The One Woman Part 23

Again the ceaseless roar of the city, calm and fierce as the sea, one with its eternity of life, stunned him with its immensity and its indifference. He felt himself once more but an atom lost in the surging tides that beat on these stone pavements, worn by the surge of myriads dead and waiting for the throb of hosts unborn.

What did they care? If he were to drop dead that moment, in the morning of his manhood, with the shout of victory on his lips, they would not lift an eye from their gaze on hat or ribbon to watch his funeral cortege trot to the cemetery. A brief obituary and he would be forgotten.

"After all," he mused, "Nature will have her way about this old world and its destiny. Self-development is the first law of life, not self-effacement."

His brow clouded for a moment as he recalled Kate's strange reserve and shrinking at his morning visit. Would she, womanlike, at the last moment contradict herself and withhold the full surrender of life? It was impossible, and yet he felt a vague fear. At any rate, he had burned the bridges behind. His way was clear. He would bring to bear every power he possessed to win her, and in the vanity of his powerful manhood he laughed with the certainty of victory.

When he greeted Kate and bent to kiss her she drew back, blushed and firmly said:

"No; we have had our moments of madness."

And the man smiled.

"I mean it," she said, shaking her head.

"You will change your mind. It's a woman's way. Those moments of bliss, so intense it was pain, when our souls and bodies met in a kiss, have made a new world for you and me."

"But we will keep ourselves pure and unspotted," she answered slowly. "All night I fought this battle alone. Our love is a hopeless tragedy."

"It shall not be so for you, my shining one."

"There are others," she said, nervously clasping her hands, "whose lives are linked with ours. The face of your wife I saw last night will forever haunt me with its pathos. I've seen your children once--so like you, and yet so like her."

"Even so. Life has no meaning now except that you are mine and I am yours."

"But may you not be mine in a n.o.bler way than the cheap surrender to our senses? We can love and suffer and wait. You love me. It is enough."

"But, Kate, my dear, there can be no middle course between right and wrong, a lie and the truth."

She fixed on him an intense look.

"Have you told her?"

"Yes, and we have separated as man and wife. She leaves for Florida for the winter. She has agreed at my request to secure a divorce, and you and I will marry under the new forms of Social freedom.

Our union will be a prophecy of the revolution that shall redeem society."

"You are doing a great wrong," she protested, her full red lips drawn with pain. "When I think of your wife and children, of her tears and reproaches, I am sick with fear."

"Perfect love will cast out fear. The world is large. The soul is large. Lift up your head and be yourself. You said to me in this room once you were not afraid."

"Yes; I had not kissed you then, or felt the bliss and agony of your strong arms about me. Now, I am afraid of you"--her voice sank to a tense whisper--"and I am afraid of myself!"

He seized her hand.

"You will take the risk. You are cast in such a mould," he said, with ringing a.s.surance. "You are the chosen one, my dauntless comrade in a holy crusade. We will call womanhood from enslavement to form, ceremony and tradition, in which the brute nature of man has bound her, out and up into her larger self, the mate and equal of man."

She shook her head, and her hair began to fall in waving ringlets about her forehead, temples and neck.

"I am afraid. I cannot permit this sacrifice on your part. You must break with society, your friends, your father, your past, your wife and children. I must brave the sneers of gossip and the tongue of slander. It will destroy your work and end your career."

"It will give it grander scope. Back of the dead forms of the age, the living heart of a new life is beating. It will burst its bounds as surely as the dead limbs in that park will in spring put on their shimmering satin which Nature is now weaving in her mills beneath the sod. You and I will open the doors of the soul and body to a new and wider life. And, after all, the body is the soul. I know it as I drink the madness of your beauty."

"I do not fear the world so much, I shrink from striking a woman a mortal blow. I know what it is to love now," she insisted sadly.

"Ruth and I have grown out of each other's life. Besides, you do not know her. Beneath her little form are caged powers you have not guessed," he replied, with a curious smile. "I groan and bellow in pain until you can hear me a mile. It is my way. She can take her place on the cold slab of a surgeon's table, feel the crash of steel through nerve and muscle and artery without a groan. I might rave, commit suicide or murder in a tempest of pa.s.sion, but mark my word, she will lift her lithe figure erect and, with soft, even footstep, go her way."

He said this with a ring of tender pride, as though she were his child about whom he was boasting.

"I believe you love her still," Kate said, flushing with a look of surprise.

"You know her love could not live in the fires with which my eyes are consuming you," he said with intensity.

She lowered her gaze and glanced uneasily about as though afraid of him.

"Must the strength of manhood be forever throttled by the impulses and mistakes of youth? Great changes in society are impending. You have felt it. The whole world is trembling at their coming. Changes in the forms of marriage must come that shall give scope for our highest development. I ask you to enter with me into this new world as a comrade pioneer and priestess. We will enter into a marriage so free, so spontaneous no chains shall gall it; and yet in the breadth of its freedom so sweet, so strong, so harmonious it will be a sublime revelation to the world."

"And you think me fit for such priesthood?" she asked. "There are hidden fires beneath this form you deem so fair. I have never known restraint except in the willing slavery of your love. You do not know me--I warn you. I did not know myself until I felt the mad rush of blood from my heart in your arms yesterday. I am afraid of this woman I met for the first time in the wild joy of your kiss."

"I'm not afraid of you," he laughed, springing to his feet and striding toward her.

She trembled at his approach, but did not protest except with a helpless look in her violet eyes.

He stood for a moment towering over her, his feet braced apart, his big hands fiercely locked, his wide chest heaving with the exultant joy of the mastery of her life, his steel-gray eyes sparkling with the insolence of strength.

"We were born for one another," he said, in low, burning tones.

"It was for me you were waiting. Lo! I am here, and you are mine.

In you I have seen the ideal that haunts every full-grown man's soul, of comradeship in every work, sympathy with every hope, the glory of a perfect body, and perfect faith with perfect freedom."

"And you see all this in me?" she asked earnestly.

"Yes. You are my affinity, nerve answering nerve, thought echoing thought. In our union I see a love so strong, of such utter surrender, of such devotion of intellect, such mystic enthusiasm and physical joy, its waves must break in ecstasy on our souls forever."

She arose with a sigh, looked appealingly at him, and her lips mechanically said:

"It is wrong."

But the man saw the flash of unutterable love in her eyes and the tender smile about her full lips; and laughing aloud, he took her deliberately in his arms.

He kissed a tear from her lashes. A tremor shook her splendid form, she closed her eyes, breathing deeply, slipped her arms around his neck and sighed:

"My darling!"

CHAPTER XV

GOEST THOU TO SEE A WOMAN?