The Pagans Part 8

It suited Fenton's whim next morning to dine with Mrs. Greyson. He had established the habit of dropping in when he chose, always sure of a welcome, and always sure, too, of a listener to the tirades in which he was fond of indulging. If Helen did not always accord him agreement, she at least gave attention, and he cared rather to talk than to convince.

His aesthetic taste, moreover, was gratified by the pretty breakfast table; and he was not without a subtle sense of pleasure in the beauty and harmonious dress of his hostess, who possessed the rare charm of contriving to be always well attired. This morning she wore a gown of russet cashmere with here and there knots of dull gold ribbon, which tint formed a pleasing link between the stuff and the color of her clear skin.

"It is good of you to come," she said, as she poured his coffee. "There are so few days left before you will have married a wife and cannot come. I shall miss you very much."

"Why do you persist in talking in that way?"

Fenton returned. "I'm not going out of the country or out of the world.

You could not take a more absolute farewell if I were about to be cremated."

"You do not know," replied she, smiling. "However, I am glad you are to be married. It will do you good. You need a wife, if you do dread matrimony so much."

"It is abominable," he observed deliberately, "to talk as I do. Of course I do not mind what you choose to think of me; or rather I am sure you will not misunderstand."

"I do not," Mrs. Greyson interpolated significantly.

"But it seems a reflection upon Miss Caldwell," he continued, answering her interruption only by a grimace, "for me to discourse of marriage just as I do. It isn't because I'm not fond of her. It is my protest against the absurd and false way in which society regards marriage; in a word against marriage itself."

Mrs. Greyson understood Arthur Fenton as well as any woman can understand a man who is her friend. Her friendship softened the harshness of her judgments, but she could not be blind to his vanity, his constant efforts at self-deception, and so far as she was in possession of the facts, she reasoned correctly in regard to his approaching marriage.

"No," she said calmly, "it isn't even that. You talk partly for the sake of saying things that sound effective, and partly because you are morbid from over introspection. If you were vicious, I should say you did it as an atonement. Many people would not understand you, but as I do, it is harmless for you to talk to me."

"Introspective? Of course. Can any body help being that in this age?

And as for being morbid--it all depends upon definitions. I try to be honest with myself."

"The subtlest form of hypocrisy," she answered, "often consists in what we call being honest with ourselves. I gave that up long ago. You are not honest with yourself about this marriage. If you don't wish to marry Miss Caldwell, who forces you to do so?"

"Forces me to? Good heavens! I do wish to marry her. Of course I don't ever expect to be perfectly happy. In this inexplicable world natures that demand that every thing shall be explained must necessarily remain unsatisfied. Still, I'd take a little more coffee as a palliation of my lot, if you please."

"It is well you are to marry," observed Helen, refilling his cup.

"You've concentrated your attention upon yourself too long."

"But I am afraid of poverty. If I find some old Boston duffer with a lot of money, and can fool him into admiring the frame of one of my pictures, he may buy it, and I can pay the butcher, the baker and the gas man for a week. If I can't, I must daub the canvas a little higher and try the same game in New York, and--"

"Rubbish!" she interrupted. "The difficulty is, you are too self-indulgent. You are too much afraid of the little discomforts."

"No," he answered; "men--at least sensitive men--do not suffer so much from the discomforts of poverty as from its indignities."

"If--" began Helen; but without finishing, she rose from the table, went to the window and stood looking out.

Fenton watched her idly, knowing perfectly that the woman before him was capable of sacrificing for him all the little income which was her's; and he wondered, as men will, how deep her feeling for him had really become, and whether it had ever pa.s.sed that mysterious and undefinable line which separates love from friendship.

Helen had often endeavored to a.s.sist the artist out of some financial difficulty by buying one of his unsellable pictures, a pretext which he had the grace to put aside by refusing to sell, sometimes sending her as a gift precisely the work for which he could most easily find a purchaser. There was continually a silent struggle, more or less consciously carried on between the two, although seldom appearing upon the surface. Too much Fenton's friend not to be pained by his weaknesses, Helen was stung to the quick by a certain insincerity which she often detected alike beneath his raillery and his cynicism.

Too n.o.ble to yield to any belief in a friend's unworthiness without resistance, she suffered anew whenever his words seemed to ring false, and now there were tears in her eyes as she looked out into the sunny street. She pressed them firmly back, however, and turned a calm face towards her guest, who sat playing with his spoon and watching her with a half troubled, half amused expression.

"I've composed my epitaph," he said irrelevantly. "Will you please compose my monument."

"Oh, willingly. But it will be necessary to know the epitaph, so that the monument may express the same sentiment."

"I shall have no name," Arthur returned. "Only-- _L'homme est mort. Soit_.

How does that strike you?"

"Ah," she cried impulsively, "how does any thing strike me? You play at being wretched as sentimental school girls do, when in their case it is slate pencils and pickled limes and in your case it is vanity. If you were half as miserable as you pretend, you'd have blown your brains out long ago, or deemed yourself the veriest craven alive. I've no patience with such att.i.tudinizing."

"You are partly right," he admitted, "but do any of us find the savor of life so sweet as to make it worth while?"

Something in his voice, a ring of what might be pity in his tone, humiliated Helen. She suspected that he thought her outburst arose from a too great fondness for himself, for grief at parting and at giving him up to another. She struggled to regain her calmness; she felt the impossibility of contradicting the belief which she was sure existed in his mind; she was conscious that to say, "I do not love you," would appear to him proof incontrovertible that the reverse was true. Her throat contracted painfully and she cast down her eyes lest the tears in them should be seen.

"The Caffres," Fenton continued, after an instant's pause, "are said to be so fond of sugar that they will eat a handful of sand rather than lose a grain or two that has fallen to the ground; it seems to me life is the sand and joy in the proportion of the sugar. I'm not willing to take the sand, and I protest against it. There is no morality in it."

"There is no morality in any thing but death," Helen returned drearily.

"Death!" echoed Fenton. "Do you call that moral! Death that crushes the emotions, that kills the pa.s.sions, that pollutes the flesh; the monster which debauches all that is sacred in the physical, that degrades to the level of the lowest all that is high in the intellectual--is this your idea of the moral? The coa.r.s.est rioting of sensual life is sacred beside it. Death moral? _Mon Dieu_, Helen, how you do abuse terms!"

Fenton was continually treading upon the dangerous edge between pathos and bathos, between impressiveness and absurdity. Had he not possessed extremely sensitive perceptions which enabled him to judge swiftly and exactly of the effect of his declamations, and the keenest sense of the ludicrous that helped him to turn into ridicule whatever could not be made to pa.s.s for earnest, much of his extravagant talk would have excited amus.e.m.e.nt and, not impossibly, contempt, instead of producing the half serious effect he desired. He could impart a vast air of sincerity to his speech, moreover, and could even for the moment be sincere. In the present case his earnest and real feeling saved this outburst from the somewhat theatrical air which the words might easily have had if spoken at all artificially.

"The history of mankind," went on the artist, in a sort of two-fold consciousness, deeply feeling on the one hand what he was saying, but on the other endeavoring to direct the conversation to generalities in which would be lost the dangerous personal remarks which threatened, "the whole history of mankind is a protest against death as an insult, an outrage. All religions are only mankind's defiance of death more or less largely phrased."

"No," Helen said. "Not our defiance; our confession of a craven fear. I am afraid of death. I don't dare take my life."

"We are talking," responded her companion, in his turn leaving the table and approaching the window, "like a couple of unmitigated ghouls.

I acknowledge your right to put aside your life if it bores you; man has at least that one inalienable right. But why should you? Art is left still."

"Art," she repeated with profound sadness; "yes, but a woman is never content with abstractions. She demands something more definite. And, by the way, Will came to see me yesterday."

"Yes! What did he want?"

"He said he only came to see how I was. I think he recognizes that now he has come from Europe our secret is sure to leak out soon, and is looking the ground over to see how it is best to behave. He was very entertaining; I never enjoyed him more thoroughly."

"He's a model husband," Fenton observed thoughtfully. "As well as you like each other, I'll be hanged if I can see why you don't live like other people."

"It is precisely because we don't live like other people," was the reply, "that we do like each other so well. We are the best of friends; we were the worst possible husband and wife. I hated him officially, and---There! Why must you bring all that up again? Let the dead past bury its dead."

"But the past won't bury its dead. It sits over their corpses like a persistent resurrectionist, in a fashion which is irresistibly disheartening. Did it never strike you, by the way, what a droll caricature might be made on that line? Time as a decrepit old s.e.xton, you know."

"So few people can joke on those subjects that it would appeal to a very limited audience, I'm afraid."

"Oh, that's true of every thing that is good for any thing."

"Unfortunately the converse is not true, for every thing appealing to a small audience is by no means good."

"Not even marriage?"

"Still harping on matrimony," said Helen, laughing. "What will you do after the knot is really tied? You speak in the mournful tone of one who reads _'Lasciate ogni speranza'_ upon his wedding horseshoe."

"Oh, not quite," he laughed back, "for after marriage a man can always amuse himself, you know, by looking at any woman he may meet and fancying how much worse off he might be if he had married her instead of his wife."