The Bachelors Part 3

"I left New York the week following the announcement of your engagement to Mr. Thatcher. Perhaps you can figure it out better than I. Time has come to mean nothing to me here."

"That was in ninety-three," Marian said, reflecting,--"over twenty years ago! You have been here ever since?"

Hamlen hesitated before he answered. "I have been back to the States only once--when my father died. I have made short excursions to London, to Paris, to Berlin, to Vienna; but the world is all the same, and I was always glad to return here, to this retreat."

"Twenty years of solitude!" Marian repeated. "Don't tell me that it was because of--"

"I came here because I wanted to get away from every old a.s.sociation,"

Hamlen interrupted hastily. "I settled down here because I loved this beautiful island--and I love it still."

"But your friends, Philip--"

A tinge of bitterness crept into his voice. "Friends?" he repeated after her. "What friends did I ever have whom I could regret to leave behind?"

"I know," she admitted, striving to ease the pain her words had inflicted; "but your father--and your cla.s.smates."

"Yes--my father. I was wrong to leave him. Had I waited but two years longer, I should have left behind me no ties of any kind. But the good old pater understood me; he was the only one who ever did."

"Haven't you kept in touch with any one at home?"

"This is 'home,'" he corrected.

"Not for you, Philip," she insisted. "This is a Garden of Eden, as you yourself called it, this is a dream life of sunshine and the fragrance of flowers, this is the home of the lotus-eaters, for the present moment enticing men--and women, too--away from the stern pursuits of life; but it is not 'home' for such as you."

"I have found it all you say and more," Hamlen replied firmly; "but it has not been the life of inactivity which you suggest. The very things which tempted you to turn in here from your drive show that my years of patient study and experiment have not been altogether in vain. Inside the house I have my library, which can scarcely be equaled in the States. There I keep up my work more a.s.siduously than I could possibly have done elsewhere. The literature of the past belongs to me, for I have made it part of myself. I know Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, not as books only, but almost word for word. I can speak five languages as well as my own. Is this the existence of the lotus-eater, Marian? Is this merely the dream life of sunshine and of flowers?"

She looked at him long before replying. Then she rested her hand gently upon his arm.

"It's the same Philip, isn't it?--the same old Philip who refused, over twenty years ago, to recognize the real significance of life? The same Philip--older, more refined by the chastening of time, more polished by the refinement of accomplishment, but with his eyes still closed to the difference between the means and the end."

The expression on Hamlen's face showed that he failed utterly to comprehend.

"Why had you no friends to leave behind you?" she asked abruptly, realizing the cruelty of her question, but determined to make him see her point.

"Because no one understood me," he answered doggedly.

"Was it their failure to understand you, or your failure to give them the opportunity?"

"Both, perhaps. I had no time to fritter away in college; most of the men did."

"There you are! Can't you see what I mean? The particular things the fellows did there were forgotten within twenty-four hours, but the friendships formed while doing them have endured throughout their lives.

The 'things' were the means, the experience was the end. What friendships can you have here?"

Instead of answering her, Hamlen rose and motioned silently that she precede him through the arbor and up the path to the edge of the cliff.

"Do you think I can be lonely while I hear the surge of that great ocean upon my sh.o.r.e?" he demanded. "Do you think I miss the friendships which so often bring sorrow in their wake while I can conjure up from the past the most glorious friends the world has ever known, visit with them, argue over my pet theories, and give them all this setting here whose counterpart can never be surpa.s.sed?"

She smiled sadly in reply. "You have built your life upon the same basis as this island itself," she said--"upon the foundations of what is dead and past. You have argued with yourself until you have come to believe the fallacy you preach--that you, an Anglo-Saxon, can be content with such a life as this. Are you true to your responsibilities? Are you--"

"What do I owe the world?" he interrupted. "I ask from it nothing but peace and solitude, and surely even the most insignificant has a right to that without incurring responsibilities. Why, Marian, I stand here upon this Point, as the little steamers leave their trail of smoke behind them, and thank G.o.d that for one day, three days, a week, we are cut off from the world. There is nothing I love so much as this separation from my fellow-men."

"Then how fortunate, after all--" she began, but he interrupted her.

"That is another story," he insisted. "I am speaking of what life means to me to-day, not what it might have meant under other circ.u.mstances."

They strolled slowly back into the garden and settled themselves upon a stone seat which commanded a superb view of the surrounding country. It was her heart rather than her eyes which controlled Marian now, and she saw before her nothing but this man-grown boy, who at an earlier time in her life had exercised an absorbing influence upon her. It was her heart, still loyal to the friendship which remained, struggling to find the right word which should start in motion the machinery to bring the latent potentiality into action.

"Your ideas are no different now than then," she said at length, "except that time has intensified them. You used to compare what you found in books with what you found in life, to the distinct disadvantage of the realities."

"Yes," Hamlen admitted; "and it is just as true to-day."

"Do you know why?" she demanded pointedly.

"Because life is so full of insincerity."

"No," she protested, "you are wrong, absolutely wrong. The real reason lies in you. You have always given of yourself in your intellectual pursuits, and have received in kind. In your relations with life you have never given of yourself, and again you have received in kind.

Philip, Philip! why don't you study yourself as you do your books, and even now learn the lesson you need to know?"

"Was that why--back there--" he began.

She paused for a moment as the conversation took her back to the earlier days.

"You thought me changeable," she evaded the question; "but for that you yourself were responsible. You drew me to you with irresistible force, then repelled me by your intolerance of all those lighter interests which were natural to youth of our age. Your letters stimulated my ambition, your conversation stirred in me all that was best; but as soon as we were separated I felt a lack which for a long time I was unable to understand."

"Why did you come," he asked, "to awaken these memories I have tried so hard to forget?" but she seemed not to hear him.

"Then I realized what a dream it was," she continued. "Music to you meant canon and fugue, counterpoint and diminished sevenths; to me it was the invitation to dance. You had no friends, and I was frightened by your willingness to be alone. You had nothing in common with me or my friends; you gave my heart nothing to feed upon except intellect--intellect, and I found myself one moment beneath its hypnotic influence, the next striving to break away from its oppression. Perhaps this was what you had in mind, Philip, that we two run off to some island such as this, to spend our lives in Utopia, alone except for ourselves and your books."

"For me, that would have been all I could have asked."

"But no one, Philip, can live on that alone. We need to draw from our companionship with others in order to give of it to each other. And you forget"--she smiled mischievously--"that when Aristotle begins to bore you he can be placed back upon the shelf. You couldn't do that with a wife! Admit, dear friend, that I or any other woman would have made you utterly wretched."

"I will admit that of any woman other than you."

They rose as by mutual impulse and strolled about the garden for several moments in silence, the thoughts of each centered upon the past.

"See this wild honey." Hamlen touched the curiously formed leaf. "It took me months to make it twine about that tree."

"How long would it have taken to make a baby's fingers twine about your heart?" Marian asked meaningly.

A twinge of pain shot across his face. "Have you--children?" he asked.

"Forgive me, Philip," she answered contritely. "Yes," in answer to his question; "a daughter, whom you shall meet at the hotel, and a big, strapping son. He's a senior at Harvard now, and his name is--Philip."

Hamlen suddenly seized her hand and pressed it to his lips. "Your husband won't begrudge me that," he said, with a quaver in his voice.

"Thank G.o.d!" Marian cried unexpectedly. "It is a relief to find even a small defect in that intellectual armor of yours! Philip, you are a humbug, and you deceive no one but yourself! It is not solitude which you love, it is not friendship which you despise; it is simply that you have made a virtue out of a condition which exists because you don't know how to change it. Let me help you now."

"How can the leopard change his spots?" he demanded incredulously.