ON the way across the Atlantic her painful thoughts faded; and, after the mid-ocean period when the worlds on either side of those infinite waters dwindle into unreality, she found her imagination looking forward to her new world as a place where there would be a new beginning in her work and in her love. At Cherbourg Marlowe came out on the lighter. “How handsome he is,” she was saying to herself, as she leaned against the rail, watching his eyes search for her. “And how well he wears his clothes. His head is set upon his shoulders just right—what a strong, graceful figure he has.” And she again felt something resembling her initial interest and pride in him, her mind once more, as at first, interpreting his character through his appearance, instead of reading into his appearance the man as she knew him.
When their eyes met she welcomed and returned the thought he sent her in his look.
They were soon together, bubbling over with the joy of living like two children let out into the sunshine to play after a long imprisonment with lessons. They had a compartment to themselves down to Paris and sat very near each to the other, with illustrated papers as the excuse for prolonging the enormous pleasure of the physical sensation of nearness. They repeated again and again the commonplaces which all human beings use as public coaches to carry their inarticulate selves a visiting each other.
She went to sleep for a few minutes, leaning against him; and a breeze teased his nerves into an ecstasy of happiness with a stray of her fine red-brown hair. “I’ve never been so happy,” she thought as she awakened, “I could never be happier.” She did not move until it became impossible for her to refrain from some outward expression of her emotions. Then she only looked up at him. And his answer showed that his mood was hers. As they sank back in the little victoria outside the station, she gave a long look round the busy, fascinating scene—strange, infectious of gaiety and good-humour. “Paris!” she said, with a sigh of content in her dream realised.
“Paris—and Emily,” he replied.
They went to a small hotel in the Avenue Montaigne—“Modern enough,” he said, “but very French and not yet discovered by foreigners.” At sunset they drove to d’Armenonville to dine under the trees and to watch the most interesting groups in the world—those groups of the civilised through and through, in dress, in manners, in thought. After two days he was called back to London. When he returned at the end of two weeks she had transformed herself. A new gown, a new hat, a new way of wearing her hair, an adaptation of her graces of form and manner to the fashion of the moment, and she seemed a Parisienne.
“You have had your eyes open,” he said, as he noted one detail after another, finally reaching the face which bloomed so delicately beneath the sweeping brim of her hat. “And what a gorgeous hat! And put on at the miraculous angle—how few women know how to put on a hat.” Of his many tricks in the art at which he excelled—the art of superficially pleasing women—none was more effective than his intelligent appreciation of their dress.
They staid at her pretty little apartment in a maison meublèe in the Rue des Capucines; in a few days they went down into Switzerland, and then, after a short pause at Paris, to Trouville. In all they were together about a month, he neglecting his work in spite of her remonstrances and her example. For she did her work conscientiously—and she had never written so well. He tried to stay on with her at Paris, but she insisted on his going.
“I believe you wish to be rid of me,” he said, irritation close beneath the surface of his jesting manner.
“This morning’s is the third complaining cable you’ve had from the office,” she answered.
He looked at her, suspecting an evasion, but he went back to London. The unpleasant truth was that he had worn out his welcome. She had never before been with him continuously for so much as a week. Now, in the crowded and consecutive impressions of these thirty uninterrupted days, all the qualities which repelled her stood out, stripped of the shimmer and glamour of novelty. And as she was having more and more difficulty in deceiving herself and in spreading out the decreasing area of her liking for him over the increasing gap where her love for him had been, he, in the ironical perversity of the law of contraries, became more and more demonstrative and even importunate. Many times in her effort to escape him and the now ever-impending danger of open rupture, she was driven to devices which ought not to have deceived him, perhaps did not really deceive him.
When he was gone she sat herself down to a “good cry”—an expression of overwrought nerves rather than of grief.
But after a few weeks she began to be lonely. The men she met were of two kinds—those she did not like, all of whom were willing to be friends with her on her terms; those she did like more or less, none of whom was willing to be with her on any but his own terms. And so she found herself often spending the most attractive part of the day—the evening—dismally shut up at home, alone or with some not very interesting girl. She had never been so free, yet never had she felt so bound. With joy all about her, with joy beckoning her from the crowded, fascinating boulevards, she was a prisoner. She needed Marlowe, and she sent for him.
She was puzzled by the change in him. She had only too good reason to know that he loved her as insistently as ever, but there was a strain in his manner and speech, as if he were concealing something from her. She caught him looking at her in a peculiar way—as if he were angry or resentful or possibly were suspecting her changed and changing feelings toward him. And he had never been less interesting—she had never before heard him talk stupidities and lifeless commonplaces or break long silences with obvious attempts to rouse himself to “make conversation.”
She was not sorry when he went—he stayed four days longer than he had intended; but she was also glad to get a message from him ten days later, announcing a week-end visit. The telegram reached her at dejeuner and afterward, in a better mood, she drove to the Continental Hotel, where she sometimes heard news worth sending. She sat at a long window in the empty drawing-rooms and watched a light and lazy snow drift down.
As it slowly chilled her to a sense of loneliness, of disappointment in the past, of dread of the future, she became conscious that a man was pointedly studying her. She looked at him with the calm, close, yet repelling, stare which experience gives a woman as a secure outlook upon the world of strange men. This strange man was not ungracefully sprawled in a deep chair, his top hat in a lap made by the loose crossing of his extremely long and extremely strong legs. His feet and hands were proportionate to his magnitude. His hands were white and the fingers in some way suggested to her a public speaker. He had big shoulders and a great deal of coat—a vast overcoat over a frock coat, all made in the loosest English fashion. She had now reached his head—a large head with an aggressive forehead and chin, the hair dark brown, thin on top and at the temples, the skin pallid but healthy. His eyes were bold and keen, and honest. He looked a tremendous man, and when he rose and advanced toward her she wondered how such bulk could be managed with so much grace. “An idealist,” she thought, “of the kind that has the energy to be very useful or very dangerous.”
“You are alone, mademoiselle,” he said, in French that was fluent but American, “and I am alone. Let us have an adventure.”
Emily’s glance started up his form with the proper expression of icy oblivion. But by the time it reached the lofty place from which his eyes were looking down at her it was hardly more than an expression of bewilderment. To give him an icy stare would have seemed as futile as for the valley to try to look scorn upon the peak. Before Emily could drop her glance, she had seen in his eyes an irresistible winning smile, as confiding as a boy’s, respectful, a little nervous, delightfully human and friendly.
“I can see what you are,” he continued in French, “and it may be that you see that I am not untrustworthy. I am lonely and shall be more so if you fail me. It seemed to me that—pardon me, if I intrude—you looked lonely also—and sad. Why should we be held from helping each the other by a convention that sensible people laugh at even when they must obey it?”
His voice pleaded his cause as words could not; and there was a certain compulsion in it also. Emily felt that she wished to yield, that it would be at once unkind and absurd not to yield, and that she must yield. The impression of mastering strength was new and, to her surprise, agreeable.
“Why not?” she said slowly in French, regarding him with unmistakable straightforwardness and simplicity. “I am depressed. I am alone. I have been looking inside too much. Let us see. What do you propose?”
“We might go to the Louvre. It is near, and perhaps we can think of something while we are there.”
They walked to the Louvre, he talking appreciatively of France and the French people. He showed that he thought her a Frenchwoman and she did not undeceive him. She could not decide what his occupation was, but felt that he must be successful, probably famous, in it. “He is not so tall after all,” she said to herself, “not much above six feet. And he must be about forty-five.”
As they went through the long rooms, she found that he knew the paintings and statuary. “You paint?” she asked.
“No,” he replied with an impatient shrug. “I only talk—talk, talk, talk, until I am sick of myself. Again, I am compelled to listen—listen to the outpourings of vanity and self-excuse and self-complacence until I loathe my kind. It seems to me that it is only in France that one finds any great number of people with a true sense of proportion.”
“But France is the oldest, you know. It inherited from Greece and Rome when the rest of Europe was a wilderness.”
“And we inherited a little from France,” he said. “But, unfortunately, more from England. I think the strongest desire I have is to see my country shake off the English influence—the self-righteousness, the snobbishness. In England if a man of brains compels recognition, they hasten to give him a title. Their sense of consistency in snobbishness must not be violated. They put snobbishness into their church service and create a snob-god who calls some Englishmen to be lords, and others to be servants.”
“But there is nothing like that in America?”
“Not officially, and perhaps not among the mass of the people. But in New York, in one class with which my—my business compels me to have much to do, the craze for imitating England is rampant. It is absurd, how they try to erect snobbishness into a virtue.”
Emily shrugged her shoulders. “What does it matter?” she said. “Caste is never made by the man who looks down, but always by the man who looks up.”
“But it is evil. It is a sin against God. It——”
“I do not wish to dispute with you,” interrupted Emily. “But let us not disturb God in his heaven. We are talking of earth.”
“You do not believe in God?” He looked at her in astonishment.
“Do you?”
“I—I think I do. I assume God. Without Him, life would be—monstrous.”
“Yet the most of the human race lives without Him. And of those who profess to believe in Him, no two have the same idea of Him. Your God is a democrat. The Englishman’s God is an autocrat and a snob.”
“And your God?”
Emily’s face grew sad. “Mine? The God that I see behind all the mischance and stupidity and misery of this world—is—” She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she ended vaguely.
“It seems strange that a woman so womanly—looking as you do, should feel and talk thus.”
“My mode of life has made me see much, has compelled me to do my own thinking. Besides, I am a child of this generation. We suspect everything that has come down to us from the ignorant past. Even so ardent a believer as you, when asked, ‘Do you believe?’ stammers, ‘I think I do.’”
“I am used to one-sided arguments,” said the stranger with a laugh. “Usually, I lay down the law and others listen in silence.”
Emily looked at him curiously. Could he be a minister? No, it was impossible. He was too masculine, too powerful.
“Oh, I was not arguing,” she answered lightly. “I was only trying to suggest that you might be more charitable.”
“I confess,” he said, “that I am always talking to convince myself. I do not know what is right or what is wrong, but I wish to know. I doubt, but I wish to believe. I despair, but I wish to hope.”
She had no answer and they were silent for a few minutes. Then he began:
“I have an impulse to tell you what I would not tell my oldest and dearest friend—perhaps because we are two utter strangers whose paths have crossed in their wanderings through infinity and will never cross again. Do you mind if I speak of myself?”
“No.” Emily intensely wished to hear. “But I warn you that our paths may cross again.”
“That does not matter. I am obeying an instinct. It is always well to obey instincts. I think now that the instinct which made me speak to you in the first place was this instinct to tell you. But it is not a tragic story or even exciting. I am rather well known in the community where I live. I am what we call in America a self-made man. I come from the people—not from ignorance and crime and sensuality, but from the real people—who think, who aspire, who advance, who work and take pleasure and pride in their work, the people who have built our republic which will perish if they decline.”
He hesitated, then went on with increasing energy: “I am a clergyman. I went into the ministry because I ardently believed in it, saw in it an opportunity to be a leader of men in the paths which I hoped it would help me to follow. I have been a clergyman for twenty-five years. And I have ceased to believe that which I teach. Louder than I can shout to my congregation, louder than my conscience can shout to me, a voice continually gives me the lie.” He threw out his arm with a gesture that suggested a torrent flinging aside a dam. “I preach the goodness of God, and I never make a tour among the poor of my parish that I do not doubt it. I preach the immortality of the soul, and I never look out upon a congregation and remember what an infinite multitude of those same commonplace, imperfect types there have been, that I do not think: ‘It is ridiculous to say that man, the weak, the insignificant, the deformity, is an immortal being, each individual worth preserving through eternity.’ I preach the conventional code of morals, and——”
“You ought not to tell me these things,” said Emily, as he paused. She felt guilty because she was permitting him to think her a Frenchwoman, when she was of his own country and city.
“Well—I have said enough. And how much good it has done me to confess! You could not possibly have a baser opinion of me than I deserve. Telling such things is nothing in comparison with living them. I have lied and lied and lied so long that the joy of telling the truth intoxicates me. I am like a man crawling up out of years in a slimy dungeon to the light. Do you suppose it would disturb his enjoyment to note that spectators were commenting upon his unlovely appearance?”
“After all, what you tell me is the commonplace of life. Who doesn’t live lies, cheating himself and others?”
“But I do not wish the commonplace, the false, the vulgar. There is something in me that calls for higher things. I demand a good God. I demand an immortal soul. I demand a right that is clear and absolute. And I long for real love—ennobling, inspiring. Why have I all these instincts when I am compelled to live the petty, swindling, cringing life of a brute dominated by the passion for self-preservation?”
Emily thought a moment, then with a twinkle of mockery in her eyes, yet with seriousness too, quoted: “Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”
He smiled as the waters of his own fountain thus unexpectedly struck him in the face. “But my legs are weary, and my knuckles sore,” he replied. “Still—what is there to do but to persist? One must persist.”
“Work and hope,” said Emily, musingly. And she remembered Marlowe’s “work and love”; love had gone, but hope—she felt a sudden fresh upspringing of it in her heart.
When they set out from the hotel she had been in a reckless mood of despondency. She had lost interest in her work, she had lost faith in her future—was not the heart-interest the central interest of life, and what had become of her heart-interest? This stranger to whose power she had impulsively yielded in the first instance, had a magical effect upon her. His pessimism was not disturbing, for beneath it lay a tremendous belief in men and in destiny. It was his energy, his outgiving of a compelling masculine force, that aroused her to courage again. She looked at him gratefully and at once began to compare him with Marlowe. “What a child this man makes him seem,” she thought. “This is the sort of man who would inspire one. And what inspiration to do or to be am I getting from my husband?”
“You are disgusted with me.” The stranger was studying her face.
“No—I was thinking of some one else,” she replied—“of my own troubles.” And then she flushed guiltily, as if she had let him into her confidence—“a traitor’s speech” she thought. Aloud she said: “I must go. I thank you for the good you have done me. I can’t tell you how or why, but—” She ended abruptly and presently added, “I mustn’t say that I hope we shall meet again. You see, I have your awful secret.”
He laughed—there was boyishness in his laugh, but it was not boisterous. “You terrify me,” he exclaimed. Then, reflectively, “I have an instinct that we shall meet again.”
“Perhaps. Why not? It would be far stranger if we did not than if we did?”
He went with her to a cab and, with polite consideration, left her before she could give her address to the cabman. “I wish he had asked to see me again,” she thought, looking after his tower-like figure as he strode away. “But I suspect it was best not. There are some men whom it is not wise to see too much of, when one is in a certain mood. And I must do my duty.” She made a wry face—an exaggeration, but the instinct to make it was genuine.