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Book 3Three
Harry had been sitting before the fire for nearly an hour when he switched on the lights and telephoned the hotel to send over some sandwiches. He dispatched them quickly and put the tray in the outer hall. Tonight was an occasion for remembering; he felt it coming on. Years ago he used to fight against reflection. But now he sometimes felt a melancholy pleasure in looking back over his life; he had begun to understand it a little better.
He, and he only, knew why he had been so brutal to Lucy Gayheart when she came home. It was not because of what she had told him that night after the opera in Chicago.
He had regretted his hasty marriage at the end of the first week; indeed, he was already regretting it when he made it. He knew that he was hurting himself in order to hurt someone else. He was doing the one thing he had sworn he never would do, marrying a plain woman, who could never feel the joy of life. Harriet Arkwright had her good points; she was not crude, she had some experience of the world. She was intelligent and executive. It was she who built their new house in Haverford, managed the builders and workmen without trouble or confusion, furnished it exactly as she wished-- and paid for it. The house made a common interest, they were both pleased with it. She was reasonable, she had no irritating affectations. It would be possible to rub along, Harry thought. Then Lucy came back to town.
He knew, the first time he saw her in the post-office, that nothing had changed in him; more than ever before he knew what he wanted. She was standing in that crowd of slovenly men, clouds of tobacco smoke drifting about her, slowly turning the combination lock of her father`s letter-box. As he stared in from the door the line of her figure made his heart stop. She looked so slight, so fine, so reserved--He had turned like a flash and walked rapidly down the street, without going inside to face her. But that glimpse of her, standing in profile with one hand lifted, had been enough.
Afterwards, from day to day, he had to see her at a distance, pass her on the street. That grace of person appeared more marked now, when she was withdrawn, than in the days when she had been careless and gay. She seemed gathered up and sustained by something that never let her drop into the common world. As she went about the town, her head a little bent, her glance veiled, she was sometimes spiritless and uncertain, as if she were beginning to walk abroad after a long illness; but she was unapproachable. That intense preoccupation, and her brooding look, were very sad to see in one so young. But they protected her, kept her aloof and alone. The boys she used to dance and picnic with were afraid to go to see her now. It was only when she met Harry Gordon that her eyes lighted up with the present moment, and asked for something. They never looked at him that they did not implore him to be kind.
He knew that she was unhappy, that she wanted him to help her. Her voice had a note of pleading if she but said good-morning--he gave her very little chance to say more. She was a creature of impulse, he knew; never could conceal her feelings. Perhaps she never tried. She made it clear that she had some desperate need of him; it followed him back to his desk after these chance meetings. Was it that she had "got into trouble" as some people whispered, and the man had deserted her? He didn`t know, he didn`t care. He knew that if he were alone with her for a moment and she held out her hands to him with that look, he couldn`t punish her any more--and she deserved to be punished.
He was in the first year of a barren marriage (barren in every sense; his wife never had a child), and the life he would have lived with Lucy was always in the back of his mind then. She had ruined all that for a caprice, a piece of mawkish sentimentality. Let her suffer for it. God knew he did! So he used to think, when he left her on a street-corner looking after him.
And yet, underneath his resentment and his determination to punish, there was a contrary conviction lying very deep, so deep that he held no communication with it. After they had both been punished enough, something would happen, how he didn`t know; he might break with this town and all the guarantees of his future, but he and Lucy Gayheart would be together again.
A man who is young and strong looks forward. If he has been a fool and thwarted his own will--that is temporary. Every morning when he goes out into the air, he knows he is going to have his way; feels resourceful enough to leave all his blunders behind him. In those months after Lucy came back to Haverford, Harry had never doubted what the end would be. That would come about without contriving on his part--would come because it had to. When he passed her on the street or had to say good-morning to her in the post-office, the certainty of his ultimate mastery stirred in him like something alive. When the hour struck, nothing could stop him.
That evening when he passed Mrs. Ramsay`s window and saw Lucy at the piano, and the old lady listening with her head resting on her fingertips, he had scarcely got himself by. He had so nearly gone into that house. Then he would have walked home with Lucy, and everything would have come right.
Why was it that such terrible and unusual things should happen to a prudent, level-headed man? Why, when he came back from Harlem that night, with miles of open country all about, did he have to meet that little procession of lanterns and wagons crawling along over the snow? Why had he been compelled actually to drive in that procession? He couldn`t pass it,--not after he had stopped and asked what was the matter. He took off his sleigh-bells and walked his horses into town after the wagon train. There was nothing else to do.--When he reached home he went directly into the library, where his wife sat writing letters. He shut the door behind him and asked her if she knew what had happened at the river. Yes, Milton Chase had called up to tell him as soon as the news reached town, and she had answered the telephone.
"I am going west tonight on the Union Pacific two-o`clock, and I will not be back until after the funeral. I treated that girl very badly not long ago. I`ve not said a kind word to her since she came home. I can`t go to the funeral; I`m not hypocrite enough. But I want you to go. The family would be hurt if neither of us were there."
Mrs. Gordon frowned slightly. She was always self-possessed, never made scenes. Then she said in her cool, well-regulated voice:
"Your leaving town will be commented on, probably? I can`t see the point of my going to the funeral alone."
"It`s the first favour I`ve ever asked of you."
"No need to put it in that way. I don`t know the people, but if you think it`s the proper thing to do, I`ll go, of course."
"Thank you, Harriet." He went to his room to pack his bag.
There was not, in all the world, a living creature who knew of his last meeting with Lucy on the frozen country road beside the telephone post. For days, weeks, after his return from Denver, people talked about the "tragedy," as they called it; in the bank, on the street, wherever he went. He suspected they took care to discuss the subject before him. There was, of course, the dark whisper that it might have been suicide. The cuts on her wrists and hands showed that she had struggled to cling to the ice; but she might have lost courage after her plunge. She was last seen alive by a Swede farmer who had passed her on the west road, about a mile from town. Everyone knew she had been low-spirited and unlike herself since she came home. Fairy Blair had brought the story that some singer Lucy was in love with had been drowned in Italy in the summer; like enough she had resolved to put an end to herself in the same way. Even if no one had happened to tell her that the river had changed its bed last spring, couldn`t she see for herself? The whole west bank was torn up, and the island was much farther from the shore than it used to be.
These discussions never drew a remark from Harry Gordon, and no one had quite the courage to ask him how he happened to go to Denver the night Lucy was brought home. "Let`s see; you met them on the road when they were bringing her in, didn`t you, Harry?" That was as far as the boldest got.
Gordon put some more coke on the fire, walked to the window, and stood looking up at the bright winter stars. These things he had been remembering mattered very little when one looked up there at eternity. And even on this earth, time had almost ceased to exist; the future had suddenly telescoped out of the past, so that there was actually no present. Kingdoms had gone down and the old beliefs of men had been shattered since that day when he refused Lucy Gayheart a courtesy he wouldn`t have refused to the most worthless old loafer in town. The world in which he had been cruel to her no longer existed.
Life would have been much easier for him, certainly, in those years after Lucy`s death, if he could have told someone about his last meeting with her. Many a time, going home on winter nights, he had heard again that last cry on the wind--"Harry!" Indignation, amazement, authority, as if she wouldn`t allow him to do anything so shameful.
Yes, he had had a long grilling. He was tough, but it had been a match for him. Luckily for him, the automobile had come along soon after the turn of the century. He owned the first car in the county, and, as they were improved, he bought one car after another. His farms were scattered far and wide, and he lived on the road. He often went to Denver for the week-end, "driving like the devil." He got into the habit of thinking aloud as he drove; talking, indeed, to his motor engine. Once when he had his wife along, he forgot himself and came out with: "Well, it`s a life sentence."
That was the way he used to think about it. Lucy had suffered for a few hours, a few weeks at most. But with him it was there to stay. He understood well enough why she hadn`t noticed the change in the river; he knew what pain and anger did to her. It was that very fire and blindness, that way of flashing with her whole self into one impulse, without foresight or sight at all, that had made her seem wonderful to him. When she caught fire, she went like an arrow, toward whatever end.
As time dragged on he had got used to that dark place in his mind, as people get used to going through the world on a wooden leg. He made a great deal of money, he bought great tracts of land--rather a joke on him, now that land values were going down. But such things had kept him busy in the years when he needed distraction. His friendship with Mr. Gayheart had been a solace. It was somewhat like an act of retribution. Those evenings over the chess-board had come to be the best part of his week. He had grown to like the old man`s shop better than any place in town. They never talked of Lucy, but the piano on which she used to practise still stood there.
Gordon was thinking, as he sat in his study on that night of Mr. Gayheart`s funeral, how the sense of guilt he used to carry had gradually grown paler. For years he had tried never to think about Lucy at all. But for a long while now he had loved to remember her. Perhaps it was no great loss to have missed two-thirds of her life, if she had the best third, and had been young,--so heedlessly young. Of course she would fall in love with the first actor or singer she met, and would declare it openly. That would soon have passed. One might have foretold such adventures for Lucy, from her eyes, and from her laugh,--her low, rich, contralto laugh that fell softly back upon itself. It was not the laughter of nervous excitement; it was bubbling and warm, but there was a veiled note of recklessness in it.
In spite of all the misery he had been through on her account, Lucy was the best thing he had to remember. When he looked back into the past, there was just one face, one figure, that was mysteriously lovely. All the other men and women he had known were more or less like himself.
He sometimes thought of those mornings when she used to get up before daylight to go duck-shooting with him on the river: the heavy silence over the dew-drenched fields, the dark sound of the water, the quick flush of dawn in the east and the waking of the breeze in the tops of the cotton-woods, the birds rising in the pearl-coloured air. And at his elbow something eager, alert, happier than he could ever be.
It was a gift of nature, he supposed, to go wildly happy over trifling things--over nothing! It wasn`t given to him--he wouldn`t have chosen it; but he liked catching it from Lucy for a moment, feeling it flash by his ear. When they stood watching the sun break through, or waiting for the birds to rise, that expectancy beside him made all his nerves tingle, as if his shooting-clothes, and the hard case of muscle he lived in, were being sprayed by a wild spring shower. His own body grew marvellously free and light, and there was a snapping sparkle in his blood that made him set his teeth.
In the absolute stillness of the night (it was getting toward twelve), Gordon heard the bank telephone ringing again and again. That would be his wife, calling up to know what had become of him. He did not answer the telephone, but he covered the last glowing lumps of the coke fire, put on his overcoat, and started for home.
He is not a man haunted by remorse; all that he went through with long ago. He enjoys his prosperity and his good health. Lucy Gayheart is no longer a despairing little creature standing in the icy wind and lifting beseeching eyes to him. She is no longer near, beside his sleigh. She has receded to the far horizon line, along with all the fine things of youth, which do not change.
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