CHAPTER XXXI.
WHERE PAIN IS PLEASURE.
THAT fall and winter Emily and Stilson met often in the walk winding through the Park from Seventy-second street to the Plaza. Usually it was on Wednesday morning—his “lazy day”; always it was “by accident.” Each time they separated they knew they were soon to meet again. But the chance character of their meetings—once in a while they did miss each the other—maintained a moral fiction which seemed to them none the less vital to real morals because it was absurd.
What with their work and meetings to look forward to and meetings to look back upon, time did not linger with them. Often they were happy. Rarely were they miserable, and then, instead of yielding to despair and luxuriating in grief and woe, they fought valiantly to recover the tranquillity which would enable them to enjoy what they might have and to be mutually helpful. They were not sentimental egotists. They would have got little sympathy from those who weep in theatres and blister the pages of tragic fiction. Neither tried to pose before the other or felt called upon to tickle his own and the other’s vanity with mournful looks and outbursts. They loved not themselves, but each the other.
They suffered much in a simple, human way—not the worked-up anguish of the “strong situation,” but just such lonely heartaches as visit most lives and make faces sober and smiles infrequent and laughter reluctant, as early youth is left behind. And they carefully hid their suffering each from the other with the natural considerateness of unselfish love.
Once several weeks passed in which she did not “happen” to meet him. She grew rapidly melancholy and resentful of the narrowness of the sources and limits of her happiness. “He is probably ill—very ill,” she thought, “And how outside of his life I am! I could not go to him, no matter what was happening.” She called up the Democrat office on the telephone at an hour when he was never there. The boy who answered said he was out. “When will he be in?” “I cannot tell you. He has been away for several days.” “Is he ill?” she ventured. No, he was not ill—just away on business.
She read in the Evening Post the next night that Marguerite Feronia was still confined to the house, suffering with nervous prostration. “She has been ill frequently during the past year,” said the Post “and it is reported that it will be long before she returns to the stage, if ever.” Emily at once understood and reproached herself for her selfishness. What must Stilson be enduring, shut in with the cause and centre of his wretchedness—that unfortunate woman through whom he was expiating, not his crimes but his follies. “How wicked life is,” she thought bitterly. “How intelligent its malice seems. To punish folly more severely than crime, and ignorance more savagely than either—it is infamous!” And as she brooded over his wrecked life and her aloneness, her courage failed her. “It isn’t worth while to go on,” she said. “And I ask so little—such a very little!”
When she met him in the Park again, his face was as despondent as hers. They went to a bench in one of the by-paths. It was spring, and the scene was full of the joyous beginnings of grass and leaves and flowers and nests.
“Once there was a coward,” he began at last. “A selfish coward he was. He had tumbled down his life into ruins and was sitting among them. And another human being came that way. She was brave and strong and had a true woman’s true soul—generosity, sympathy, a beautiful uncondescending compassion. And this coward seized her and tried to chain her among his ruins. He gave nothing—he had nothing to give. He took everything—youth, beauty, a splendid capacity for love and happiness.” He paused. “Oh, it was base!” he burst out. “But in the end he realised and—he has come to his senses.”
“But she would not go,” said Emily softly.
“He drove her away,” he persisted. “He saw to it that she went back to life and hope. And when she saw that he would have her go, she did not try to prevent him from being true to his better self. She went for his sake.”
“But listen to me,” she said. “Once there was a woman, young in years, but compelled to learn a great deal very quickly. And fate gave her four principal teachers. The first taught her to value freedom and self-respect—taught it by almost costing her both. The second taught her that love is more than being in love with love—and that lesson almost cost her her happiness for life. The third teacher taught her that love is more than a blind, reckless passion. And then, just when she could understand it, perhaps just in time to prevent the third lesson from costing her her all—then came,” she gave him a swift, vivid glance “her fourth teacher. He taught her love, what it really is—that it is the heart of a life. The heart of her life.”
He was not looking at her, but his eyes were shining.
“Then,” she went on, “one day this man—unselfishly but, oh, so blindly—told the woman that because fate was niggard, he would no longer accept what he might have, would no longer let her have what meant life to her. He said: ‘Go—out into the dark. Be alone again.’”
She paused and turned toward him. “He thought he was just and kind,” she said. “And he was brave; but not just or kind. He was blind and—cruel; yes, very cruel.”
“It can’t be true,” he said. “No—it is impulse—pity—a sacrifice.”
She saw that his words were addressed to himself in reproach for listening to her. “It was unworthy of him,” she went on, “unworthy of his love for her. How could he imagine that only he knew what love is—the happiness of its pain, almost happier than the happiness of its joy? Why should I have sought freedom, independence, if not in order that I may use my life as I please, use it to win—and keep—the best?”
“I don’t know what to think,” he said uncertainly. “You’ve made it impossible for me to do as I intended—at present.”
Emily’s spirits rose—in those days the present was her whole horizon. “Don’t be selfish,” she said in a tone of raillery. “Think of me, once in a while. And please try to think of me as capable of knowing my own mind. I don’t need to be told what I want.”
“I beg your pardon,” he said with mock humility. “I shall never be so impertinent again.”