CLIVE would not sit up all night with Helena, but they spent hours of the day in the forest, and there was nothing funereal in his aspect when they were alone. One morning Helena’s maid brought her a note when she came to awaken her.
“My dear Miss Belmont” (it ran),—“I am going away for a few days. I shall be back on Monday, at four.
“Yours truly,
“OWIN CLIVE.”
Helena stared at the abrupt, formal missive in dismay for a moment; then laughed. She had seen men struggle in her net before. She knew that he would keep his word and return, and had perfect faith in the power of her seductive charm, no matter what good resolve he might accomplish when away.
It was a hot day, and her guests were too indolent to do anything but lie about and smoke and read. They did not want to be entertained, and she let them alone and spent the day in the rose-garden in the shade of the oaks. She rather enjoyed thinking of Clive, for variety, and anticipating his return. She concocted clever arguments and convincing appeals. She saw herself in the gowns she would wear when he was with her again, and was glad for the wealth that gave such potent aid to her beauty. She was very happy: the future was so exquisite that she trembled and grew breathless at the thought of it.
The next day she sat on a ledge below the crest of the cliffs, and stared at the huge restless waves of the Pacific rearing against the outlying rocks, falling with their baffled roar. There was neither peace, nor reason, nor power of anticipation in her. She was insensible of any instinct beyond an insufferable desire for his physical presence.
That night she went to bed glad with the thought that she should see him in sixteen hours, and pictured their meeting so often and variously, and struck a match to look at the clock so many times, that she slept little. The next morning she was so nervous and apprehensive that the placid conversation of her guests was intolerable, and she would not drive with them. After luncheon she went up to a favorite spot in the forest, directing one of the Chinese servants to conduct Clive to her when he returned.
As the afternoon wore on her gloom lifted and passed. She grew light minded and humorous, almost indifferent. She took herself to task in some dismay: in the fitness of things she should be passionately serious when he arrived. “Are there really no great crises in life?” she thought. “Are we all comedians gone wrong, personified jokes?” But she was helpless; the reaction was inevitable.
Clive was late. He was always late. Helena felt no uneasiness, but sat idly, wondering how they would meet, her mind occasionally drifting to other things. She had carried a large hat lined with white and covered with white plumes, in a box through the damaging brush, and hidden the box in a hollow redwood. The hat, pushed backward on her brilliant hair, enhanced the oval colorous beauty of her face. She took it off suddenly and threw it on the ground; the attempt was too evident; all men were not consistently dense.
She heard a crackling in the brush on the other side of the creek, then the Chinaman’s protesting voice.
“Can’t hully when catchee pigtail allee time, Mister Clive. Me got thlee velly bad sclatches, and clothes allee same no washee.”
There was no answer from Clive, but he was in view presently. The Chinaman retreated hastily, wrapping his pigtail round his neck. Helena rose and went forward. She felt suddenly resentful and haughty.
After all, it was presumption in a man to take upon himself the deciding of a question which was as vital to her as to him. She wondered if she really did love him; certainly she felt neither tenderness nor tolerance at the moment.
Clive walked slowly across the felled redwood which served as bridge between the high banks of the creek. As he approached Helena forgot herself and her moods.
“He has suffered horribly,” she thought. “What am I that I did not know he must?”
And then she realized that she could not comprehend his experience of the past three days; that her mind merely grasped the fact; she had no profounder, more sympathetic understanding. She drew back, frightened and chilled.
“I am sorry to see you looking so badly,” she said coldly, as they shook hands. “Perhaps we had better have it out at once.”
They sat down against two redwoods, facing each other.
“Very well,” said Clive, “I have been a scoundrel and nothing I can say is the least excuse. I can only state the facts.... The average girl who is an avowed flirt expects to be made love to, and a man finds it no task to do what a charming woman exacts of him.... I took you in the beginning for a spoilt beauty, a coquette, above the average as far as brain was concerned, but still suggesting little more than an unusually spirited flirtation. Of course, I was far more fascinated than I realized or I should not have come to your house, nor should I have asked you to give me these two weeks.... That it might mean life or death to either of us I did not realize until that day among the ferns.”
The fight was on. Helena threw back her head. “Can you not explain to Mary Gordon? Surely she would release you.”
“I never could explain to Mary Gordon. She would comprehend that after four years I had thrown her over for a prettier woman whom I had known two weeks. Women like that—simple, good, loyal women—don’t reason and analyze as a clever woman does. And the hurt lasts—not because the man is worth it, any more than any man is good enough for such women—but because they are what they are.”
“But she was not the woman for you; therefore she would find another man.”
“She would live on an isolated ranch in Southern California for several years, then go back to England and live in her old home, among the people she has known all her life. Those women don’t seek distraction. They are the slaves of an idea. If the right man did come she wouldn’t know it.”
“All of which means that you think it your duty to marry her.”
“I mean to marry her. There is nothing else to be done. If there were no other reason I have no right to make her ridiculous.”
Helena caught her breath. For the first time she mentally appreciated the strength in the man which had captivated her woman’s instincts. But she did not lose courage.
“And I am not to be considered at all? I say nothing about being made ridiculous. If I am it is my own fault, and I don’t care, anyhow; that seems to me a very insignificant matter. Now that I have found you am I to be left alone—thirty, forty years? You know that I have about equal possibilities of good and bad in me. If I married you I could become as wholly good as any mortal can. I never realized what possibilities there are in any of us as I did in the last few days before you went away. The principal reason that I love you is because I always feel that there is something in you to climb to and that you could lift me up to you. If you leave me I’ll become a bad woman. Why not? It must be very interesting, and I have nothing more in life to look forward to. If I lived with you I might grow into your belief; you could carry me anywhere; but alone I cannot. Moreover, I want to live in this life. I cannot sit down and wait patiently for a mythical and unsubstantial hereafter. I am too much of a savage, I suppose, but at all events, I can’t.”
“There will be no excuse for you to become a bad woman. You have too much brain and money—too many methods of distraction. You can travel and make any life you choose. The world is an interesting place; you don’t know the A B C of it.”
“You are cruel.”
“Yes,” he said. “More so than you realize just now.”
“I’m not doubting that you love me. If I did do you suppose I would argue with you? I’m not in a tender or sympathetic mood. There is too much to be said. I must talk it out now; we are not an ordinary pair of fools.” She paused a moment and looked straight at him. “We have a more imperative duty to ourselves than to traditions. You are in the new world now, almost in a new civilization. Smash such outworn ideals. They are nothing, nothing to human happiness.”
“Such traditions as honor and faith and pity for the weaker are in the bone and blood of the older civilization. If we tore them out there is not much we’ve got that’s worth anything that wouldn’t follow.”
“I would not care—not a straw. I should love you whether you were satisfied with yourself or not, and I could make you forget.”
“No; you could not.”
“Oh, you are way above me,” she said bitterly. “I don’t mean to say that I haven’t known plenty of honorable men, but they would find a way out of it—for me. You seem to be welded together so compactly that every characteristic is bound up with every other. Nothing is acquired, separate. Probably I’d never reach you, after all. Perhaps it is as well we don’t marry——”
“I wish you would not talk as if I were an infernal prig. Can’t you imagine what an ass a man feels when a woman rots to him like that? I am the most ordinary person you will probably ever know. If I were not we wouldn’t be where we are to-day. Now that I have made such a mess of things I can only see one way out of it, and I don’t feel a hero, I assure you.”
“Have you thought of yourself at all during the last three days?”
“Of course I’ve thought of myself. What a question. And thinking of myself meant thinking of you.”
“But you have thought more of Mary Gordon—I mean you have considered her more.”
“Yes; I have.”
She got up and went over and sat down on the edge of the bluff. He filled his pipe. She smiled as the smoke drifted to her. She thought that she had never seen the creek look so beautiful. The stones under the clear water shone like opaque jewels. Great bunches of feathery maiden-hair clung to every boulder. The long delicate strands of the ice-grass trailed far over the water. Tiny trees sprouted from rocks in mid-stream, where moss had gathered. Red lilies and ferns grew close to the brink. The ugly brown roots of a pine clung, squirming, down the bluff.
On the mountain above the plateau a deer leaped once, crashing through the brush, tossing his white horns in terror at sight of man. A squirrel chattered high up in a redwood, where he was packing acorns for the winter. A school of salmon swam serenely down the creek and disappeared in the dark perspective.
Helena sat there for a half-hour. Then she went back to Clive, but did not sit down. He rose also.
“I understand you a little better, I think,” she said. “You won’t like what I am going to say, but I shall say it, anyhow. You have so much good in you. I never thought I should love a good man, but I believe that is really the reason I love you so much. The raw material in me responds to the highly developed in you. You are capable of so much that is way beyond me. I have fine impulses, but they are shallow; lofty ideals, but in a little while they bore me. And you are consistent. Even when you do what you know to be wrong, you never vary in your ideals and faith. I am new and crude and heterogeneous. It is the difference between the Old and the New.”
“You have the richest possibilities of any woman I have ever known——”
“Tell me something. Is it not because Mary Gordon is the more helpless and appeals more to your chivalry?—although you love me more; although I have more beauty and brains and passion, and could make you far happier?”
“That is one reason.”
“Then will the manliest and best of men continue to be captured by the best and simplest of women? It will produce a better race, I suppose. If I had been your mother you would not be half what you are. It is enough for the man to have the brain, I suppose. We are a forced growth and abnormal—but what is to become of us?”
His reserve left him then and he caught her in his arms. She clung to him desperately, and for a while forgot that the victory was still to be won. Then she cried, and coaxed, and pleaded, and lavished endearment, and was far more difficult for the man to combat than when he had stood his ground with a brain alone.
“Come,” he said finally; “can’t you understand? You might help me a little. Can’t you see that I want to let everything go and stay with you? Don’t you think I know what I should find with you? You do know that? Well, then, you should also know that I have made up my mind to do the only decent thing a man could do.”
“Well, give me a month longer. Let me have that much, at least.”
“I shall go to-morrow. If I go now all these people will quickly forget me, and regard what has passed between us as one of your flirtations. But if I stayed on I should make you ridiculous, and perhaps compromise you—you are so reckless. And for other reasons the sooner I get away from here the better.”
“What are the other reasons?”
“We’ve discussed the subject enough. Come, let us go.”
“I never knew that a man could be so obstinate with a beautiful woman he loved.”
“You have a woman’s general knowledge of men, but you know nothing of any type you haven’t encountered. I believe you could make any man love you; but certain men are greater cowards before certain inherited principles than they are before the prospect of parting from the woman they most love——”
“I said that you were the victim of traditions.”
“Perhaps I am, but I am also unable to eat raw fish or human flesh. What are any of us but the logical results of traditions? Just look at this fog. Let me put your shawl round you.”
Helena turned. A fine white mist was pouring out of the forest on the other side of the creek. It had passed them, and was puffing slowly onward. It lay softly on the creek, covering the bright water. It swirled about the trees and moved lightly through the dark arbors above. It fled up the mountain beyond, and the forest showed through the silver veil like grey columns with capitals and bases of frozen spray.
“Yes, we must go,” said Helena, “or we shall be lost.”