CHAPTER XV.
A FLICKERING FIRE.
THEY made several journeys to Monsieur Germain that fall, as he did not close his inn and return to Philadelphia until the second week in December. He had the instinctive French passion for the romantically unconventional; and, while he was a severely proper person in his own domestic relations, the mystery of the quiet visits of this handsome young couple delighted him. He made them very comfortable indeed, and his big smooth face shone like a sun upon their happiness.
As Marlowe had always been most irregular in his appearances at the office, Emily’s absences did not connect her with him in the minds of their acquaintances. Even Joan suspected nothing. She saw that Marlowe was devoted to her beautiful friend and she believed that Emily loved him, but she had seen love go too often to be much affected by its coming.
After three months of this prolonged and peculiar honeymoon, Marlowe showed the first faint signs of impatience. It was a new part to him, this of being the eluded instead of the eluder, the uncertain, not the creator of uncertainty. And it was a part that baffled his love and irritated his vanity. He thought much upon ways and means of converting his Spartan marriage into one in which his authority, his headship would be recognized, and at last hit upon a plan of action which he ventured to hope might bring her to terms. He stayed away from her for two weeks, then went to Chicago for a month, writing her only an occasional brief note.
Before he left for Chicago, Emily was exceeding sick at heart. She kept up appearances at the office, but at home went about with a long and sad face. “They’ve quarrelled,” thought Joan, “and she’s taking it hard.” Emily was tempted to do many foolish things—for example, she wrote a dozen notes at least, each more or less ingeniously disguising its real purpose. But she sent none of them. “If he doesn’t care,” she reflected, “it would be humiliating myself to no purpose. And if he does care, he has a good reason which he’ll tell when he can.”
Then came his almost curt note announcing his departure for Chicago. She was angry—“he’s treating his wife as he wouldn’t treat a girl he’d been merely attentive to.” But, worse than angry, she was wounded, in the mortal spot in her love for him—her unquestioning confidence in him.
This might be called her introduction to the real Marlowe, the beginning of her acquaintance with the man she had married after a look at the outside of him and a distorted glimpse of such parts of the inside man as are shown by one bent upon making the most favourable impression.
When he had been in Chicago three weeks, came a long letter from him—“Forgive me. I was not content as we were living. I want you—all of you, all of the time. I want you as my very own. And I thought to win you to my way of thinking. But you seem to be stronger than I.” And so on through many pages, filled with passionate outpourings—extravagant compliments, alternations of pride and humility, all the eloquence of a lover with an emotional nature and a gift for writing. It was to her an irresistible appeal, so intensely did she long for him. But there drifted through her mind, to find lodgment in an obscure corner, the thought: “Why is he dissatisfied with a happiness that satisfies me? Why do I feel none of this desire to abandon my independence and submerge myself?” At the moment her answer was, that if she were to do as he wished he would remain free, while she would become his dependent. Afterward that answer did not satisfy her.
He came back, and their life went on as before until——
She overheard two men at the office talking of an adventure he had had while he was in Chicago. She did not hear all, and she got no details, but there was enough to let her see that he had not lived up to their compact. “Now I understand his letter,” she said. “It was the result of remorse.” And with a confused mingling of jealousy and indignation, she reviewed his actions toward her immediately after his return. She now saw that they were planned deliberately to make it impossible for her to think him capable of such a lapse. She could follow the processes of his mind as it worked out the scheme, gauging her credulity and his own adroitness. When she had done, she had found him guilty of actions that concerned their most sacred relations, and that were tainted with the basest essence of hypocrisy.
“I shouldn’t care what he had done,” she said to herself bitterly, “if he had been honest with me—honestly silent or honestly outspoken. I cannot, shall not, ever trust him again. And such needless deception! He acted as if I were the ordinary silly woman who won’t make allowances and can’t generously forgive. I love him, but——”
“I love him, but—” that is always the beginning of a change which at least points in the direction of the end. At first she was for having it out with him. But she decided that he would only think her vulgarly jealous; and so, with unconscious inconsistency, she resolved to violate her own fundamental principle of absolute frankness.
A few weeks and these wounds to her love, inflicted by him and aggravated by herself, seemed to have healed. They were again together almost every day and were apparently like lovers in the first ecstasy of engagement. But while he was completely under her spell, her attitude toward him was slightly critical. She admired his looks, his physical strength, his brilliant quickness of mind, as much as ever. At the same time she began to see and to measure his weaknesses.
She was often, in the very course of laughter or admiration at his cleverness, brought to a sudden halt by the discovery that he was not telling the truth. Like many men of rapid and epigrammatic speech, he would sacrifice anything, from a fact of history to the reputation of a friend, for the sake of scoring a momentary triumph. And whenever she caught him in one of these carelessly uttered falsehoods she was reminded of his falsehood to her—that rankling, cankerous double falsehood of unfaithfulness and deceit.
Another hastener of the mortal process of de-idealisation was the discovery that his sparkle was hiding a shallowness which was so lacking in depth that it offended even her, a woman—and women are not easily offended by pretence in men. His mind was indeed quick, but quick only to see and seize upon that which had been discovered and shown to him by some one else. And so forgetful or so used to borrowing without any sort of credit was he, that he would even exhibit to Emily as original with himself the ideas which she had expressed to him only a few days before. He had a genius for putting everything in the show-window; but he could not conceal from her penetrating, and now critical and suspicious eyes, the empty-shelved shop behind, with him, full of vanity and eagerness to attract any wayfarer, and peering out to note what effect he was producing. She discovered that one of the main sources of his education was Stilson—that it was to an amazing, a ridiculous, a pitiful extent Stilson’s views and ideas and knowledge and sardonic wit which he bore away and diluted and served up as his own. Comparison is the life and also the death of love. As soon as she began to compare him with Stilson and to admit that he was the lesser, she began to neglect love, to leave it to the alternating excessive heat and cold of passion.
But all these causes of a curious decline were subordinate to one great cause—she discovered that he was a coward, that he was afraid of her. The quality which she admired in a man above every other was courage. She had thought Marlowe had it. And he was physically brave; but, when she knew him well and had got used to that cheapest form of courage which dazzles the mob and deceives the unthinking, she saw a coward lurking beneath. He wrote things he did not believe; he shirked issues both in his profession and in his private life; he lied habitually, not because people intruded upon his affairs and so compelled and excused misrepresentation, but because he was afraid to face the consequences of truth.
In February she was saying sadly to herself: “If he’d been brave, he would have made me come to him, could have made me do as he wished. Instead——” She was not proud, yet neither was she ashamed, of the conspicuous tyranny she had established over him.
“It seems to me,” she said to Joan at breakfast one morning, to draw her out, “that the only way to be married, is for each to live his own life. Then at least there can be none of that degrading familiarity and monotony.”
Joan shook her head in vigorous dissent.
“Why not?” asked Emily.
“Because it is certain to end in failure—absolutely certain.”
Emily looked uncomfortable, “I don’t see why,” she said, somewhat irritably. “Don’t you think people can get too much of each other?”
“Certainly—and in marriage they always do; but if it’s to be a marriage, if there’s to be anything permanent about it, they must live together, see each other constantly, become completely united in the same current of life; all their interests must be in common, and they must have a common destiny and must never forget it.”
“But that isn’t love,” objected Emily.
“No, it isn’t love—love of the kind we’re all crazy about nowadays. But it is married love—and that’s the kind we’re talking about. If I were married I shouldn’t let my husband out of my sight for a minute, except when it was necessary. I’d see to it that we became one. If he were the stronger, he’d be the one. If I were the stronger, I’d be the one—but I’d try to be generous.”
Emily laughed at this picture of tyranny, so directly opposed to her own ideas and to her own tyranny over her husband. She mocked Joan for entertaining such “barbaric notions.” But later in the day, she caught herself saying, with a sigh she’d have liked to believe was not regret, “It’s too late now.”
There were days when she liked him, hours when she wrought herself into an exaltation which was a feeble but deceptive imitation of his adoration of her—and how he did adore her then, how he did strain to clasp her more tightly, believing her still his, and not heeding instinctive, subtle warnings that she was slipping from him. But in contrast to these days of liking and hours of loving were her longer periods of indifference and, occasionally, of weariness.
Early in the summer, there was a revival of her interest—a six weeks’ separation from him; an attack of the “blues,” of loneliness; a sudden appreciation of the strength and comfort of the habit which a husband had become with her.
On a Friday evening in June he was coming to dine, and Miss Gresham was dining out. He arrived twenty minutes late. “I’ve been making my arrangements to sail to-morrow,” he explained. “You can come on the Wednesday or Saturday steamer—if you can arrange to leave on such short notice.”
She looked surprised—she was no longer astonished at the newspaper world’s rapid shifts.
“They’re sending me to reorganise the foreign service. They also wish to send a woman to Paris, and didn’t know whom to ask. I suggested you, and reminded them that you speak French. They soon consented. My headquarters will be London, but I’ll be free to go where I wish. Will you come? Won’t you come?”
Evidently he was assuming that she would; but she said, “I’ll have to think it over.”
He looked at her nervously. “Why, I may be away several years,” he said. “And over there——”
“You forget—I’m tied up with Joan. We have a lease. But that might be arranged. Do you know what salary they’ll give me?”
“Sixty a week—and your travelling expenses.”
“Yes,” said Emily, after a moment’s silent casting up of figures. “Yes—the lease can be taken care of. Then, there is my work—what are the advantages?”
“Experience—a change of scene—a chance to do more individual work—and last, and, of course, least in your eyes, lady-with-a-career-to-make, the inestimable advantages of——”
The servant was out of the room. He went behind her chair, and bent over and kissed her. “We shall be happy as never before, dear—happy though we have been, haven’t we? Think what we can do together—how free we shall be, how many beautiful places we can visit.”
She was looking at him tenderly and dreamily when he was sitting opposite her again. “Yes, we shall be happy,” she said, and to herself she added, “again.”
The next morning, at about the hour when Marlowe’s boat was dropping down the bay, Joan went into Emily’s room and awakened her. “I can’t wait any longer,” she said. “Did you know you were going abroad?”
“Yes,” said Emily, sleepily rubbing her eyes, “Marlowe was dining here last night, and he told me.”
“It’s very evident that Stilson likes and appreciates you,” continued Joan. “He selected you.”
Emily smiled faintly—she was remembering what Marlowe had said.
“I happened to be in Stilson’s office,” continued Joan, “when he was deciding. It seems the London man suddenly resigned and something had to be done at once. You know Stilson is acting Managing Editor. He asked me if you spoke French. He said: ‘I’m just sending for Marlowe to come down, as I wish him to go to London for us; and if Miss Bromfield can speak French, I’ll send her to Paris.’ I told him that you spoke it almost like a native. ‘That settles it,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell her to-morrow—but I don’t mind if you tell her first. You live together, don’t you?’ And you were asleep when I came last night, and I’m so disappointed that I’m not the first to tell you.”
Emily had sunk back into her pillow and was concealing her face from Joan. “I wish they’d sent you,” she said presently, in a strained voice.
“Oh, I couldn’t have gone. The fact is I’ve written a play and had it accepted. It’s to be produced at the Lyceum in six weeks.”
“But why didn’t you tell me?” Emily could not uncover her face, could not put interest in her tone—she could think only of Marlowe, of his petty, futile, vainglorious lie to her. A few hours before—it seemed but a few minutes—they had been so happy together. She had fancied that the best was come again. Her nerves were still vibrating to his caresses. And now—this adder-like reminder of all his lies, deceptions, hypocrisies.
“I thought I’d surprise you,” replied Joan. “Besides, it’s not a very good play. And when you’re in Paris, you might watch the papers for the notices of the first night of ‘Love the Liar, by Harriette Stone’—that will be my play and I.”
“Love the Liar,” Emily repeated, and then Joan saw her shoulders shaking.
“Laughing at me? I don’t wonder; it’s very sentimental—but then, you know, I have a streak of sentiment in me.”
When Joan left her, Emily brushed the tears from her eyes and slowly rose. “I ought to be used to him by this time,” she said. “But—oh, why did he spoil it! Why does he always spoil it!”
At the office, she was apparently bright again, certainly was looking very lovely and a little mischievous as she went in to see Stilson. “I’d thank you, if I dared,” she said, “but I know that you’d cut me short with some remark about my thanks being an insinuation that you were cheating the proprietors of the Democrat by showing favouritism.” She was no longer in the least afraid of him. “Perhaps you’d like it better if I told you I was angry about it.”
“And why angry, pray?” There was a twinkle deep down in his sombre sardonic eyes.
“Because you’re sending me away to get rid of me.”
He winced and flushed a deep red. He rose abruptly and bowed. “No thanks are necessary,” he said, and he was standing at the window with his back to her.
“I beg your pardon,” she said to his strong, uncompromising shoulders. “I did not mean to offend you—you must know that.”
“Offend me?” He turned his face toward her but did not let her see his eyes. He put out his hand and just touched hers before drawing it away. “My manner is unfortunate. But—that is not important. Success to you, if I don’t see you before you sail.”
As she left his office she could see his face, his eyes, in profile. His expression was more than sad—it was devoid of hope.
“Where have I seen an expression like that before?” she wondered. But she could not then remember.