Shadows of Flames Part 86

XIX

Loring had got over the first novelty of having the moon descend to his crying. Selene was now a domesticated planet. They moved in the same orbit. He felt, without realising it, somewhat as a lover might feel who, while gazing entranced at the silver disk in mid-heaven, suddenly finds himself transported among the Mountains of the Moon. The lunar landscape, thus familiarly envisaged, struck him as a little bleak.

There was nothing "chummy" about Sophy, he decided. He had always thought it would be great fun to drink wine freely with the woman one was in love with. A "bully" dinner after hunting, or a cosy supper after the play, with plenty of champagne to enliven it. Champagne added such zest to kisses. He felt aggrieved that Sophy did not care for this form of bliss. She said that wine "blurred" her. Such a rum expression! He thought her prudish. He told her so on one occasion.

"Look here, G.o.ddess," he said fretfully. "You run your temple-business in the ground. You treat love-making like a religious ceremony. Hang it!-- I can't feel like Cupid's high-priest all the year 'round. Love ought to be just a bully sort of spree sometimes."

Sophy had said, flushing:

"I'm sorry I seem priggish. But I'm afraid I'll never be able to look on love as 'just a bully sort of spree.'"

Loring had flushed, too.

"Well ... a chap can't go on playing Endymion forever. I suppose there was an end even to the Moon's honeymoon!"

It was after dinner one evening during the next winter. As usual, he had been drinking freely. This always made him either amorous or irritable.

As she would not endure the amorousness, irritability invariably resulted. Sophy was by this time frankly unhappy. But no one guessed it--not even Loring. She had come to feel the full weight of that family remark: "Morry has such a strong will!" She had found that this will of his was far stronger than his love for her. Yet he loved her still. At times even the old feeling of worship gave him pause for an instant.

But the steady drinking--c.o.c.ktails before meals, whiskey-and-soda in between meals--dulled the edge of finer sentiment. And he resented pa.s.sionately the disapproval that her very silence on the subject evinced.

At first she had spoken out to him about it--with affection, honestly, as one good friend might speak to another--but when she found how useless it was, she did not "nag." And she was never "superior" in her manner towards him.

However, no one, living in the close intimacy of marriage with another, can loathe a thing as Sophy loathed this constant tippling of her husband, without the offender being aware of that unexpressed detestation.

He grew quite callous about it as time went by, but during this second winter of their marriage it made him very ugly with her at times.

And Sophy had a bitter, ironic feeling when she faced the fact of this sordid, reduced replica of the tragedy of her first marriage. That had had the dignity of real peril, at least, but this brought her only the ignominy of acute discomfort and at times humiliation.

She suffered intensely. That he could not have understood this suffering, even had she explained it, made her sometimes a little over-proud and cold. He had his full share of the discomfort. In less exacting hands, he would have made a rather easy-going if utterly selfish husband. The climate of Olympus did not at all agree with his const.i.tution. In the legend, it is said that Endymion, after his marriage with Selene, was cast out of Olympus by the wrathful Zeus, for making love to Hera. This lapse was probably caused by the too exacting standard that Selene held up to her earthly spouse.

But they clashed also in other ways. There was a certain strain of unconventionality in Sophy, that often outraged Loring's extreme conventionality of outlook. He had found it "swagger" and amusing that she should choose to embellish an old house in Washington Square, rather than follow the social bell-wether "up to the Park." That had been a "swell" att.i.tude in its way. But there were certain unwritten laws of "smart" propriety, which to break, he felt, was to risk being ridiculous. He would have chosen death cheerfully at any time, rather than seem ridiculous. Sophy felt otherwise. As long as she herself did not consider what she did ridiculous, she did not think at all of the opinion of "society."

XX

But all these frictions, and changes, and readjustments of vision did not come in a steady progression. The unfolding of their inner life followed intricate spirals, returned on itself, coiled outward again.

Sometimes Sophy found herself standing breathless in a glow of the old glamour, that fell on her as if through a far window in the past, reflected back from the blank wall of the present. Then she would think that perhaps the man that he had seemed in their first love-days was the real man, and this Morris only the result of their hectic, vapid life.

Again, she would wonder if he had really ever been what she had dreamed him, even then. It was as if some rare spirit had "possessed" him for the time being. Or was it that love had transfigured him? She could not bridge with her reason the gulf that lay between his past and his present personality.

Then as the months pa.s.sed, and he grew more and more relaxed and slovenly of spirit under the ease of possession, she came to think that he had never been Endymion at all. She had loved a wraith, a seeming.

She did not realise that sometimes love works temporary miracles, even as religion does; that love also makes conversions which are very real for the moment, but that cannot stand the wear of every day.

But when the final realisation came, Sophy felt as if life were over for her. Love had seemed the only real life; now love was over. She sat alone in her bedroom one night, thinking: "Love is over ... love is over...." She felt such anguish at this thought as drove her to her feet. She went and stood at her window, looking out at the bare trees in the Square and the cross of electric lights against the sky, made dark purple by contrast with the orange glow. She felt as if it were too much to bear--this second terrible mistake. And yet, what escape was there?

It seemed to her that there was no escape. Her misery was all the more terrible because life had given her a second chance, as it were--and for a second time she had built her House of Love upon the sands. Vain regret stole over her like lava. It spread barrenness. Once more her creative gift lay strangled under the ashes of her own mistake.

She thought: "This is age--this devastated feeling. I am really old now.

I am only thirty-two, but I could not feel older in spirit if I were eighty."

Her affection for him only made this death of deeper love more terrible.

As in a pale shadow-play, she saw her shadow-self, repeating the role that she had once enacted in a more vivid drama--the role of wife to a man whom she had ceased to love, but towards whom she felt a compa.s.sionate affection. There is no part in the tragi-comedy of life that requires such terrific powers of acting.

And to this exigent demand was added the pang of self-ridicule. Life had given her the talisman of experience to guard her--and this was what she had done with it. She blushed hot, remembering suddenly the love-songs that she had written when he was in Florida. It was anguish to think that what she had believed with all her being was only a love-sick fancy.

She stood thinking, her eyes on the cross of electric lights. She stared at it so long that when she looked away it shone green on the purple dusk--a cross of glow-worms.

She thought of Richard Garnett's words: "Then is Love blessed, when from the cup of the body he drinks the wine of the soul." This had been her dream of love--twice over. But from the cup of the body she had drunk only the gall of the senses. And, again and again, she went back in wondering memory to that time of beglamourment. The words of the first sonnet she had ever sent him, painted it clearly. Line by line, the sonnet came back to her:

"After long years of slowly starved desire, Within this sh.e.l.l of me myself lay sped: My life was wrought of birthdays of the dead; I slept on graves. You came. My spirit's fire Leapt into light and showed Despair a liar: You came--and all Death's ashen wine blushed red.

Your eyes drank mine: I trembled--not with dread, But like a lute-string sharply tuned higher.

"--And I am mocked by wistful dreams of old, As winter by a bright mirage of flowers.

My vanished Spring lives in your eyes' dear blue.

My maiden faith is by your lips retold-- Long, long ago drained out my purple hours-- Lo! in your hand Love's hour-gla.s.s brimmed anew!"

Despite all her idealism, however, Sophy had that sort of dogged courage which sets its teeth and digs in the bed-rock of life for hid lessons.

She did not intend to go dolefully inert like the poor wights in the Hall of Eblis, with her hand always over the flame of pain in her heart.

"Very well," she addressed Life in her thought. "You have done this to me. Now what is your meaning? I am not one of those who think your doings like the 'tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' I believe your grimmest practical jokes have an inner meaning. Why did you cheat me with love a second time? Why, when I had given up all thought of love, and won a tranquil, clear content of spirit, did you send love to trample my secret garden like a dark angel in a whirlwind?"

She came to the conclusion that life means something vaster and more splendid than a restored Eden, where one man and one woman walk together guarded in their blissful isolation by the flaming sword of selfishness.

"Come forth of that!" thunders the Voice that is not one love but All Love. And so Life hales us by the hair, out of our little palaces of dreams. And we are driven naked into the desert of reality. And when we have read aright what is written in the desert sands--behold! the desert blossoms like the rose.

But this writing was not yet clear to Sophy. She toiled through the hot, clogging sands, and what was traced upon them seemed to her only the wanton hieroglyphics of the wind ... the wild wind that blew men and women hither and thither like rootless stalks. Yet she believed in this vaster and more splendid meaning that Life kept hidden, under all its dark pranks and sardonic jesting. She imagined Life, in those days, as a huge, Afrit clown, under whose motley is secreted the Seal of Solomon.

If one could but survive the horrid rough-and-tumble of his sinister game, one would be able, in the end, to s.n.a.t.c.h away the magic seal at whose touch all mysteries open.

That spring brought a new difficulty. Lady Wychcote's letters on the subject of seeing her grandson had become very pressing of late. In February she had been quite ill. Now in her convalescence she wrote more urgently than ever, saying that she felt she had a right to ask that her only grandchild should not be kept away from her any longer. She asked (her request was almost in the form of a demand) that Sophy would bring Cecil's son to England some time during that spring or summer. Sophy felt the justice of this request. She felt that she owed its fulfilment to Cecil's mother--that she really had no right to keep Bobby apart from her indefinitely.

And yet, when she thought of a visit to England and all that it involved, she winced from it in her most secret fibres.

XXI

The more Sophy thought of this visit to England, the more she shrank from it and the more obligatory she felt it to be. She dreaded it for many reasons. The meeting with Lady Wychcote would be painful in the extreme. She could imagine those hard eyes as though they were already fastened on her. And then Morris--how would Lady Wychcote behave to Morris, should they be thrown together? How, indeed, would Morris behave to Lady Wychcote? Sophy hoped ardently that he would not go with her.

She hoped it, not only on this account, but because it seemed dreadful to her that she should appear in London again, after five years of absence, as the wife of another man. She had left England in the dignity of a great tragedy; she would return to it as the wife of an American millionaire, "ages younger than she is, my dear." And Morris--how would Morris seem, thus transplanted? He had been to England before, of course; but he knew few of the people among whom her lot there had been cast. His English acquaintances were all of the ultra sporting sort.

She tried to fancy him at lunch or dinner with the Arundels. What would he make of that political and literary atmosphere?

But what filled her with the keenest dread of all, when facing the possibility of Morris's going with her, was the fact of his constant drinking. Here in America it was the custom of his cla.s.s and set. But there--no. Some Englishmen were "hard drinkers," certainly--but it was the exception and not the rule.

But then again--perhaps all this anxiety on her part was quite useless.

Most probably Morris would dislike the idea of spending a month in England, just when polo on Long Island was at its best. She determined to put it to him that evening. She did so as they drove home from the opera.