Phases of an Inferior Planet Part 30

"It is not choice," she replied; "it is necessity. What else is there to do--except starve? Can we go on living like this day after day, you killing yourself with work, I a drag? It is better that I should go--better for us both."

He hesitated a moment as if in thought, and when he spoke it was with judicial calm.

"And would you have gone--a year ago?"

She was silent so long that he would have repeated the question, but at his first word the answer came with a wave of self-abas.e.m.e.nt.

"I--I suppose not."

And that was all.

During the next few days the subject of Mariana's decision was not mentioned. Both felt a constraint in alluding to it, and yet both felt the inevitableness of the final hour. Anthony's pride had long since sealed his lips over the expressions of an unwished-for affection, and Mariana had grown chary of words.

But both went quietly along their daily lives, Anthony working at his desk while Mariana gathered together her shabby garments and made ready for the moment which by word and look they both ignored.

Then at last, when the night before her going came, Mariana spoke. They had just risen from the supper-table and the slipshod maid of work had carried off the unemptied tray. Mariana had eaten nothing. Her face was flushed, and she was moving excitedly about the room.

"I go to-morrow," she began, feverishly.

Algarcife looked up from a book through which he was searching for a date.

"So you have decided?" His lips twitched slightly and the veins upon his forehead contracted.

Mariana shook out a night-gown which she had taken from a drawer, folded it carefully, and laid it in the trunk.

"There is nothing else to do," she replied, mechanically, as if she were fencing with fate from a corner into which she had been driven.

Algarcife closed the book and rose to his feet. He pressed his hand upon his eyes to screen them from the glare of light. Then he moistened his lips before speaking.

"Do you realize what it means?" he asked.

Mariana lowered her head into the trunk and her voice sounded from among the clothes.

"There is nothing else to do," she repeated, as mechanically as before.

"I hope that it will be for your happiness," said Algarcife, and turned away. Then he went towards her in sudden determination.

"Is there anything that I can help you about?"

Mariana stood up and shook her head. "I think not," she answered.

"Signor Morani calls for me to-morrow at six."

Algarcife sat down, but the old sensation of dizziness came upon him and he closed his eyes.

"Have you a headache?" asked Mariana. "The tea was very bad. Shall I make you a cup?"

He shook his head and opened a book, but she crossed to his side and laid her hand upon his shoulder.

"It may not be for long," she said. "If I am successful--"

He flinched from her touch and shook her hand off almost fiercely. His eyes were bloodshot and his lips white.

"The room is so warm," he said, "it makes me dizzy. I'll go out."

And he went down-stairs.

Mariana stood where he had left her and looked down upon the pile of unpacked garments. A tear glistened upon her lashes, but it was a tear of impersonal sorrow and regret. For herself she was conscious only of a dulness of sensation, as if her usually vital emotions had been blunted and rendered ineffectual. In a mute way, as she stood there, she realized an almost tragic pity, but it was purely mental, and she recalled calmly the fact that a separation, which six months ago would have seared her soul with agony, she was now accepting with a feeling that was one of relief. The stress of acc.u.mulated griefs and anxieties had crushed her impressionable nature past all resemblance to its former responsiveness. Yet it is possible that even then, had Anthony returned to overpower her with his appeal, she would have wavered in her decision, but the wavering would have been the result of a fight between the instincts which were virile and the memory of the instincts which were buried with her buried pa.s.sions, and it is doubtful where the victory would have rested. Her impulse for flight was as keen as the impulse which causes a bird to beat its breast against the bars that hold it. She wanted to flee from the sorrow she had known and all its a.s.sociations; she wanted to flee from poverty and ugliness to beauty and bright colors. The artistic genius of her nature was calling, calling, and she thrilled into an answering echo.

But, for all that, a tear glistened upon her lashes as she looked down upon the unpacked clothes.

"O G.o.d! if you would only make a miracle!" she said--"if you only would!"

Her glance fell upon the desk where Anthony's work was lying. She saw the freshly written page upon which the ink was not dry. She lifted the pen in her fingers and felt the thick cork handle which was stained and indented by constant use. She sighed and turned slowly away.

The next afternoon, in hat and veil, with a small black satchel in her hand, she stood waiting for Signor Morani. Her trunk had already been carried down, and the carriage was turning the corner. She spoke lightly, dreading silence and dreading an accent of seriousness. "It is cooler," she said. "I hope a change is coming."

Then, as the carriage stopped beside the pavement below, she held out her hands. They shook slightly.

"Good-bye," she said.

"I hope you will be happy."

"And you. It will be easier for you."

"Good-bye."

She raised her veil, her eyes shining.

"Kiss me."

He kissed her, but his lips were cold, and there was no pressure upon hers.

She lowered her veil and went out. Algarcife stood at the window and heard her footsteps as she descended the stairs. He saw her leave the house, pause for an instant to greet Signor Morani, give the black bag into his hands, and enter the carriage. As she sat down, she leaned out for an instant and glanced up to where he stood. Then the carriage started, turned the corner, and was gone.

Still he did not leave the window. He stood motionless, his head bent, looking down into the heated streets, across which were stretching the slanting shadows from the west. A splash of scarlet, like the impress of a b.l.o.o.d.y hand, projected above the jagged line of tenement roofs, while a film of rising smoke obscured its lurid distinctness. He felt that complete sense of isolation, that loss of connection with the chain of humanity which follows a separation from one who has shared with us, night and day, the commonplaces of existence. The past and future seemed to have clashed together and shattered into the present.

In the street below men and women were going homeward from the day's work. He noticed that they wore, one and all, an aspect of despair, as if pa.s.sing automatically along the endless round of a treadmill. He felt a vague wonder at the old, indomitable instinct of the preservation of self which seemed so alien to his mood. Situated as he was above it all, humanity a.s.sumed to his indifferent eyes a comic effect, and he found himself laughing cynically at the moving figures that blocked the sidewalk below. A physical disgust for the naked facts of life attacked him like nausea. The struggle for existence, the propagation of the species, the interminable circle of birth, marriage, and death, appeared to him in revolting b.e.s.t.i.a.lity. In his bodily and mental wreckage, all action became repellent and hideous, and the slanting sun-rays bespattering the human atoms in the street produced a giddiness in his brain. At that moment he was in the throes of a mental revolution, and his old philosophic sanity was ingulfed.

He remembered suddenly that he had eaten nothing all day, and, turning from the window, drank a cup of tea which had been left upon the table.

The continual use of stimulants, in exciting his nervous system, had made sleep impossible, and he felt as if a furnace blazed behind his eyeb.a.l.l.s. He sat down, staring blankly at the opposite wall. In the corner, upon a heap of books, the skull and cross-bones had been thrown, and they caught his glance and held it with a curious fascination. They seemed to typify his own life, those remnants of dry bones that had once supported flesh and blood. He regarded himself impersonally, as he might once have regarded a body for dissection. He saw that he had pa.s.sed the zenith of his physical and mental power, and that from this day forth it would mean to him retrogression or stagnation. He saw that the press of untoward circ.u.mstances had forced his intellect from its natural orbit into a common rut from which there was no side-track of escape. He weighed his labors, his knowledge, his impa.s.sioned aims for truth, and, in the balance with a handful of dust, he found them wanting. He stirred the ashes heaped where once had been a vital pa.s.sion, and he found a wasted skeleton and dry bones. He looked at his thin and pallid hand, and it seemed to him as incapable of work as the hand of one palsied.

Before his tragic eyes, the years of his past stood marshalled, and, one and all, they bore the badge of failure.

As he rose from his chair in sudden desperation, the recurring faintness seized him and he steadied himself against the open drawer of the bureau. Looking into it as he turned away, he saw some loose articles which Mariana had forgotten--a bit of veiling, a single stocking, and a tiny, half-worn sock of pink worsted. He closed the drawer and turned hastily away.

Then he sat down beside his desk and bowed his head into his hands.