The Wheel of Life Part 47

As she thought of it now it appeared to her that death was the only means by which she could free herself and him from this marriage; and the several ways of dying which were possible to her crowded upon her with the force of an outside pressure. She might be crushed in the street? or walk on till she found the river? But the different approaches to death showed to her as so hideous that she knew she could not summon the courage with which to select a particular one and follow it to the end. "Yet I shall never go back," she thought, "he does not love me--he wishes only to spare himself the scandal. If he loved me he could never have looked at me like that. And I loved him three weeks ago," she added. Her love was gone now, and the memory of it had become intolerable to her, yet the vacancy where it had been was so great that death occurred to her again as the only outcome. "Though I hate him it seems impossible that I should live on without him," she said.

But the next instant when she endeavored to recall his face she could remember him only by his casual likeness to Perry Bridewell, and she saw him standing upon the hearthrug while he pulled in angry perplexity at his moustache. The words he had spoken, the tones of his voice, and her own emotion, were blotted from her recollection as if a thick darkness had wiped them out, and from the hour of her deepest anguish she could bring back only a meaningless gesture and the white rosebud he had worn in his coat. What she had suffered then was the dying agony of the thing within her which was really herself, and there remained to her now only the vacant image from which the pa.s.sion and the life had flown. "How could it make so much difference when I can barely remember it?" she asked; and it seemed to her at the instant that nothing that could happen in one's existence really mattered, since big and little were all equal, and the memory of an emotion faded sooner than the memory of a gesture.

Pausing for a moment on the corner, she watched curiously the faces moving under the electric lights, and she found herself wondering presently if each man or woman in the crowd was loving and hating or seeking an escape from both love and hatred? A stout man wearing a red necktie, a pretty woman in a purple coat, a pale girl carrying a heavy bundle, a bent shouldered clerk who walked with a satisfied and affected air--as each one pa.s.sed she saw his features and even his hidden thoughts in a grotesque clearness which seemed to come partly from an illumination within herself and partly from the glare of the lights without. "The man in the red necktie is happy because he has made money; the pretty woman is happy because she is loved--but the pale girl and the bent shouldered clerk are wretched. They have neither love nor money, and they have not found out how little either is worth."

For a while she watched them, almost forgetting her own unhappiness in the excitement of their discovered histories; but wearying suddenly, she turned away and entered a street where the darkness had already gathered. Here she came close upon a pair of lovers who walked arm in arm, but the sight irritated her so she turned again at the next corner.

The question whether she should go home or not thrust itself upon her, and it seemed to her that it would be better to die in the street than to return to the persuasions of Gerty, the reproaches of Mrs. Payne, and the complacency of Kemper. As she hurried on in the darkness she saw her past as distinctly as if her eyes were turned backward, and in this vision of it there showed to her the steep upward way of the spirit, and she remembered the day when her destiny had seemed to lie mapped out for her in the hand of G.o.d. "Was this what G.o.d meant?" she demanded, and because there was no answer to the question she asked it again and again the more pa.s.sionately. "Or perhaps there is no G.o.d after all," she added.

A sob broke from her lips, and a policeman, who was pa.s.sing, threw first an enquiring, then a respectful glance at her, and went on again. A child playing in the street ran up to beg for some money, and she opened her bag and gave him a piece of silver with a smile.

"Thank you, lady," he responded, and ran back into the shadows. As he crossed the street she followed him with her eyes, seeing him hasten, his palm outstretched, to an Italian who was roasting chestnuts in a charcoal burner on the opposite sidewalk.

The darkness had grown heavier and as she walked rapidly through streets which she did not know, her nervous energy failed her, and she began to tremble presently from exhaustion. Again she asked herself for the last time if it were possible for her to go home and face Mrs. Payne and Gerty and marry Kemper in three days. A fantastic humour in the situation brought a laugh to her lips--for whenever she was confronted by the hopelessness of her escape, the arguments for her marriage presented themselves to her in the forms of cases of silver and of her wedding dress in its white satin box. Mrs. Payne had spent the afternoon, she knew, in arranging this silver on covered tables in an empty room, and she could see plainly the old lady's animated movements, the careful eye with which she estimated the value of each gift, and the expression of approval or contempt with which she grouped it according to its importance. Then she thought of Kemper held to his love by the embarra.s.sment of these presents, by the hopelessness of returning them, and by his conventional horror of "getting into print," and at the picture the laugh grew almost hysterical on her lips. How sordid it all was! This array of silver, Mrs. Payne's reproachful comic mask, and Kemper, pulling his moustache as he stood upon the hearthrug, all whirled confusedly in the dimly lighted street before her. She felt her knees tremble, and while this weakness lasted it seemed to her that it would be better to go back and get warm again, and submit to anything they forced upon her. Her flesh, in its weakness, would have yielded, but something more powerful than the flesh--the soul within which she had so long rejected--struggled on after the impulses of the body had surrendered.

The lights grew suddenly blurred before her eyes, and looking up, she found that she had reached a ferry, and that a crowd from a neighbouring factory was hurrying through the open doors into the boat which was about to put off. For the first time it occurred to her that she might leave the city; and going inside she bought a ticket and followed the people who were rushing across the gangway. Where it would take her she had no idea, but when after a few minutes the boat had crossed to the other side, she went out again with the crowd, and then turning in the direction where there appeared to be open country, she walked on more rapidly as if her thoughts flew straight ahead into the broader s.p.a.ces of the horizon.

At first there were rows of streets, a few scattered shops in among the houses, and groups of workmen from the factories lounging upon the sidewalk. A child, with a crooked back, in a red dress, ran across the pavement in front of her and stopped with an exclamation before a window which contained a display of pink and white candy. Then a second child joined her, and the two fell to discussing the various highly coloured sweets arrayed on little fancy squares of paper behind the gla.s.s. As Laura watched them, pausing breathlessly in her walk, every trivial detail of this incident seemed to her to possess an equal importance with all other happenings large or small: for the events of her individual experience had so distorted her perceptions of the ascending values of life, that her own luckless pursuit of happiness appeared of no greater importance in her eyes than the child, with the crooked back, making her choice of sweets. Her own emotions, indeed, interested her no longer, but she was aware of a dull curiosity concerning the crippled child. Would her whole life become misshapen because of the physical form which she wore like an outer garment? And she felt, at the thought, that she would like to stand upon the side of the child and upon the side of all who were oppressed and made miserable by the crookedness either of the body or of destiny.

While this pity was still in her mind she tried to recall Kemper as she had first known him, but it was to remember only that he had reddened with anger as he spoke to her, and that the sunlight, falling upon him, had revealed the gray hair on his temples. The physical aspect which had meant so little in her love was all that the recollection of him could suggest to her now, for she found that the visual memory still remained after the pa.s.sion which had informed it with life and colour was blotted out.

The child interested her no longer, and walking on again, she pa.s.sed, after a time, the scattered houses, and came out upon the open road which showed white and deserted beneath the stars. Looking overhead, as she went on, her gaze swept the heavens with that sense of absolute stillness which comes under the solitude of the sky, and standing presently in the dust of the road, she fixed her eyes upon the Pleiades shining softly far above the jagged line of the horizon. Her feet ached beneath her, but her head seemed suddenly spinning through clear s.p.a.ces among the stars, and while she stood there, she felt that the distance between her and the sky existed only in the hindrance of her body. With that laid aside might she not recover her soul and G.o.d there as well as here?

Again she went on, but this time she found that her limbs could make no further effort, and struggling step by step, to a bend in the road, she looked about her in a physical agony which left her consciousness only of her desire for rest. A house, set back from the roadside in a clump of trees, showed to her as she turned, and going through the little whitewashed gate and up the path, she knocked at the door and then stood trembling before the threshold.

CHAPTER IV

SHOWS THAT TRUE LOVE IS TRUE SERVICE

On the evening of the day upon which Laura was to have been married, Adams went, as usual, into his study and lit the green lamp upon his desk; but his mind was so filled with the mystery of her absence that even the pretence of distraction became unendurable. Since the news of her broken engagement and her flight had reached him, he had spent three days in a fruitless, though still hopeful, search for her; and the nights when he was forced to relax his efforts were filled with agonised imaginings of her loneliness at so great a distance and yet in reality so near. From the moment that he had heard through Gerty of her disappearance, there had ceased to exist all uncertainty as to the position in which he now stood to her; and he reproached himself, as he remembered her visit to his office, because he had failed then to take into his hands a decision which from an external view appeared so little to affect him.

But the external view, he realised, was nothing to him to-night. On that last day he had penetrated beneath the shallow surface of the conventions, and he had read in her tormented heart the whole story of the bitter disillusionment which she did not dare to put in words. Her imagination, he saw, had created an ideal lover in Kemper's shape, and in the moment of her awakening she had turned away not from the falsehood, but from the truth. "Though he is not what I loved yet I will still love him!" her heart had cried, in a subjection to the old false feminine belief that faithfulness to a mistaken ideal is not weakness but virtue. Yet in the end she had fled from that ultimate choice between the higher and the lower nature. How could she have lived on a lie when her spirit had forged so clear a path of truth before her?

Rising from his chair he walked for a few minutes rapidly up and down the room. How far or how near was she to-night? Had she remembered him in her misery? Would G.o.d reveal Himself to her in the most terrible hour? His trust in her final deliverance was so great that even as he put the questions, he knew in his heart that she was one of those who, in the end, "win their own souls through perseverance." His eyes fell on her picture above his desk, and then turning away rested on Connie's which stood where he had placed it in the first years of his marriage.

Connie and her life with him was like a half-forgotten dream to him now, yet, looking back upon it, he could not tell himself that there had been for him no gain of strength, for Connie no growth of understanding, in the pitiless failure of their marriage. All was softened in his memory by that last afternoon when he had seen the shame of experience wiped from her face as they combed her hair straight back from her forehead in the old childish fashion; and he had realised from that instant that a soul had come to birth in the hour before her death. A single ray of the divine light had dispelled the thick darkness, and her blind eyes were opened for one minute before she closed them to the body forever. Was that one minute not worth every heart throb he had suffered and every difficult hope for which he had battled in his thoughts? Having looked though for a fleeting glimpse only upon the unity of life, was not her spirit's growth measured in the instant of that flashing vision? For G.o.d had worked here--had worked in the pity of his heart, as well as in the awakening grat.i.tude in Connie's; and because of the deeper insight he had attained, he could look back over the whole sordid tragedy and discern one of those steep and arduous roads by which the spirit mounts to enlightenment through the flesh. And if this were so here--if in ugliness such as this he could find beauty, was it not one and the same over the broad field of human effort? Had not his own life proved to him that let a man's eyes be opened, and even in the depths of abas.e.m.e.nt he may look in his soul and discover G.o.d?

And Laura? His heart was flooded with tenderness, and he felt again a confident, an almost mystic a.s.surance that her destiny was one with his.

In this growing conviction his anxiety appeared to him suddenly as a pitiable and cowardly denial of his faith--and he was possessed by the certainty that he had only to send out his will in order to smooth the way of her return to peace.

The room had become warm, and opening the window he stood looking beyond the housetops to the stars which shone dimly over the city. The noise in the streets grew fainter in his ears, and as he stood there with his eyes on the stars, he could tell himself in the joy of his reconciliation, that the law by which they moved gloriously toward their end was the law which controlled his own and Laura's life. The sense which is less a belief than an intimate knowledge of immortality belonged to him now, and he realised that so far as he lived at all he lived not in the hour alone, but in eternity, that so far as he had won peace it was bound up in a pa.s.sionate conviction of the survival of the universe within his soul. To-day or to-morrow, in the minute or in eternity, he saw that wherever G.o.d is there will always be immortal life.

Turning back into the room he looked again at Laura's picture with a longing which had not freed itself as yet from the idea of renouncement.

Even now he realised that he had been strong enough to live without her, and with the admission, he was aware again of that wider sympathy which had been his compensation in a forefeiture of personal love. His happiness he had told himself a year ago depended neither upon possession nor upon any pa.s.sage of events, yet to-night his heart strained after her in a tenderness which seemed to bring her visible presence before him in the room. His love for her appeared not only as a part of his love for G.o.d, but as a part, also, of his sorrows, his bitter patience, his renouncement and of the compa.s.sion which had sprung from the agony and the enlightenment of his failure. Sorrow he could still feel--the deepest human grief might be his portion to-morrow, but while this unfading light shone in his soul, he knew that it was ordained that he should conquer in the end. By this knowledge alone he had at last won through suffering into the open places of the spirit where were joy and freedom.

A ring at the bell startled him from his abstraction, and with an impatient eagerness for news, he hastened to the door, where a boy thrust at him a small folded sheet of paper. As he opened it he felt that his hand trembled, for even before he read the words, he knew that Laura's appeal to him had come.

"I need a friend. Will you help me?" was all that she had written.

He motioned the boy to come inside, and then stood looking at him enquiringly as he got into his overcoat.

"Do you go back with me?" he asked.

The boy nodded while he pulled at a scarlet handkerchief about his neck.

Adams noticed that though he was stunted and anaemic in appearance, he wore his shabby overcoat with an almost rakish swagger. His mouth was filled with chewing-gum which he rolled aside in his cheek when he talked.

"Is it far?" Adams enquired in a hopeless effort to extort information however meagre.

The boy looked important, almost mysterious.

"Yep," he responded, adding immediately, "She's the other side of the ferry."

"Do you mean the lady?" He opened the door, and hurried to the sidewalk where he stopped to call a cab from the corner.

"She's been there three nights, so tired she couldn't move," replied the boy, as he followed Adams into the cab. "A fine lady, too," he commented with a wink.

"Well, she's all right now, and I'm much obliged to you," said Adams, but he asked no further questions until they were seated side by side in the ferry, when he tried again to draw out the bare facts of Laura's flight.

During the walk through the town and along the country road, he learned that Laura had reached the house of the boy's mother in an exhaustion of mind and body which had compelled them to harbour her for the night. On the next day her appearance and the money with which she was supplied had so won upon the mother's sympathy that her desire to remain a few days longer had been met almost with eagerness by the older woman. When he had, with difficulty, extracted this account of what had pa.s.sed, Adams fell a little ahead of his companion, and they went on in silence until they came, at the end of several miles, in sight of the cottage withdrawn from the roadside in its clump of trees. A single lighted window was visible through the bared boughs, and standing out clearly from the interior, Adams saw a dark figure which his heart recognised with a bound.

The boy pushed back the gate and Adams went up the path inside, and entering the house opened the door of the room in which he had seen Laura standing. She was still there, motionless in the lamplight, and as he went toward her she lifted her eyes and gazed back at him in the mute defiance which is the outward expression of despair.

"Do you think you have been quite just to me, Laura?" he asked, not tenderly, but with a stern and reproachful face.

Without lowering her eyes she looked at him while she shook her head.

"I sent for you because I could not help it. I had nowhere to go," she said.

"Do you think you have been just to me?" he asked again.

"You? I never thought of you until to-day," she answered. "I came here because I had to go somewhere--it did not matter where. I was too tired to walk any farther, so they were very good to me."

"And you have let us search for you three days." His voice was constrained, but as he looked into her wan face between the loosened waves of her hair, his heart melted over her in an agony of tenderness.

Every drop of blood appeared to have left her body, which was so pallid that he seemed to see the light shining through her drawn features.

"So they have been looking for me?" she observed, with but little interest.

"What did you expect?" he questioned in his turn.

"But I didn't want to be found--I would rather stay lost," she responded. Shrinking away from him she went to the window and stood there, pressed closely against the panes, as if in a blind impulse to put the s.p.a.ce of the room between them. "I will not go back even now--I will not go back," she insisted.

As he entered he had closed the door behind him, and leaning against it now, he looked at her with a flicker of his quiet smile.

"I'm not talking about going back, am I?" he rejoined. "Heaven knows you may stay here if you like the place." He glanced quickly about the crudely furnished little room hung with cheap crayon portraits. "It's rather hard, though, to fit you into these surroundings," he remarked with a flash of humour.

She shook her head. "They suit me as well as any other."