Chapter VIII

A certain amount of blundering is allowable to a man who cares for a woman and sees her wretched. I offer only this excuse for myself. I expected no happiness, but it seemed to me some one should have the right to look after her and protect her.

It was Ellice who told me later where the fallacy lay in my reasoning.

“When a woman is childless,” she said, “she makes her man her child. You might as well have asked Anne to give up a son. And of course this being a bad child made no difference.”

For that is what I did.

She was very gentle with me, but from the moment I began I saw it was hopeless. He needed her. She did a good many things for him that he thought were done by the servant. Everything in the house had its own place, so he could find it, and was never moved from that place. She read to him, too. Only the night before she had had a bad time; she was reading aloud.

“Last night, ah yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head.
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.”

She had tried to stop when she found what it was, but he made her read on. Then she had heard him laugh, rather dreadfully. And the next moment he had taken the book from her and flung it into the fire.

She had been composed enough up to that, but there she broke. It seemed that she had heard him outside her door later that night, and she had thought perhaps he meant to kill her and then himself. He had stood there, very still, for some time, and then had gone away.

But I was not to worry. She had only been over-wrought. He had really been much gentler with her lately.

I had to go away with that. . . .

I suppose I would never have found the solution had it not been for Ellice Valentine and her absurd mantel. The final arrangements were to be made for the casts before my departure, and we went together to the studio to complete them.

“At noon,” her note said. “I don’t want to meet him, and I want to study the altar piece.”

There was nobody around, and we sauntered alone into the studio. The group was complete now. The Mother stood below the cross, looking up, and Ellice gazed at it for some time without speaking.

It was Anne.

I suppose nothing he will ever do, and he has done some big things since, will be as truly great as that figure, buried to-day in a small Lithuanian Church. Courage, anguish and love are epitomised in it; all the suffering of all the motherhood of the world.

And it was Anne.

Ellice did not speak until we were outside again. Then she said:

“How terribly he loves her!”

I do not think she had reasoned it out then. She simply felt it. But later on she explained it.

“He couldn’t have done it if he hadn’t loved her,” she said. “And he couldn’t have done it if—everything had been happy between them. Don’t you see?”

“You mean, he has to reach for a star?”

“Don’t you? Cynara was the dream of a lost love. This is the dream of a lost motherhood. Probably he doesn’t know it himself, but it is true.”

But he did know it. It was that fact which brought about the tragedy.

Anne, it seems, went to the studio that evening to bring him home, for the streets had turned icy. She saw the Madonna, and had a moment, I gather, of sheer happiness. But he only stood near her, saying nothing and brooding. And on the way home he had told her a man could build out of the mud, if he had his gaze on the stars. He had built the Cynara out of his mistress at the time, and now—this.

She went upstairs very quietly when they got home, and even laid out his night things and turned down his bed. I can see her seeing that there were matches and tobacco beside the bed. She had an idea, I suppose, that what she meant to do would only touch the surface of his life. Her being there or not being there had seemed to matter so little.

Then she got his revolver—he was still downstairs—and shot herself in the chest. . . .

He was standing outside the door when I got there. They were keeping him out. You see, he had never been in Anne’s room, and he knocked against things and got in the way. And besides, he kept yelling at them to do something, when they were doing all they could.

He refused to let me pass, although Anne had sent for me, and somehow or other he had got hold of the revolver, and would not give it up. It took me a good half hour to get him away from the door and downstairs, and even then he kept hold of the revolver. If Anne died I knew he would shoot himself, and I wasn’t at all sure he wouldn’t shoot me.

It was a nightmare. He insisted on talking—anything that welled to the surface of his mind. He said the Italian at the studio was not an Italian but a Levantine Jew, and that he wouldn’t keep the place warm. From that he began to boast about the way he got about the streets, and what he said to the people who offered to help him. His terrible pride again. And all the time he was listening. Just listening.

He broke in once, however, on this monologue to ask me how I knew, and why I had come.

“Did she send for you?”

“Yes. We were old friends, Sidney.”

“Ah, I know what she wants.” He turned his distorted face toward me. “She wants you to promise to take care of me. I’ll see you in hell first.”

After a time he began groping around the room, and at last he found a small model of the Madonna for the altar piece. He stood holding it, running his fingers lightly over it.

“I tried to keep her out of it,” he said. “I tried. But I couldn’t.”

He put the figure back, and then he dropped on his knees before it and raised his face.

“Oh, holy mother of God,” he said. “Intervene for us. Forgive me and save her. For without her there is nothing.”