Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

"That's better," I hazarded. "We're beginning to understand each other. Now let's lay all our cards face up on the table?"

Lucette stared at me a moment, her lips pursed, dubious, her impenetrable blue eyes holding mine.

"I will, if you will," she said finally. "Let's."

It was dangerous, I knew, to take her at her word; yet I ventured.

"I've a weak hand, Lucette; but there's one honest ace of trumps in it."

"There could hardly be two," smiled Lucette.

"No; I count on that. In a pinch, I shall take the one trick essential, and throw the others away." I leaned to her and spoke slowly: "There is no reason, affecting her honor or rights, why Gertrude may not return to her home--if she so desires. I think you understand me?"

"Perfectly. You wish to protect Miss Blake. You would try to do that in any case, wouldn't you? But I'm rather afraid you're too late. I'm afraid Miss Blake has handicapped you too heavily. If so, it was clever of her--for she must have done it on purpose. You see, Ambrose, it was she who sent for Gertrude."

"Susan!"

"Susan. Telegraphed her--of all things!--either to come home to you or set you free. The implication's transparent. Especially as I had thought it my duty to warn Gertrude in advance--and as Mr. Phar sent her, by messenger, a vague but very disturbing note this morning."

"Maltby?"

"Yes. His note was delivered not five minutes ahead of Susan's wire. Gertrude caught the next train. And there you are."

Well, at least I began to see now, dimly, where Maltby was, where Susan was, where we all were--except, possibly Gertrude. Putting enormous constraint on my leaping nerves, I subdued every trace of anger.

"Two more questions, Lucette. Do you believe me when I say, with all the sincerity I'm capable of, that Susan is slandered by these suspicions?"

"Really," answered Lucette, with a little worried frown, as if anxiously balancing alternatives, "I'm not, am I, in a position to judge?"

I swallowed hard. "All right," I managed to say coldly. "Then I have placed you. You're not an onlooker--you're an open foe."

"And the second question, Ambrose?"

"What, precisely, does Gertrude want from me?"

"I'm not, am I, in a position to judge?" repeated Lucette. "But one supposes it depends a little on what you're expecting--from her?"

"All I humbly plead for," said I, "is a chance to see Gertrude alone and talk things over."

"Don't you mean talk _her_ over?" suggested Lucette. "And aren't you," she murmured, "forgetting the last straw?"

VII

My confusion of mind, my consternation, as I left the Egyptian tomb, was pitiable. One thing, one only, I saw with distinctness: The being I loved best was to be harried and smirched, an innocent victim of the folly and malignity of others.

"Never," I muttered, "Never--never--never!"

This was all very grim and virile; yet I knew that I could grit my teeth and mutter Never! from now till the moon blossomed, without in any way affecting the wretched situation. Words, emotional contortions, attitudes--would not help Susan; something sensible must be done--the sooner the better. Something sensible and decisive--but what? There were so many factors involved, human, incalculable factors; my thought staggered among them, fumbling like a drunken man for the one right door that must be found and opened with the one right key. It was no use; I should never be able to manage it alone. To whom could I appeal? Susan, for the time being, was out of the question; Maltby had maliciously betrayed a long friendship. Phil? Why of course, there was always Phil? Why hadn't I thought of him before?

I turned sharply and swung into a rapid stride. With some difficulty I kept myself from running. Phil seemed to me suddenly an intellectual giant, a man of infinite heart and unclouded will. Why had I never appreciated him at his true worth? My whirling perplexities would have no terrors for him; he would at once see through them to the very thing that should at once be undertaken. Singular effect of an overwhelming desire and need! Faith is always born of desperation. We are forced by deep-lying instincts to trust something, someone, when we can no longer trust ourselves. As I hurried down York Street to his door, my sudden faith in Phil was like the faith of a broken-spirited convert in the wisdom and mercy of God.

Phil's quarters were on the top floor of a rooming-house for students; he had the whole top floor to himself and had lived there simply and contentedly many years, with his books, his pipes, his papers, and his small open wood fire. Phil is not destitute of taste, but he is by no means an aesthete. His furniture is of the ordinary college-room type--Morris chair of fumed oak, and so on--picked up as he needed it at the nearest department store; but he has two or three really good framed etchings on the walls of his study; one Seymour Haden in particular--the _Erith Marshes_--which I have often tried to persuade him to part with. There is a blending of austerity and subtlety in the work of the great painter-etchers that could not but appeal to this austere yet finely organized man.

His books are wonderful--not for edition or binding--he is not a bibliophile; they are wonderful because he keeps nothing he has not found it worth while to annotate. There is no volume on his shelves whose inside covers and margins are not filled with criticism or suggestive comment in his neat spiderwebby hand; and Phil's marginal notes are usually far better reading than the original text. Susan warmly maintains that she owes more to the inside covers of Phil's books than to any other source; insists, in fact, that a brief note in his copy of Santayana's _Reason in Common Sense_, at the end of the first chapter, established her belief once for all in mind as a true thing, an indestructible and creative reality, destined after infinite struggle to win its grim fight with chaos. I confess I could never myself see in this note anything to produce so amazing an affirmation; but in these matters I am a worm; I have not the philosophic _flair_. Here it is:

"'We know that life is a dream, and how should thinking be more?' Because, my dear Mr. Santayana, a dream cannot propagate dreams and realize them to be such. The answer is sufficient."

Well, certainly Susan, too, seemed to feel it sufficient; and perhaps I should agree if I better understood the answer.... But I have now breasted four flights to Phil and am knocking impatiently.... He opened to me and welcomed me cordially, all trace of his parting gruffness of the other evening having vanished, though he was still haggard about the eyes. He was not alone. Through the smoke haze of his study I saw a well-built youngster standing near the fireplace, pipe in hand; some college boy, of course, whom Phil was being kind to. Phil was forever permitting these raw boys to cut in upon his precious hours of privacy; yet he was at the opposite pole from certain faculty members, common to all seats of learning, who toady to the student body for a popularity which they feel to be a good business asset, or which they find the one attainable satisfaction for their tottering self-esteem.

Phil, who had had to struggle for his own education, was genuinely fond of young men who cared enough for education to be willing to struggle for theirs. He had become unobtrusively, by a kind of natural affinity, the elder brother of those undergraduates who were seekers in any sense for the things of the mind. For the rest, the triumphant majority--fine, manly young fellows as they usually were, in official oratory at least--he was as blankly indifferent as they were to him.

"My enthusiasm for humanity is limited, fatally limited," he would pleasantly admit. "For the human turnip, even when it's a prize specimen, I have no spontaneous affection whatever."

On the other hand it was not the brilliant, exceptional boy whom he best loved. It was rather the boy whose interest in life, whose curiosity, was just stirring toward wakefulness after a long prenatal and postnatal sleep. For such boys Phil poured forth treasures of sympathetic understanding; and it was such a youth, I presume, who stood by the fireplace now, awkwardly uncertain whether my coming meant that he should take his leave.

His presence annoyed me. On more than one occasion I had run into this sort of thing at Phil's rooms, had suffered from the curious inability of the undergraduate, even when he longs himself to escape, to end a visit--take his hat, say good-by simply, and go. It doesn't strike one offhand as a social accomplishment of enormous difficulty; yet it must be--it so paralyzes the social resourcefulness of the young.

Phil introduced me to Mr. Kane, and Mr. Kane drooped his right shoulder--the correct attitude for this form of assault--grasped my hand, and shattered my nerves--with the dislocating squeeze which young America has perfected as the high sign of all that is virile and sincere. I sank into a chair to recover, and to my consternation Mr. Kane, too, sat down.

"Jimmy's just come to us," said Phil, relighting his pipe. "He passed his entrance examinations in Detroit last spring, but he had to finish up a job he was on out there before coming East. So he has a good deal of work to make up, first and last. And it's all the harder for him, because he's dependent upon himself for support."

"Oh," said Jimmy, "what I've saved'll last me through this year, I guess."

"Yes," Phil agreed; "but it's a pity to touch what you've saved." He turned to me. "You see, Hunt, we're talking over all the prospects. Aren't we, Jimmy?"

"Yes, sir," answered Jimmy. "Prof. Farmer thinks," he added, "that I may be making a mistake to try it here; he thinks it may be a waste of time. I'm kind of up in the air about it, myself."

"Jimmy's rather a special case," struck in Phil, dropping into a Morris chair and thrusting his legs out. "He's twenty-two now; and he's already made remarkably good as an expert mechanic. He left his home here over six years ago, worked his way to Detroit, applied for a job and got it. Now there's probably no one in New Haven who knows more than this young man about gas engines, steel alloys, shop organization, and all that. The little job that detained him was the working out of some minor but important economy in the manufacture of automobiles. He suggested it by letter to the president of the company himself, readily obtained several interviews with his chief, and was given a chance to try it out.

"It has proved its practical worth already, though you and I are far too ignorant to understand it. As a result, the president of the company offered him a much higher position at an excellent salary. It's open to him still, if he chooses to go back for it. But Jimmy has decided to turn it down for a college education. And I'm wondering, Hunt, whether Yale has anything to give him that will justify such a sacrifice--anything that he couldn't obtain for himself, at much less expense, without three years waste of time and opportunity. How does it strike you, old man? What would you say, offhand, without weighing the matter?"

What I wanted to say was, "Damn it all! I'm not here at this time of night to interest myself in the elementary problems of Jimmy Kane!" In fact, I did say it to myself, with considerable energy--only to stop at the name, to stare at the boy before me, and to exclaim in a swift flash of connection, "Great Scott! Are you _Susan's_ Jimmy?"

"'Susan's Jimmy'!" snorted Phil, with a peculiar grin. "Of course he's Susan's Jimmy! I wondered how long it would take you!"

As for Susan's Jimmy, his expression was one of desolated amazement. Either his host and his host's friend, or he himself--had gone suddenly mad! The drop of his jaw was parentheses about a question mark. His blue eyes piteously stared.

"I guess I'm not on, sir," he mumbled to Phil, blushing hotly.

He was really a most attractive youth, considering his origins. I eyed him now shamelessly, and was forced to wonder that the wrong end of Birch Street should have produced not only Susan--who would have proved the phoenix of any environment--but this pleasant-faced, confidence-inspiring boy, whose expression so oddly mingled simplicity, energy, stubborn self-respect, and the cheerfulness of good health, an unspoiled will, and a hopeful heart. He seemed at once too mature for his years and too naive; concentration had already modelled his forehead, but there was innocence in his eyes. Innocence--I can only call it that. His eyes looked out at the world with the happiest candor; and I found myself predicting of him what I had never yet predicted of mortal woman or man: "He's capable of anything--but sophistication; he'll get on, he'll arrive somewhere--but he will never change."

Phil, meanwhile, had eased his embarrassment with a friendly laugh. "It's all right, Jimmy; we're not the lunatics we sound. Don't you remember Bob Blake's kid on Birch Street?"

"Oh! Her?"

"Mr. Hunt became her guardian, you know, after----"

"Oh!" interrupted Jimmy, beaming on me. "You're the gentleman that----"

"Yes," I responded; "I'm the unbelievably fortunate man."

"She was a queer little kid," reflected Jimmy. "I haven't thought about her for a long time."

"That's ungrateful of you," said Phil; "but of course you couldn't know that."

Question mark and parentheses formed again.

"Phil means," I explained, "that Susan has never forgotten you. It seems you did battle for her once, down at the bottom of the Birch Street incline?"

"Oh, gee!" grinned Jimmy. "The time I laid out Joe Gonfarone? Maybe I wasn't scared stiff that day! Well, what d'y' think of her remembering that!"

"You'll find it's a peculiarity of Susan," said Phil, "that she doesn't forget anything."

"Why--she must be grown up by this time," surmised Jimmy. "It was mighty fine of you, Mr. Hunt, to do what you did! I'd kind of like to see her again some day. But maybe she'd rather not," he added quickly.

"Why?" asked Phil.

"Well," said Jimmy, "she had a pretty raw deal on Birch Street. Seeing me--might bring back things?"

"It couldn't," I reassured him. "Susan has never let go of them. She uses all her experience, every part of it, every day."

Jimmy grinned again. "It must keep her hustling! But she always was different, I guess, from the rest of us." With a vague wonder, he addressed us both: "You think a lot of her, don't you?"

For some detached, ironic god this moment must have been exquisite. I envied the god his detachment. The blank that had followed his question puzzled Jimmy and turned him awkward. He fidgeted with his feet.

"Well," he finally achieved, "I guess I'd better be off, professor. I'll think over all you said."

"Do," counselled Phil, rising, "and come to see me to-morrow. We mustn't let you take a false step if we can avoid it."

"It's certainly great of you to show so much interest," said Jimmy, hunching himself at last out of his chair. "I appreciate it a lot." He hesitated, then plunged. "It's been well worth it to me to come East again--just to meet _you_."

"Nonsense!" laughed Phil, shepherding him skillfully toward the door....

When he turned back to me, it was with the evident intention of discussing further Jimmy's personal and educational problems; but I rebelled.

"Phil," I said, "I know what Susan means to you, and you know--I think--what she means to me. Now, through my weakness, stupidity, or something, Susan's in danger. Sit down please, and let me talk. I'm going to give you all the facts, everything--a full confession. It's bound, for many reasons, to be painful for both of us. I'm sorry, old man--but we'll have to rise to it for Susan's sake; see this thing through together. I feel utterly imbecile and helpless alone."

Half an hour later I had ended my monologue, and we both sat silent, staring at the dulled embers on the hearth....

At length Phil drew in a slow, involuntary breath.

"Hunt," he said, "it's a humiliating thing for a professional philosopher to admit, but I simply can't trust myself to advise you. I don't know what you ought to do; I don't know what Susan ought to do; or what I should do. I don't even know what your wife should do; though I feel fairly certain that whatever it is, she will try something else. Frankly, I'm too much a part of it all, too heartsick, for honest thought."

He smiled drearily and added, as if at random: "'Physician, heal thyself.' What an abysmal joke! How the fiends of hell must treasure it. They have only one better--'Man is a reasonable being!'" He rose, or rather he seemed to be propelled from his chair. "Hunt! Would you really like to know what all my days and nights of intense study have come to? The kind of man you've turned to for strength? My life has come to just this: I love her, and she doesn't love me!

"Oh!" he cried--"Go home. For God's sake, go home! I'm ashamed...."

So I departed, like Omar, through the same door wherein I went; but not before I had grasped--as it seemed to me for the first time--Phil's hand.

VIII

There are some verses in Susan's notebook of this period, themselves undated, and never subsequently published, which--from their position on the page--must have been written about this time and may have been during the course of the momentous evening on which I met Jimmy Kane at Phil Farmer's rooms. I give them now, not as a favorable specimen of her work, since she thought best to exclude them from her first volume, but because they throw some light at least on the complicated and rather obscure state of mind that was then hers. They have no title, and need none. If you should feel they need interpretation--"_guarda e passa_"! They are not for you.

_Though she rose from the sea
There were stains upon her whiteness;
All earth's waters had not sleeked her clean.
For no tides gave her birth,
Nor the salt, glimmering middle depths;
But slime spawned her, the couch of life,
The sunless ooze,
The green bed of Poseidon,
Where with sordid Chaos he mingles obscurely.
Her flanks were of veined marble;
There were stains upon her._

_But she who passes, lonely,
Through waste places,
Through bog and forest;
Who follows boar and stag
Unwearied;
Who sleeps, fearless, among the hills;
Though she track the wilds,
Though she breast the crags,
Choosing no path--
Her kirtle tears not,
Her ankles gleam,
Her sandals are silver._

IX

It was midnight when I reached my own door that night, but I was in no mood for lying in bed stark awake in the spiritual isolation of darkness. I went straight to my study, meaning to make up a fire and then hypnotize myself into some form of lethargy by letting my eyes follow the printed lines of a book. If reading in any other sense than physical habit proved beyond me, at least the narcotic monotony of habit might serve.

But I found a fire, already falling to embers, and Susan before it, curled into my big wing chair, her feet beneath her, her hands lying palms upward in her lap. This picture fixed me in the doorway while my throat tightened. Susan did not stir, but she was not sleeping. She had withdrawn.

Presently she spoke, absently--from Saturn's rings; or the moon.

"Ambo? I've been waiting to talk to you; but now I can't or I'll lose it--the whole movement. It's like a symphony--great brasses groaning and cursing--and then violins tearing through the tumult to soar above it."

Her eyes shut for a moment. When she opened them again it was to shake herself free from whatever spell had bound her. She half yawned, and smiled.

"Gone, dear--all gone. It's not your fault. Words wouldn't hold it. Music might--but music doesn't come.... Oh, poor Ambo--you've had a wretched time of it! How tired you look!"

I shut the door quietly and went to her, sitting on the hearth rug at her feet, my knees in my arms.

"Sweetheart," I said, "it seems that in spite of myself I've done you little good and about all the harm possible." And I made a clean breast of all the facts and fears that the evening had developed. "So you see," I ended, "what my guardianship amounts to!"

Susan's hand came to my shoulder and drew me back against her knees; she did not remove her hand.

"Ambo," she protested gently, "I'm just a little angry with you, I think."

"No wonder!"

"Oh!" she exclaimed. "If I am angry it's because you can say stupid things like that! Don't you see, Ambo, the very moment things grow difficult for us you forget to believe in me--begin to act as if I were a common or garden fool? I'm not, though. Surely you must know in your heart that everything you're afraid of for me doesn't matter in the least. What harm could slander or scandal possibly do me, dear? Me, I mean? I shouldn't like it, of course, because I hate everything stodgy and _formidablement bete_. But if it happens, I shan't lose much sleep over it. You're worrying about the wrong things, Ambo; things that don't even touch our real problem. And the real problem may prove to be the real tragedy, too."

"Tragedy?" I mumbled.

"Oh, I hope not--I think not! It all depends on whether you care for freedom; on whether you're really passion's slave. I don't believe you are."

The words wounded me. I shifted, to look up at, to question, her shadowy face. "Susan, what do you mean?"

"I suppose I mean that _I'm_ not, Ambo. You're far dearer to me than anybody else on earth; your happiness, your peace, mean everything to me. If you honestly can't find life worth while without me--can't--I'll go with you anywhere; or face the music with you right here. First, though, I must be sincere with you. I can live away from you, and still make a life for myself. Except your day-by-day companionship--I'd be lonely without that, of course--I shouldn't lose anything that seems to me really worth keeping. Above all, I shouldn't really lose you."

"Susan! You're planning to leave me!"

"But, Ambo--it's only what you've felt to be necessary; what you've been planning for me!"

"As a duty--at the bitterest possible cost! How different that is! You not only plan to leave me--I feel that you want to!"

"Yes, I want to. But only if you can understand why."

"I don't understand!"

"Ah, wait, Ambo! You're not speaking for yourself. You're a slave now, speaking for your master. But it's _you_ I want to talk to!"

I snarled at this. "Why? When you've discovered your mistake so soon!... You don't love me."

She sighed, deeply unhappy; though my thin-skinned self-esteem wrung from her sigh a shade of impatience, too.

"If not, dear," she said, "we had better find it out before it's too late. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps love is something I only guess at and go wrong about. If love means that I should be utterly lost in you and nothing without you--if it means that I would rather die than leave you--well, then I don't love you. But all the same, if love honestly means that to you--I can't and won't go away." She put out her hand again swiftly, and tightened her fingers on mine.

"It's a test, then. Is that it?" I demanded. "You want to go because you're not sure?"

"I'm sure of what I feel," she broke in; "and more than that, I doubt if I'm made so that I can ever feel more. No; that isn't why I want to go. I'll go if you can let me, because--oh, I've got to say it, Ambo!--because at heart I love freedom better than I love love--or you. And there's something else. I'm afraid of--please try to understand this, dear--I'm afraid of stuffiness for us both!"

"Stuffiness?"

"Sex _is_ stuffy, Ambo. The more people let it mess up their lives for them, the stuffier they grow. It's really what you've been afraid of for me--though you don't put it that way. But you hate the thought of people saying--with all the muddy little undercurrents they stir up round such things--that you and I have been passion's slaves. We haven't been--but we might be; and suppose we were. It's the truth about us--not the lies--that makes all the difference. You're you--and I'm I. It's because we're worth while to ourselves that we're worth while to each other. Isn't that true? But how long shall we be worth anything to ourselves or to each other if we accept love as slavery, and get to feeling that we can't face life, if it seems best, alone? Ambo, dear, do you see at all what I'm driving at?"

Yes; I was beginning to see. Miss Goucher's desolate words came suddenly back to me: "Susan doesn't need _you_."

X

Next morning, while I supposed her at work in her room, Susan slipped down the back stairs and off through the garden. It was a heavy forenoon for me, perhaps the bleakest and dreariest of my life. But it was a busy forenoon for Susan. She began its activities by a brave intuitive stroke. She entered the Egyptian tomb and demanded an interview with Gertrude. What is stranger, she carried her point--as I was presently to be made aware.

Miss Goucher tapped at the door, entered, and handed me a card. So Gertrude had changed her mind; Gertrude had come. I stared, foolishly blank, at the card between, my fingers, while Miss Goucher by perfect stillness effaced herself, leaving me to my lack of thought.

"Well," I finally muttered, "sooner or later----"

Miss Goucher, perhaps too eagerly, took this for assent. "Shall I say to Mrs. Hunt that you are coming down?"

I forced a smile, fatuously enough, and rose.

"When I'm down already? Surely you can see, Miss Goucher, that I've touched the bottom?" Miss Goucher did not reply. "I'll go myself at once," I added formally. "Thank you, Miss Goucher."

Gertrude was waiting in the small Georgian reception room, whose detailed correctness had been due to her own; waiting without any vulgar pretense at entire composure. She was walking slowly about, her color was high, and it startled me to find her so little altered. Not a day seemed to have added itself; she looked under thirty, though I knew her to be thirty-five; she was even handsomer than I had chosen to remember. Even in her present unusual restlessness, the old distinction, the old patrician authority was hers. Her spirit imposed itself, as always; one could take Gertrude only as she wished to be taken--seriously--humbly grateful if exempted from disdain. Gertrude never spoke for herself alone; she was at all times representative--almost symbolic. Homage met in her not a personal gratitude, but the approval of a high, unbroken tradition. She accepted it graciously, without obvious egotism, not as due to her as a temporal being, but as due--under God--to that timeless entity, her class. I am not satirizing Gertrude; I am praising her. She, more than any person I have ever known, made of her perishing substance the temple of a completely realized ideal.

It was, I am forced to assume, because I had failed in entire respect for and submission to this ideal that she had finally abandoned me. It was not so much incompatibility of temperament as incompatibility of worship. She had removed a hallowed shrine from a felt indifference and a possible contamination. That was all, but it was everything. And as I walked into the reception room I saw that the shrine was still beautiful, faultlessly tended, and ready for any absolute but dignified sacrifice.

"Gertrude," I began, "it's splendid of you to overlook my inexcusable rudeness of yesterday! I'm very grateful."

"I have not forgiven you," she replied, with casual indignation--just enough for sincerity and not a shade too much for art. "Don't imagine it's pleasant for me to be here. I should hardly have risked your misinterpreting it, if any other course had seemed possible."

"You might simply have waited," I said. "It was my intention to call this evening, if only to ask after your health."

"I could not have received you," said Gertrude.

"You find it less difficult here?"

"Less humiliating. I'm not, at least, receiving a husband who wishes to plead for reconciliation--on intolerable grounds."

"May I offer you a chair? Better still--why not come to the study? We're so much less likely to be disturbed."

She accepted my suggestion with a slight nod, and herself led the way.

"Now, Gertrude," I resumed, when she had consented to an easy-chair and had permitted me to close the door, "whatever the situation and misunderstandings between us, can't we discuss them"--and I ventured a smile--"more informally, in a freer spirit?"

She caught me up. "Freer! But I understand--less disciplined. How very like you, Ambrose. How unchanged you are."

"And you, Gertrude! It's a compliment you should easily forgive."

She preferred to ignore it. "Miss Blake," she announced, "has just been with me for an hour."

She waited the effect of this. The effect was considerable, plunging me into dark amazement and conjecture. Not daring to make the tiniest guess as to the result of so fantastic an interview, I was left not merely tongue-tied but brain-tied. Gertrude saw at once that she had beggared me and could now at her leisure dole out the equal humiliation of alms withheld or bestowed.

"Given your curious social astigmatism and her curious mixed charm--so subtle and so deeply uncivilized--I can see, of course, why she has bewitched you," said Gertrude reflectively, and paused. "And I can see," she continued, musing, as if she had adopted the stage convention of soliloquy, "why you have just failed to capture her imagination. For you have failed--but you can hardly be aware how completely."

"Whether or not I'm aware," I snapped, "seems negligible! Susan feels she must leave me, and she'll probably act with her usual promptness. Is that what she called to tell you?"

"Partly," acknowledged Gertrude, resuming then her soliloquy: "You've given her--as you would--a ridiculous education. She seems to have instincts, impulses, which--all things considered--might have bloomed if cultivated. As it is, you found her crude, and, in spite of all the culture you've crammed upon her, you've left her so. She's emancipated--that is, public; she's thrown away the locks and keys of her mind. I grant she has one. But apparently no one has even suggested to her that the essence of being rare, of being fine, is knowing what to omit, what to reject, what to conceal. I find my own people, Ambrose--and they're the _right_ people, the only ones worth finding--by feeling secure with them; I can trust them not to go too far. They have decorum, taste. Oh, I admit we're upholding a lost cause! You're a deserter from it--and Miss Blake doesn't even suspect its existence. Still"--with a private smile--"her crudity had certain immediate advantages this morning."

Ignoring rarity, fineness, I sank to the indecorum of a frankly human grin. "In other words, Gertrude, Susan omitted so little, went so much too far, that she actually forced you for once to get down to brass tacks!"

Gertrude frowned. "She stripped herself naked before a stranger--if that's what you mean."

"With the result, Gertrude?"

"Ah, that's why I'm here--as a duty I owe myself. I'm bound to say my suspicions were unjust--to Miss Blake, at least. I'll even go beyond that----"

"Careful, Gertrude! Evil communications corrupt good manners."

"Yes," she responded quickly, rising, "they do--always; that's why I'm not here to stay. But all I have left for you, Ambrose, is this: I'm convinced now that in one respect I've been quite wrong. Miss Blake convinced me this morning that her astounding telegram had at least one merit. It happened to be true. I _should_ either live with you or set you free. I've felt this myself, from time to time, but divorce, for many reasons...." She paused, then added: "However, it seems inevitable. If you wish to divorce me, you have legal grounds--desertion; I even advise it, and I shall make no defense. As for your amazing ward--make your mind quite easy about her. If any rumors should annoy you, they'll not come from me. And I shall speak to Lucette." She moved to the door, opening it slowly. "That's all, I think, Ambrose?"

"It's not even a beginning," I cried.

"Think of it, rather, as an ending."

"Impossible! I--I'm abashed, Gertrude! What you propose is out of the question. Why not think better of returning here? The heydey's past for both of us. My dream--always a wild dream--is passing; and I can promise sincere understanding and respect."

"I could not promise so easily," said Gertrude; "nor so much. No; don't come with me," she added. "I know my way perfectly well alone."

Nevertheless, I went with her to the front door, as I ought, in no perfunctory spirit. It was more than a courteous habit; it was a genuine tribute of admiration. I admired her beauty, her impeccable bearing, her frock, her furs, her intellect, the ease and distinction of her triumph. She left me crushed; yet it was a privilege to have known her--to have wooed her, won her, lost her; and now to have received my _coup de grace_ from her competent, disdainful hands. I wished her well, knowing the wish superfluous. In this, if nothing else, she resembled Susan--she did not need me; she could stand alone. It was her tragedy, in the French classic manner, that she must. Would it also in another manner, in a deeper and--I can think of no homelier word--more cosmic sense, prove to be Susan's?

But my own stuffy problem drama, whether tragic or absurd, had now reached a crisis and developed its final question: How in the absence of Susan to stand at all?

XI

From her interview with Gertrude, Susan went straight on to Phil's rooms, not even stopping to consider the possible proprieties involved. But, five minutes before her arrival, Phil had been summoned to the Graduates Club to receive a long-distance call from his Boston publisher; and it was Jimmy Kane who answered her knock and opened the study door. He had been in conference with Phil on his private problems and Phil had asked him to await his return. All this he thought it courteous to explain to the peach of a girl before him, whose presence at the door puzzled him mightily, and whose disturbing eyes held his, he thought, rather too intimately and quizzically for a stranger's.

She could hardly be some graduate student in philosophy; she was too young and too flossy for that. "Flossy," in Jimmy's economical vocabulary, was a symbol for many subtle shades of meaning: it implied, for any maiden it fitted, an elegance not too cold to be alluring; the possession of that something more than the peace of God which a friend told Emerson always entered her heart when she knew herself to be well dressed. Flossy--to generalize--Jimmy had not observed the women graduate students to be, though he bore them no ill will. To be truly flossy was, after all, a privilege reserved for a chosen few, born to a certain circle which Jimmy had never sought to penetrate.

One--and a curiously entrancing specimen--of the chosen evidently stood watching him now, and he wished that her entire self-possession did not so utterly imperil his own. What was she doing alone, anyway, this society girl--in a students' rooming house--at Prof. Farmer's door? Why couldn't she tell him? And why were her eyes making fun of him--or weren't they? His fingers went instinctively to his--perhaps too hastily selected?--cravat.

Then Susan really did laugh, but happily, not unkindly, and walked on in past him, shutting the door behind her as she came.

"Jimmy Kane," she said, "if I weren't so gorgeously glad to see you again, I could beat you for not remembering!"

"Good Lord!" he babbled. "Why--good Lord! You're Susan!"

It was all too much for him; concealment was impossible--he was flabbergasted. Sparkling with sheer delight at his _gaucherie_, Susan put out both hands. Her impulsiveness instantly revived him; he seized her hands for a moment as he might have gripped a long-lost boy friend's.

"You never guessed I could look so--presentable, did you?" demanded Susan.

"Presentable!" The word jarred on him, it was so dully inadequate.

"I have a maid," continued Susan demurely. "Everything in Ambo's house--Ambo is my guardian, you know; Mr. Hunt--well, everything in his house is a work of art. So he pays a maid to see that I am--always. I am simply clay in her hands, and it does make a difference. But I didn't have a maid on Birch Street, Jimmy."

Jimmy's blue eyes capered. This was American humor--the kind he was born to and could understand. Happiness and ease returned with it. If Susan could talk like that while looking like that--well, Susan was _there_! She was all right.

Within five minutes he was giving her a brief, comradely chronicle of the missing years, and when Phil got back it was to find them seated together, Susan leaning a little forward from the depths of a Morris chair to follow more attentively Jimmy's minute technical description of the nature of the steel alloys used in the manufacture of automobiles.

They rose at Phil's entrance with a mingling, eager chatter of explanation. Phil later--much later--admitted to me that he had never felt till that moment how damnably he was past forty, and how fatally Susan was not. He further admitted that it was far from the most agreeable discovery of a studious life.

"What do you think, Prof. Farmer," exclaimed Jimmy, "of our meeting again accidentally like this--and me not knowing Susan! You can't beat that much for a small world!"

Phil sought Susan's eye, and was somewhat relieved by the quizzical though delighted gleam in it.

"Well, Jimmy," he responded gravely, "truth compels me to state that I have heard of stranger encounters--less inevitable ones, at least. I really have."

"But you never heard of a nicer one," said Susan. "Haven't I always told you and Ambo that Jimmy would be like this?"

"Sort of foolish?" grinned Jimmy, with reawakening constraint. "I'll bet you have, too."

Susan shook her head, solemn and slow; but the corners of her mouth meant mischief.

"No, Jimmy, not foolish; just--natural. Just--sort of--_you_."

At this point, Jimmy hastily remembered that he must beat it, pleading what Phil knew to be an imaginary recitation. But he did not escape without finding himself invited to dinner for that very evening, informally of course--Susan suspected the absence of even a dinner coat: Phil would bring him. It was really Phil who accepted for him, while Jimmy was still muddling through his thanks and toiling on to needless apologies.

"If I've been too"--he almost said "fresh," but sank to--"familiar, calling you by your first name, I mean--I wouldn't like you to think--but coming all of a sudden like this, what I mean is----"

"Oh, run along!" called Susan gayly. "Forget it, Jimmy! You're spoiling everything."

"That's what I m-mean," stammered Jimmy, and was gone.

"But he does mean well, Susan," Phil pleaded for him, after closing the door.

It puzzled him to note that Susan's face instantly clouded; there was reproof in her tone. "That was patronizing, Phil. I won't have anybody patronize Jimmy. He's perfect."

Phil was oddly nettled by this reproof and grew stubborn and detached. "He's a nice boy, certainly; and has the makings of a real man. I believe in him. Still--heaven knows!--he's not precisely a subtle soul."

Susan's brow had cleared again. "That's what I m-mean!" she laughed, mimicking Jimmy without satire, as if for the pure pleasure of recollection. "The truth is, Phil, I'm rather fed up on subtlety--especially my own. Sometimes I think it's just a polite term for futility, with a dash of intellectual snobbishness thrown in. It must be saner, cleaner, healthier, to take life straight."

"And now, Phil dear," she said, dismissing the matter, as if settling back solidly to earth after a pleasantly breathless aerial spin, "I need your advice. Can I earn my living as a writer? I'll write anything that pays, so I think I can. Fashion notes--anything! Sister and I"--"Sister" being Susan's pet name for Miss Goucher--"are running away to New York on Monday--to make our fortunes. You mustn't tell Ambo--yet; I'll tell him in my own way. And I must _make_ my own way now, Phil. I've been a lazy parasite long enough--too long! So please sit down and write me subtle letters of introduction to any publishers you know. Maltby is bound to help me, of course. You see, I'm feeling ruthless--or shameless; I shall pull every wire in sight. So I'm counting on _The Garden Exquisite_ for immediate bread and butter. I did my first article for it in an hour when I first woke up this morning--just the smarty-party piffle its readers and advertisers seem to demand.

"This sort of thing, Phil: 'The poets are wrong, as usual. Wild flowers are not shy and humble, they are exclusive. How to know them is still a social problem in American life, and very few of us have attained this aristocratic distinction.' And so on! Two thousand silly salable words--and I can turn on that soda-water tap at will. Are you listening? Please tell me you don't think poor Sister--she refuses to leave me, and I wouldn't let her anyway--will have to undergo martyrdom in a cheap hall bedroom for the rest of her days?"

Needless to say, Phil did not approve of Susan's plan. He agreed with her that under the given conditions she could not remain with me in New Haven; and he commended her courage, her desire for independence. But Susan would never, he felt, find her true pathway to independence, either material or spiritual, as a journalistic free-lance in New York. He admitted the insatiable public thirst for soda-water, but saw no reason why Susan should waste herself in catering to it. He was by no means certain that she could cater to it if she would.

"You'll too often discover," he warned her, "that your tap is running an unmarketable beverage. The mortal taste for nectar is still undeveloped; it remains the drink of the gods."

"But," Susan objected, "I can't let Ambo pay my bills from now on--I can't! And Sister and I must live decently somehow! I'd like nothing better than to be a perpetual fountain of nectar--supposing, you nice old Phil, that I've ever really had the secret of distilling a single drop of it. But you say yourself there's no market for it this side of heaven, which is where we all happen to be. What do you want me to do?"

"Marry me."

"It wouldn't be fair to you, dear."

There was a momentary pause.

"Then," said Phil earnestly, "I want you to let Hunt--or if you can't bring yourself to do that--to let _me_ loan you money enough from time to time to live on simply and comfortably for a few years, while you study and think and write in your own free way--till you've found yourself. My nectar simile was nonsense, just as your soda-water tap was. You have brains and a soul, and the combination means a shining career of some kind--even on earth. Don't fritter your genius away in makeshift activities. Mankind needs the best we have in us; the best's none too good. It's a duty--no, it's more than that--it's a true _religion_ to get that expressed somehow--whether in terms of action or thought or beauty. I know, of course, you feel this as I do, and mean to win through to it in the end. But why handicap yourself so cruelly at the start?"

Phil tells me that Susan, while he urged this upon her, quietly withdrew and did not return for some little time after he had ceased to speak. He was not even certain she had fully heard him out until she suddenly leaned to him from her chair and gave his hand an affectionate, grateful squeeze.

"Yes, Phil," she said, "it is a religion--it's perhaps the only religion I shall ever have. But for that very reason I must accept it in my own way. And I'm sure--it's part of my faith--that any coddling now will do me more harm than good. I must meet the struggle, Phil--the hand-to-hand fight. If the ordinary bread-and-butter conditions are too much for me, then I'm no good and must go under. I shan't be frittering anything away if I fail. I shan't fail--in our sense--unless we're both mistaken, and there isn't anything real in me. That's what I must find out first--not sheltered and in silence, but down in the scrimmage and noise of it all. If I'm too delicate for that, then I've nothing to give this world, and the sooner I'm crushed out of it the better! Believe me, Phil dear, I know I'm right; I _know_."

She was pressing clenched hands almost fiercely between her girl's breasts as she ended, as if to deny or repress any natural longing for a special protection, a special graciousness and security, from our common taskmaster, life.

Phil admits that he wanted to whimper like a homesick boy.

XII

Susan's informal dinner for Jimmy that evening was not really a success. The surface of the water sparkled from time to time, but there were grim undercurrents and icy depths. Perhaps it was not so bad as my own impression of it, for I had a sullen headache pulsing its tiresome obbligato above a dull ground base of despair. Despair, I am forced to call it. Never had life seemed to me so little worth the trouble of going on; and I fancy Phil's reasoned conviction of its eternal dignity and import had become, for the present, less of a comfort to him than a curse. Moods of this kind, however ruthlessly kept under, infect the very air about them. They exude a drab fog to deaden spontaneity and choke laughter at its source.

Neither Phil nor I was guilty of deliberate sulking; whether from false pride or native virtue we did our best--but our best was abysmal. Even Susan sank under it to the flat levels of made conversation, and poor Jimmy--who had brought with him many social misgivings--was stricken at table with a muscular rigor; sat stiffly, handled his implements jerkily, and ended by oversetting a glass of claret and blushing till the dusky red of his face matched the spreading stain before him.

At this crisis of gloom, luckily, Susan struggled clear of the drab fog and saved the remnant of the evening--at least for Jimmy, plunging with the happiest effect into the junior annals of Birch Street, till our heavier Hillhouse atmosphere stirred and lightened with _Don't-you-remember's_ and _Sure-I-do's_. And shortly after dinner, Phil, tactfully pleading an unprepared lecture, dragged Jimmy off with him before this bright flare-up of youthful reminiscence had even threatened to expire. Their going brought Susan at once to my side, with a stricken face of self-reproach.

"It was so stupid of me, Ambo--this dinner. I've never been more ashamed. How could I have forced it on you to-night! But you were wonderful, dear--wonderful! So was Phil. I'll never forget it." There were tears in her eyes. "Oh, Ambo," she wailed, "do you think I shall ever learn to be a little like either of you? I feel--abject." Before I could prevent it, she had seized my hand in both hers and kissed it. "Homage," she smiled....

It broke me down--utterly.... You will spare me any description of the next ten minutes of childishness. Indeed, you must spare me the details of our later understanding; they are inviolable. It is enough to say that I emerged from it--for the experience had been overwhelming--with a new spirit, a clarified and serener mind. My love for Susan was unchanged--yet wholly changed. The paradox is exact. Life once more seemed to me good, since she was part of it; and my own life rich, since I now knew how truly it had become a portion of hers. She had made me feel, know, that I counted for her--unworthy as I am--in all she had grown to be and would grow to be. We had shaped and would always shape each other's lives. There for the moment it rested. She would leave me, but I was not to be alone.

No; I was not to be alone. For even if she had died, or had quite changed and forsaken me, there would be memories--such as few men have been privileged to recall....

INTERLUDE

On the rearward and gentler slopes of Mount Carmel, a rough, isolated little mountain, very abrupt on its southerly face, which rises six or seven miles up-country from the New Haven Green, there is an ancient farm, so long abandoned as to be completely overgrown with gray birch--the old field birch of exhausted soils--with dogwood and an aromatic tangle of humbler shrubs, high-bush huckleberry and laurel and sweet fern; while beneath these the dry elastic earth-floor is a deep couch of ghost-gray moss, shining checkerberry and graceful ground pine. The tumbledown farmstead itself lies either unseen at some distance from these abandoned fields or has wholly disappeared along with the neat stone fences that must once have marked them. Yet the boundaries of the fields are now majestically defined through the undergrowth by rows of gigantic red cedars so thickset, so tall, shapely, and dense as to resemble the secular cypresses of Italian gardens more nearly than the poor relations they ordinarily are.

And at the upper edge of one steep-lying field, formerly an apple orchard--though but three or four of the original apple trees remain, hopelessly decrepit and half buried in the new growth--the older cedars of the fence line have seeded capriciously and have thrown out an almost perfect circle of younger, slenderer trees which, standing shoulder to shoulder, inclose the happiest retreat for woodland god or dreaming mortal that the most exacting faun or poet could desire.

That Susan should have happened upon this lonely, this magic circle, I can never regard as a mere accident. Obviously time had slowly and lovingly formed and perfected it for some purpose; it was there waiting for her--and one day she came and possessed it, and the magic circle was complete.

Susan was then seventeen and the season, as it should have been, was early May. Much of the hill country lying northward from the Connecticut coast towns is surprisingly wild, and none of it wilder or lovelier than certain tracts spread within easy reach of the few New Haveners who have not wholly capitulated to business or college politics or golf or social service or the movies, forgetting a deeper and saner lure. A later Wordsworth or Thoreau might still live in midmost New Haven and never feel shut from his heritage, for it neighbors him closely--swamp and upland, hemlock cliff and hardwood forest, precipitous brook or slow-winding meadow stream, where the red-winged blackbirds flute and flash by; the whole year's wonder awaits him; he has but to go forth--alone.

Nature never did betray the heart that loved her, though she so ironically betrays most of us who merely pretend to love her, because we feel, after due instruction, that we ought. For Nature is not easily communicative, nor lightly wooed. She demands a higher devotion than an occasional picnic, and will seldom have much to say to you if she feels that you secretly prefer another society to hers. To her elect she whispers, timelessly, and Susan, in her own way, was of the elect. It was the way--the surest--of solitary communion; but it was very little, very casually, the way of science. She observed much, but without method; and catalogued not at all. She never counted her warblers and seldom named them--but she loved them, as they slipped northward through young leaves, shyly, with pure flashes of green or russet or gold.

Nature for Susan, in short, was all mood, ranging from cold horror to supernal beauty; she did not sentimentalize the gradations. The cold horror was there and chilled her, but the supernal beauty was there too--and did not leave her cold. And through it all streamed an indefinable awe, a trail one could not follow, a teasing mystery--an unspoken word. It was back of--no rather it interpenetrated the horror no less than the beauty; they were but phases, hints, of that other, that suspected, eerie trail, leading one knew not where.