The days spent in the mountains were seventeen exactly, and
during that time with Christina, Eugene reached a curious
exaltation of spirit different from anything he had experienced
before. In the first place he had never known a girl like
Christina, so beautiful, so perfect physically, so incisive
mentally, so full of a fine artistic perception. She was so quick
to perceive exactly what he meant. She was so suggestive to him in
her own thoughts and feelings. The mysteries of life employed her
mind quite as fully as they did his. She thought much of the
subtlety of the human body, of its mysterious emotions, of its
conscious and subconscious activities and relationships. The
passions, the desires, the necessities of life, were as a fine
tapestry for her mind to contemplate. She had no time to sit down
and formulate her thoughts; she did not want to write—but she
worked out through her emotions and through her singing the
beautiful and pathetic things she felt. And she could talk in a
fine, poetic melancholy vein on occasion, though there was so much
courage and strength in her young blood that she was not afraid of
any phase of life or what nature might do with the little substance
which she called herself, when it should dissolve. "Time and change
happeneth to us all," she would quote to Eugene and he would
gravely nod his head.
The hotel where he stopped was more pretentious than any he had
been previously acquainted with. He had never had so much money in
his life before, nor had he ever felt called upon to spend it
lavishly. The room he took was—because of what Christina might
think—one of the best. He took Christina's suggestion and invited
her, her mother and her brother to dinner on several occasions; the
remainder of the family had not arrived yet. In return he was
invited to breakfast, to lunch and dinner at the bungalow.
Christina showed on his arrival that she had planned to be with
him alone as much as possible, for she suggested that they make
expeditions to High Hill, to Bold Face, and The Chimney—three
surrounding mountains. She knew of good hotels at seven, ten,
fifteen miles distance to which they could go by train, or else
they drive and return by moonlight. She had selected two or three
secluded spots in thickets and groves where the trees gave way to
little open spaces of grass, and in these they would string a
hammock, scatter their books of verse about and sit down to enjoy
the delights of talk and love-making.
Under the influence of this companionship, under cloudless skies
and in the heart of the June weather, Christina finally yielded to
an arrangement which brought Eugene into a relationship which he
had never dreamed possible with her. They had progressed by degrees
through all the subtleties of courtship. They had come to discuss
the nature of passion and emotion, and had swept aside as
negligible the conviction that there was any inherent evil in the
most intimate relationship. At last Christina said frankly:
"I don't want to be married. It isn't for me—not until I've
thoroughly succeeded, anyhow. I'd rather wait—If I could just have
you and singleness too."
"Why do you want to yield yourself to me?" Eugene asked
curiously.
"I don't know that I exactly want to. I could do with just your
love—if you were satisfied. It's you that I want to make happy. I
want to give you anything you want."
"Curious girl," observed her lover, smoothing her high forehead
with his hand. "I don't understand you, Christina. I don't know how
your mind works. Why should you? You have everything to lose if
worst came to worst."
"Oh, no," she smiled. "I'd marry you then."
"But to do this out of hand, because you love me, because you
want me to be happy!" he paused.
"I don't understand it either, honey boy," she offered, "I just
do."
"But why, if you are willing to do this, you wouldn't prefer to
live with me, is what I don't understand."
She took his face between her hands. "I think I understand you
better than you do yourself. I don't think you'd be happy married.
You might not always love me. I might not always love you. You
might come to regret. If we could be happy now you might reach the
point where you wouldn't care any more. Then you see I wouldn't be
remorseful thinking that we had never known happiness."
"What logic!" he exclaimed. "Do you mean to say you wouldn't
care any more?"
"Oh, I'd care, but not in the same way. Don't you see, Eugene, I
would have the satisfaction of knowing that even if we did separate
you had had the best of me."
It seemed astounding to Eugene that she should talk in this
way—reason this way. What a curious, sacrificial, fatalistic turn
of mind. Could a young, beautiful, talented girl really be like
this? Would anybody on earth really believe it if they knew? He
looked at her and shook his head sorrowfully.
"To think that the quintessence of life should not stay with us
always." He sighed.
"No, honey boy," she replied, "you want too much. You think you
want it to stay, but you don't. You want it to go. You wouldn't be
satisfied to live with me always, I know it. Take what the gods
provide and have no regrets. Refuse to think; you can, you
know."
Eugene gathered her up in his arms. He kissed her over and over,
forgetting in her embrace all the loves he had ever known. She
yielded herself to him gladly, joyously, telling him over and over
that it made her happy.
"If you could only see how nice you are to me you wouldn't
wonder," she explained.
He concluded she was the most wonderful being he had ever known.
No woman had ever revealed herself to him so unselfishly in love.
No woman he had ever known appeared to have the courage and the
insight to go thus simply and directly to what she desired. To hear
an artist of her power, a girl of her beauty, discussing calmly
whether she should sacrifice her virtue to love; whether marriage
in the customary form was good for her art; whether she should take
him now when they were young or bow to the conventions and let
youth pass, was enough to shock his still trammelled soul. For
after all, and despite his desire for personal freedom, his
intellectual doubts and mental exceptions, he still had a profound
reverence for a home such as that maintained by Jotham Blue and his
wife, and for its results in the form of normal, healthy, dutiful
children. Nature had no doubt attained to this standard through a
long series of difficulties and experiments, and she would not
readily relinquish it. Was it really necessary to abandon it
entirely? Did he want to see a world in which a woman would take
him for a little while as Christina was doing now, and then leave
him? His experience here was making him think, throwing his
theories and ideas up in the air, making a mess of all the notions
he had ever formed about things. He racked his brain over the
intricacies of sex and life, sitting on the great verandas of the
hotel and wondering over and over just what the answer was, and why
he could not like other men be faithful to one woman and be happy.
He wondered whether this was really so, and whether he could not.
It seemed to him then that he might. He knew that he did not
understand himself very clearly; that he had no grasp on himself at
all as yet—his tendencies, his possibilities.
These days, under such halcyon conditions, made a profound
impression on him. He was struck with the perfection life could
reach at odd moments. These great quiet hills, so uniform in their
roundness, so green, so peaceful, rested his soul. He and Christina
climbed, one day, two thousand feet to a ledge which jutted out
over a valley and commanded what seemed to him the kingdoms and the
powers of the earth—vast stretches of green land and subdivided
fields, little cottage settlements and towns, great hills that
stood up like friendly brothers to this one in the distance.
"See that man down in that yard," said Christina, pointing to a
speck of a being chopping wood in a front space serving as a garden
to a country cottage fully a mile distant.
"Where?" asked Eugene.
"See where that red barn is, just this side of that clump of
trees?—don't you see? there, where the cows are in that field."
"I don't see any cows."
"Oh, Eugene, what's the matter with your eyes?"
"Oh, now I see," he replied, squeezing her fingers. "He looks
like a cockroach, doesn't he?"
"Yes," she laughed.
"How wide the earth is and how small we are. Now think of that
speck with all his hopes and ambitions—all the machinery of his
brain and nerves and tell me whether any God can care. How can He,
Christina?"
"He can't care for any one particular speck much, sweet. He
might care for the idea of man or a race of men as a whole. Still,
I'm not sure, honey. All I know is that I'm happy now."
"And I," he echoed.
Still they dug at this problem, the question of the origin of
life—its why. The tremendous and wearisome age of the earth; the
veritable storms of birth and death that seemed to have raged at
different periods, held them in discussion.
"We can't solve it, Eugenio mio," she laughed. "We might as well
go home. Poor, dear mamma will be wondering where her Christina is.
You know I think she suspects that I'm falling in love with you.
She doesn't care how many men fall in love with me, but if I show
the least sign of a strong preference she begins to worry."
"Have there been many preferences?" he inquired.
"No, but don't ask. What difference does it make? Oh, Eugene,
what difference does it make? I love you now."
"I don't know what difference it makes," he replied, "only there
is an ache that goes with the thought of previous experience. I
can't tell you why it is. It just is."
She looked thoughtfully away.
"Anyhow, no man ever was to me before what you have been. Isn't
that enough? Doesn't that speak?"
"Yes, yes, sweet, it does. Oh, yes it does. Forgive me. I won't
grieve any more."
"Don't, please," she said, "you hurt me as much as you hurt
yourself."
There were evenings when he sat on some one of the great
verandas and watched them trim and string the interspaces between
the columns with soft, glowing, Chinese lanterns, preparatory to
the evening's dancing. He loved to see the girls and men of the
summer colony arrive, the former treading the soft grass in filmy
white gowns and white slippers, the latter in white ducks and
flannels, gaily chatting as they came. Christina would come to
these affairs with her mother and brother, beautifully clad in
white linen or lawns and laces, and he would be beside himself with
chagrin that he had not practised dancing to the perfection of the
art. He could dance now, but not like her brother or scores of men
he saw upon the waxen floor. It hurt him. At times he would sit all
alone after his splendid evenings with his love, dreaming of the
beauty of it all. The stars would be as a great wealth of diamond
seed flung from the lavish hand of an aimless sower. The hills
would loom dark and tall. There was peace and quiet everywhere.
"Why may not life be always like this?" he would ask, and then
he would answer himself out of his philosophy that it would become
deadly after awhile, as does all unchanging beauty. The call of the
soul is for motion, not peace. Peace after activity for a little
while, then activity again. So must it be. He understood that.
Just before he left for New York, Christina said to him:
"Now, when you see me again I will be Miss Channing of New York.
You will be Mr. Witla. We will almost forget that we were ever here
together. We will scarcely believe that we have seen what we have
seen and done what we have done."
"But, Christina, you talk as though everything were over. It
isn't, is it?"
"We can't do anything like this in New York," she sighed. "I
haven't time and you must work."
There was a shade of finality in her tone.
"Oh, Christina, don't talk so. I can't think that way. Please
don't."
"I won't," she said. "We'll see. Wait till I get back."
He kissed her a dozen farewells and at the door held her close
once more.
"Will you forsake me?" he asked.
"No, you will forsake me. But remember, dear! Don't you see?
You've had all. Let me be your wood nymph. The rest is
commonplace."
He went back to his hotel with an ache in his heart, for he knew
they had gone through all they ever would. She had had her summer
with him. She had given him of herself fully. She wanted to be free
to work now. He could not understand it, but he knew it to be
so.
It is a rather dreary thing to come back into the hot city in
the summer after a period of beauty in the mountains. The quiet of
the hills was in Eugene's mind, the glisten and babble of mountain
streams, the soar and poise of hawks and buzzards and eagles
sailing the crystal blue. He felt lonely and sick for awhile, out
of touch with work and with practical life generally. There were
little souvenirs of his recent happiness in the shape of letters
and notes from Christina, but he was full of the premonition of the
end which had troubled him on leaving.
He must write to Angela. He had not thought of her all the time
he had been gone. He had been in the habit of writing to her every
third or fourth day at least; while of late his letters had been
less passionate they had remained fairly regular. But now this
sudden break coming—it was fully three weeks—made her think he must
be ill, although she had begun to feel also that he might be
changing. His letters had grown steadily less reminiscent of the
joys they had experienced together and of the happiness they were
anticipating, and more inclined to deal with the color and
character of city life and of what he hoped to achieve. Angela was
inclined to excuse much of this on the grounds of the special
effort he was making to achieve distinction and a living income for
themselves. But it was hard to explain three weeks of silence
without something quite serious having happened.
Eugene understood this. He tried to explain it on the grounds of
illness, stating that he was now up and feeling much better. But
when his explanation came, it had the hollow ring of insincerity.
Angela wondered what the truth could be. Was he yielding to the
temptation of that looser life that all artists were supposed to
lead? She wondered and worried, for time was slipping away and he
was setting no definite date for their much discussed nuptials.
The trouble with Angela's position was that the delay involved
practically everything which was important in her life. She was
five years older than Eugene. She had long since lost that
atmosphere of youth and buoyancy which is so characteristic of a
girl between eighteen and twenty-two. Those few short years
following, when the body of maidenhood blooms like a rose and there
is about it the freshness and color of all rich, new, lush life,
were behind her. Ahead was that persistent decline towards
something harder, shrewder and less beautiful. In the case of some
persons the decline is slow and the fragrance of youth lingers for
years, the artifices of the dressmaker, the chemist, and the
jeweller being but little needed. In others it is fast and no
contrivance will stay the ravages of a restless, eager,
dissatisfied soul. Sometimes art combines with slowness of decay to
make a woman of almost perennial charm, loveliness of mind matching
loveliness of body, and taste and tact supplementing both. Angela
was fortunate in being slow to fade and she had a loveliness of
imagination and emotion to sustain her; but she had also a
restless, anxious disposition of mind which, if it had not been
stayed by the kindly color of her home life and by the fortunate or
unfortunate intervention of Eugene at a time when she considered
her ideal of love to have fairly passed out of the range of
possibility, would already have set on her face the signs of old
maidenhood. She was not of the newer order of femininity, eager to
get out in the world and follow some individual line of
self-development and interest. Rather was she a home woman wanting
some one man to look after and love. The wonder and beauty of her
dream of happiness with Eugene now made the danger of its loss and
the possible compulsory continuance of a humdrum, underpaid,
backwoods existence, heart-sickening.
Meanwhile, as the summer passed, Eugene was casually enlarging
his acquaintance with women. MacHugh and Smite had gone back home
for the summer, and it was a relief from his loneliness to
encounter one day in an editorial office, Norma Whitmore, a dark,
keen, temperamental and moody but brilliant writer and editor who,
like others before her, took a fancy to Eugene. She was introduced
to him by Jans Jansen, Art Director of the paper, and after some
light banter she offered to show him her office.
She led the way to a little room no larger than six by eight
where she had her desk. Eugene noticed that she was lean and
sallow, about his own age or older, and brilliant and vivacious.
Her hands took his attention for they were thin, shapely and
artistic. Her eyes burned with a peculiar lustre and her
loose-fitting clothes were draped artistically about her. A
conversation sprang up as to his work, which she knew and admired,
and he was invited to her apartment. He looked at Norma with an
unconsciously speculative eye.
Christina was out of the city, but the memory of her made it
impossible for him to write to Angela in his old vein of devotion.
Nevertheless he still thought of her as charming. He thought that
he ought to write more regularly. He thought that he ought pretty
soon to go back and marry her. He was approaching the point where
he could support her in a studio if they lived economically. But he
did not want to exactly.
He had known her now for three years. It was fully a year and a
half since he had seen her last. In the last year his letters had
been less and less about themselves and more and more about
everything else. He was finding the conventional love letters
difficult. But he did not permit himself to realize just what that
meant—to take careful stock of his emotions. That would have
compelled him to the painful course of deciding that he could not
marry her, and asking her to be released from his promise. He did
not want to do that. Instead he parleyed, held by pity for her
passing youth and her undeniable affection for him, by his sense of
the unfairness of having taken up so much of her time to the
exclusion of every other person who might have proposed to her, by
sorrow for the cruelty of her position in being left to explain to
her family that she had been jilted. He hated to hurt any person's
feelings. He did not want to be conscious of the grief of any
person who had come to suffering through him and he could not make
them suffer very well and not be conscious. He was too tender
hearted. He had pledged himself to Angela, giving her a ring,
begging her to wait, writing her fulsome letters of protest and
desire. Now, after three years, to shame her before her charming
family—old Jotham, her mother, her sisters and brothers—it seemed a
cruel thing to do, and he did not care to contemplate it.
Angela, with her morbid, passionate, apprehensive nature, did
not fail to see disaster looming in the distance. She loved Eugene
passionately and the pent-up fires of her nature had been waiting
all these years the warrant to express their ardor which marriage
alone could confer. Eugene, by the charm of his manner and person,
no less than by the sensuous character of some of his moods and the
subtleties and refinements of his references to the ties of sex,
had stirred her to anticipate a perfect fruition of her dreams, and
she was now eager for that fruition almost to the point of being
willing to sacrifice virginity itself. The remembrance of the one
significant scene between her and Eugene tormented her. She felt
that if his love was to terminate in indifference now it would have
been better to have yielded then. She wished that she had not tried
to save herself. Perhaps there would have been a child, and he
would have been true to her out of a sense of sympathy and duty. At
least she would have had that crowning glory of womanhood, ardent
union with her lover, and if worst had come to worst she could have
died.
She thought of the quiet little lake near her home, its glassy
bosom a mirror to the sky, and how, in case of failure, she would
have looked lying on its sandy bottom, her pale hair diffused by
some aimless motion of the water, her eyes sealed by the end of
consciousness, her hands folded. Her fancy outran her daring. She
would not have done this, but she could dream about it, and it made
her distress all the more intense.
As time went by and Eugene's ardor did not revive, this problem
of her love became more harrassing and she began to wonder
seriously what she could do to win him back to her. He had
expressed such a violent desire for her on his last visit, had
painted his love in such glowing terms that she felt convinced he
must love her still, though absence and the excitements of city
life had dimmed the memory of her temporarily. She remembered a
line in a comic opera which she and Eugene had seen together:
"Absence is the dark room in which lovers develop negatives" and
this seemed a case in point. If she could get him back, if he could
be near her again, his old fever would develop and she would then
find some way of making him take her, perhaps. It did not occur to
her quite clearly just how this could be done at this time but some
vague notion of self-immolation was already stirring vaguely and
disturbingly in her brain.
The trying and in a way disheartening conditions of her home
went some way to sustain this notion. Her sister Marietta was
surrounded by a score of suitors who were as eager for her love as
a bee is for the honey of a flower, and Angela could see that they
were already looking upon herself as an elderly chaperon. Her
mother and father watched her going about her work and grieved
because so good a girl should be made to suffer for want of a
proper understanding. She could not conceal her feelings entirely
and they could see at times that she was unhappy. She could see
that they saw it. It was hard to have to explain to her sisters and
brothers, who occasionally asked after Eugene, that he was doing
all right, and never be able to say that he was coming for her some
day soon.
At first Marietta had been envious of her. She thought she would
like to win Eugene for herself, and only consideration for Angela's
age and the fact that she had not been so much sought after had
deterred her. Now that Eugene was obviously neglecting her, or at
least delaying beyond any reasonable period, she was deeply sorry.
Once, before she had grown into the age of courtship, she had said
to Angela: "I'm going to be nice to the men. You're too cold.
You'll never get married." And Angela had realized that it was not
a matter of "too cold," but an innate prejudice against most of the
types she met. And then the average man did not take to her. She
could not spur herself to pleasure in their company. It took a fire
like Eugene's to stir her mightily, and once having known that she
could brook no other. Marietta realized this too. Now because of
these three years she had cut herself off from other men,
particularly the one who had been most attentive to her—faithful
Victor Dean. The one thing that might save Angela from being
completely ignored was a spirit of romance which kept her young in
looks as in feelings.
With the fear of desertion in her mind Angela began to hint in
her letters to Eugene that he should come back to see her, to
express the hope in her letters that their marriage need
not—because of any difficulty of establishing himself—be postponed
much longer. She said to him over and over that she could be happy
with him in a cottage and that she so longed to see him again.
Eugene began to ask himself what he wanted to do.
The fact that on the passional side Angela appealed to him more
than any woman he had ever known was a saving point in her favor at
this juncture. There was a note in her make-up which was stronger,
deeper, more suggestive of joy to come than anything he had found
elsewhere. He remembered keenly the wonderful days he had spent
with her—the one significant night when she begged him to save her
against herself. All the beauty of the season with which she was
surrounded at that time; the charm of her family, the odor of
flowers and the shade of trees served to make a setting for her
delightfulness which still endured with him as fresh as yesterday.
Now, without having completed that romance—a very perfect
flower—could he cast it aside?
At this time he was not entangled with any woman. Miriam Finch
was too conservative and intellectual; Norma Whitmore not
attractive enough. As for some other charming examples of
femininity whom he had met here and there, he had not been drawn to
them or they to him. Emotionally he was lonely and this for him was
always a very susceptible mood. He could not make up his mind that
the end had come with Angela.
It so happened that Marietta, after watching her sister's love
affair some time, reached the conclusion that she ought to try to
help her. Angela was obviously concealing a weariness of heart
which was telling on her peace of mind and her sweetness of
disposition. She was unhappy and it grieved her sister greatly. The
latter loved her in a whole-hearted way, in spite of the fact that
their affections might possibly have clashed over Eugene, and she
thought once of writing in a sweet way and telling him how things
were. She thought he was good and kind, that he loved Angela, that
perhaps he was delaying as her sister said until he should have
sufficient means to marry well, and that if the right word were
said now he would cease chasing a phantom fortune long enough to
realize that it were better to take Angela while they were still
young, than to wait until they were so old that the romance of
marriage would for them be over. She revolved this in her mind a
long time, picturing to herself how sweet Angela really was, and
finally nerved herself to pen the following letter, which she
sent.
Dear Eugene:
You will be surprised to get a letter from me and I want you to
promise me that you will never say anything about it to
anyone—above all never to Angela. Eugene, I have been watching her
for a long time now and I know she is not happy. She is so
desperately in love with you. I notice when a letter does not come
promptly she is downcast and I can't help seeing that she is
longing to have you here with her. Eugene, why don't you marry
Angela? She is lovely and attractive now and she is as good as she
is beautiful. She doesn't want to wait for a fine house and
luxuries—no girl wants to do that, Eugene, when she loves as I know
Angela does you. She would rather have you now when you are both
young and can enjoy life than any fine house or nice things you
might give her later. Now, I haven't talked to her at all,
Eugene—never one word—and I know it would hurt her terribly if she
thought I had written to you. She would never forgive me. But I
can't help it. I can't bear to see her grieving and longing, and I
know that when you know you will come and get her. Don't ever
indicate in any way, please, that I wrote to you. Don't write to me
unless you want to very much. I would rather you didn't. And tear
up this letter. But do come for her soon, Eugene, please do. She
wants you. And she will make you a perfectly wonderful wife for she
is a wonderful girl. We all love her so—papa and mamma and all. I
hope you will forgive me. I can't help it."With love I am yours,
"
Marietta.
"