thinking ironically, "and end all question of your loving Claire."

Philip, too, was awake. He had seen the hot flush that came into Claire's face that evening, and he knew that she had been troubled during the supper. He wondered if she were ill. Then suddenly he asked himself, "Is she in love with one of us?" He immediately tried to dismiss the thought as unworthy of her. She was not the kind of woman to forget her marriage vows. But what a home she could make for the man she loved! If he had only known her in time!

But there was still friendship--yes, surely she could give that.

Complete understanding and perfect sympathy would be the basis of a lasting attachment. "Who knows?" he pondered. "It may be that fate has sent her to me to teach me what a great self-denying love can be. In Claire I may find my dream-star again."

CHAPTER X.

HOW SIMPLE THE SOLUTION!

When Claire awoke the next morning her whole being seemed gathered into a tense strain that made her feel as though the least thing might snap the taut nerves in her body and leave her broken and stranded on some far, emotional shoal. Her heart beat unevenly, while her lips and hands felt dry and hot, as if she had spent hours in a desert wind. She did not experience the bitter anguish of the night before; such storms are too wild to last, but it had left her deadly heavy within, and she was unable to recover her usual calm.

One great determination dominated her, to prevent these men, at any cost, from knowing her real feelings. It was a determination born out of the sheer force that was carrying her on, a struggle that came from the very strength of the tide she sought to resist.

She had been awakened by a sudden and clear image, the result of her unsettled mind. Her husband was beside her, leaning over the bed and looking down at her with a great love and a greater pity shining in his eyes. She thought that she had thrown up her arms to close about him with the frantic joy of a rescued person, only to have them meet in empty air and fall listless at her sides again.

Beyond the curtain she heard Philip saying cheerfully: "It is a great day outside, one of Claire's days for play."

"Good!" Lawrence answered. "We'll go out, then, and play."

A rush of self-pity, anger against her situation, fear of she knew not what, and a gnawing desire to escape blended in her thoughts, while her heart warmed at the sound of Lawrence's words.

"Oh," she thought, "I can never, never stand this day!"

She got out of bed and began to dress, her nervous hands fumbling at the b.u.t.tons on her clothes. Her eyes, deeper and shadowed in dark rings, stared vacantly at the white canvas before her. Lawrence was talking again, and she listened. Presently he started across the room and b.u.mped into a chair. The incident was one which had become long familiar to her, and ordinarily she would have thought nothing of it, but this morning she flushed with sudden anger that a chair should have been left in his way. Then she realized that she was foolish, stepped through the curtain, and said before she thought:

"Lawrence, I do wish that you'd look where you are going!"

He laughed merrily. "So do I," he rejoined. "For some years failure to do so has kept me with at least one skinned shin. But just think of the cost of stockings had I been blind as a boy!"

Suddenly she had a vivid picture of him as a ragged, little fellow, stumbling about through his unfathomable darkness, b.u.mping into things and leaving jagged holes in his child's black stockings. Whether she wanted to laugh or cry she did not know, but a great, warm surge of motherliness came over her for the child she imaged, and she said aloud, "Poor little urchin!"

Philip turned and looked at her, smiling. "It would have been a picture indeed," he said.

"I had enough troubles during my rebellious childhood at the orphanage without adding imaginary woes," Lawrence went on, amusedly retrospective. "I remember one day when I was at the awkward stage. I was all dressed for church and happened to stumble over another boy lying in the gra.s.s. I fell against a bench, my trousers caught on a projecting nail, and ripped dreadfully. The matron gave me a scolding and sent me to bed for the day."

"Brought up in an orphanage!" thought Claire. "No wonder he is pessimistic."

"I didn't mind missing church," Lawrence continued; "but it struck me as a piece of gross injustice that I should be punished for a boy's lack of muscular coordination. I've experienced the same fate over my blindness.

It seems to be a special trick people have, and they play it incessantly. I should think it would get as tiresome to them by and by as it did to me some years ago."

Claire felt as if she were included in his casual criticism of mankind, and wondered just how she had been addicted to the practise. A dozen different instances came to her, and she felt very penitent.

"It's because we're all so thoughtless," she said.

"Perhaps. I rather choose to state it differently. It's for the same reason that I do thousands of things, because I'm more interested in myself than I am in any one else. I'm selfish, and so is the rest of humanity."

"But we aren't deliberately so," Philip protested. "Isn't it rather that we are short-sighted and unimaginative?"

"It may be. The end is the same. If I am too short-sighted, too unimaginative to know how a fellow being feels, I can do nothing but blunder along. He may be hurt by me. I may do him an injustice, I may even cheat him of his chance at life, but it can't be helped, and again the result amounts to my being selfish."

As she worked over her biscuit dough, Claire listened to their talk resentfully. She wished they would keep still, but she said nothing.

They went ahead, demonstrating, she thought bitterly, the truth of Lawrence's argument.

"I suppose mankind generally does the best it can," Philip said thoughtfully. "If you ask a man, if you really talk with him, you will find him kindly, inclined to be generous, and willing to do what he can for another. I have always found that true."

"So have I, in a way. He is kindly, he is inclined to be generous, and he is willing to do what he can for another. The trouble is, he makes a maudlin sentiment of his kindliness, a self-flattering charity of his generous inclinations, and is unable to do what he can for another because he is quite sincerely persuaded that he can't do anything."

"My friend, I have had men help me when it cost them trouble to do it.

We all have. Without it, we would none of us accomplish anything of value."

"I, too, have had them help me, from the lending of money down to guiding me across a traffic-blurred street, but I have never yet found more than three or four whose imagination was keen enough and whose judgment clear enough to give me a square deal at living."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that the same man who will help me across the street, lend me money, and be a splendid comrade, stops short when he comes to the field of self-support. He will say sympathetically, 'I don't see how you can do it,' or 'I admire your grit, old man, and I'd like to see you do it,'

and then begin scheming around to direct my interests, aspirations, and efforts into some other channel from where I want them, as though, out of his own great wisdom, he knew much better than I what a blind man could do. If you want to learn just how small the imagination of mankind is and how obstructive to progress is their fool good-heartedness, go among them as a capable mind with a physical handicap. You'll size them up, yourself included, as the most blindly wall-b.u.t.ting set of blundering organisms that ever felt their way through an endlessly obstructed universe."

"Breakfast!" Claire broke in with an unwonted sharpness in her tone.