Arthur Stringer

“ Oh, I know, Aunt Agatha; I know! Life is made so easy for a rich American girl! It always plays with the soft pedal on; it's so screened and muffled and rosy! She's petted by maids and nurses; she's pampered by grooms and coachmen; she's smiled on and run after by florists and dressmakers and jewelers; she has indulgent servants and attendants to wait on her every mood and caprice! You'd think boarding-school would waken her up a bit, but even there, when she is wealthy, and perhaps happens to be pretty, she's discreetly cajoled and wheedled and given her own way. ”

“ As her brougham turned out from the curb a hansom drove up. In it, against the shadow of the green trimming cloth of the cab hood, she could see the white and unhappy face of Dorat. A throb of pain, as tangible as a bullet shot, flashed through her breast. He seemed to her, as he sat there, so engulfed in some terrible isolation of soul, so hopeless in his misery of body and sickness of heart, that a little half-smothered, motherlike cry of pity broke from Charlotte's lips. He seemed only the crushed shell of a man; the very flame of life seemed to have died out of him. ”

“ From London Dorat and Charlotte started out for a month's cruise in Mediterranean waters.
The four weeks of this cruise always remained dream-like to Charlotte; it was so much more quietly happy than she had ever dared to hope. It seemed to obliterate the past, and day by day steeped her in some greater calm of supreme contentment. It seemed the complete quiet and happiness of repose in passion. In that mysterious love languor she looked for no more than the moment gave. It brought with it, not a sense of bondage, but one of freedom. Even her hope for the future grew fixed and strong. ”

“ Once, at a caprice of Dorat's, they slept at the monastery of Santa Rosalia, and the musician, maimed hand and all, charmed the monks by playing for them on the great old organ.
Some compressed and softer side of Charlotte seemed to expand in the wonderful Southern loveliness of sea and land and mountain which surrounded her. The exuberant Southern growths, the luxuriant beauty and color, the glory of sunset and sunrise, of flower and tree and ruin, had in some way taken, as she put it, “the New England chill out of her bones.” Life seemed drenched and heavy with beauty. ”

“ The gloomy emptiness of the house, the draped chairs and the draped balconies gave Charlotte a sense of phantasmal and subterranean life.
“I feel like a ghost!” she whispered to Meran, close at her side.
“But imagine it all this time to-morrow night!” he whispered back to her.
Out of the blackness the glare of the footlights suddenly shot up. Shadowy musicians, with instruments under their arms, seemed drifting out from some still more shadowy underworld. They took their places at the music-desks, where, at a touch of the hand, a shaft of light flashed down on the white score-sheets. ”

“ Oh, Dorat, can't you see? It's too late for either of us to wrap ourselves in rose-leaves and forget everything. We are no longer boy and girl; we are man and woman, and we want happiness, and life, and all that life can give us. But there are certain things we must not pay out for it.”
“But what is work—beside you! All this music—it is only a sighing after something. You, you are the end of it, the soul of it. With you I want nothing—the last bar to happiness has been beaten down! ”

“ Yet love was something, she consoled herself, however enthorned the rose might come to her hand. She had always dreaded isolation. She could not altogether forsake her passionate quest of life's joyousness. Whatever befell, she would love Dorat to the last—together they would travel down the lonely watershed of life. Even to remember that he was under the same roof with her brought with it an alleviating sense of companionship, an impatient longing to see him and hear him speak. She could now only fling herself on the tides of passion, and let them carry her wherever they would. ”

“ It is easy for some of them to be satisfied and happy. It is easy for some of them to be submerged and sacrificed and self-effaced. I suppose it is the eternal egoist in me—but I am hungry for something and don't really know what it is. But oh, I want to live! You advise me to keep on, in the hope that some day contentment will fall in my hand—that I may yet cheat life out of its happiness, just as we girls used to twist and twist at a button on a West Point boy's coat while we danced with him, until it came off and we carried it away for a hat-pin head! ”

“ An occasional muffled laugh and the sound of a whisper or two echoed up through the emptiness.
Down in the orchestra a few straggling musicians had begun to tune their instruments. At one time Charlotte counted four different players running brokenly over certain passages of the score. The result was medley, raucous cacophony. It was like life and love unharmonized, she thought to herself. Then there was a little silence, and clear and low the flute-player went over a passage that rang out sweetly solemn through the dark house.
“That's the love-phrase of Leander,” explained Meran. ”

“ I don't think I am one of those ultra-modern, self-opinionated Shawese women longing to reconstruct the moral world, to the popping of smart epigrams. All I want is a little love and a little tenderness and a little companionship. Day by day I seem to be getting more cramped and starved and crushed— some mornings I feel that I could scream out loud, like a crazy woman, and throw the cups and sugar-bowl at the walls. I don't mind suffering; I'm not afraid of sorrow—if only it's for something, if only it's got stir and movement and meaning to it.
“Women are not the same, Aunt Agatha. ”

“ Are you going to make this young life of yours like that old room of yours, at home, that poor old room I used to look over and laugh at, for there you were, writ down with all your moods and fads and caprices; with all your comically-tragic variable temperament—Chinese lacquer-work higgledy-piggledy with Tuscan vases, and Daghestan tapestry next to Navajo blankets, a dusty music-stand cheek-by-jowl with a forgotten easel, a portfolio of bad poetry hobnobbing with a set of book-binder's tools, and Mexican drawn-work buried under a mess of modeling clay. ”

“ She said only “Yes,” for a maid was spreading the tea-table behind them, and she wondered if, after all, he would always seem the artist before the man to her.
“Mendelssohn's music,” he went on, with his scholarly, grave abstraction, “is the music of externals, of exquisite externals. It always breathes of flowers and winds and waters, of light and color. It's butterfly music, most of it, as delicate as moth-wings, with its softness, its love, so pure and young and innocent, the love of a Cecille. When in the mood, it is enough. ”

“ XIV The open course of fate always seemed so frustrated with side-issues; the world went so crookedly always; in the whirlpools and backwaters of existence hopes and wishes and realities were forever getting so inextricably mixed and tangled and torn! Such were the thoughts that ran disjointedly through Charlotte's contrite and unhappy head, after a weary day of self-disgust and self-discovery.
She would have flown to Dorat on the wings of love, she would have hastened to him, open-armed and humble-hearted; but once more she found that emotion and opportunity did not always coincide. ”

“ It was the hotel of Auguste Speridon, the artist and collector, the very house where a week before she had flashed her triumphant way through the reception-room, and danced her way into the heart of half official Paris, and had her sally and verbal duel with the brilliant and flamboyant Comte Gerard de Montesquieu, and had been brought away in the early hours of the morning by her tired and silent husband, who had dropped in for a few minutes at the last, after a night's work on his eternal scores.
Something in life, she told herself, was making her hard and small and self-contained. ”

“ III Charlotte wondered, as she sat in the shimmering little dog-cart at Cedarhurst Station, just why the popular novelists had never essayed the epic of the Arriving Train. So many of the intenser moments of life, she argued with herself as she mused there with her ribboned whip aslant, came and went with the coming and going of car-wheels. So often, on narrow little station platforms, life crowded up to its most purposeful apex, to its most poignant sense of loss or gain. So often the step across some Great Divide of existence was only the step to or from a waiting train. ”

“ II “My dear Aunt Agatha,” wrote Charlotte Cranfill, in answer to the letter which had caused her a morning of hard riding and an afternoon of much unrest and troubled thought, “your letter made me truly happy, and truly miserable. Nothing sudden and terrible is going to take place. I am not trembling on the brink of some great abyss—and that is the worst of it all! I will just go round and round like a pin-wheel, I suppose, until I burn out. Everything will drag dully on and on and on, as it has done now for nearly two years, and it will all be mean and small and sordid. ”

“ This passion for change, this unrest and waywardness, we can always overlook in the mere play of life. But in the deeper currents of love and duty, my child, it leads to bitterness and utter defeat. As I told you years ago, it's not more life you want, it's more Light. You have not the stoic and self-fortifying soul of a social derelict; you could never be a maverick on the range of respectability. There is none of the Hindu pariah about you. You are a girl of warmth and fire; you have to have friendship, companionship, perfect understanding. ”

“ He had objected to luxurious apartments; he wanted to live simply and freely. He had set his face against “hotel” life, and from the first had seemed perfectly content in the cold and lonely rooms of their rented apartment. He had many friends, it was true, but most of them seemed his old studio and atelier comrades. She had no fear of them, she knew; and although she was a little bewildered by the apparent coolness and ease with which these men and women of the studios spoke of love and liaisons, no half-expected barbed arrow as to Dorat's previous life ever reached her breast. ”

“ Then Dorat, finding himself free, fell to the floor, and painfully and slowly gathered himself up. His face was bloodless, the dull gray of wood ashes. It was only his eyes that showed any life; they were distended and luminous, glowing now with a dull and lupine sort of hate.
“Oh, you fool!” he said, as he bound his still bleeding wrist with his handkerchief, while Charlotte and the footman still clung to his writhing enemy. “You fool, to think you can fight for a woman like a butcher. ”

“ He will let it go; he will even look for it and wait for it, and console himself, for all his pain and loneliness, if he has any, by saying that it's suffering that really makes him what he is. You are all artists first—and who can blame you for it?—and men only in your intermissions. That's why you have all made women suffer so much!”
“It is you, and the women who say these things with you, who make us suffer. There is Chopin; his life was in his music. But when George Sand killed that life she killed his music!” ”

“ She was always a lover of warmth and color and movement. She was, normally, a woman of abundant vitality, and under all the ashen exterior, day by day, as her bodily strength came back to her, the smothered coals of feeling warmed and glowed with some promise of their old-time intensity.
This gave a new turn to her sense of loneliness. She longed to see Dorat; she felt the necessity for his companionship. She tried to solace herself with memories. ”

“ It's like what you told me about Mendelssohn, who never had adversity enough, who never suffered enough, and so never became one of the greatest. A happy people has no history; and a happy heart has no history. Oh, I know; it will be only one of two things! Either all that is best in you, all that I most love in you, will wither and die away, either you will be satisfied with today and the world, or you will find out that I have come between you and your work, and you will hate me for it. ”

“ Shotwell, fortunately, she found a judicious and most thoughtful emissary between the world of exigent realities and the world of shadows and silence into which her mind seemed to wander.
She felt her spirit tortured with a vague yet persistent self-reproof at the thought that she had stood so unprepared for calamity, that life had always been so softly shrouded and upholstered and draped for her, leaving her thus broken and unnerved under the chance stroke of destiny. ”

“ From that day forward, whatever Dorat and his love might grow to mean for her, she could no longer live with Stephen Cranfill. She told him, wistfully, how she regretted that the first hours of their love had been tainted with this pang of dishonesty. She had even sought out her bewildered Aunt Agatha with a vague “Oh,I need you!” until a sudden and mysterious timidity took the place of her old-time audaciousness of spirit. And she became silent again. ”

“ You have been stubborn and hard-headed, you have set this sad old city agog with some of the mad things you have done, you have fought your mad little fight for freedom—and now that the chain begins to chafe and pinch you begin to cry out that you are the only woman who has suffered and declare that you'll have your liberty, whatever it costs, as though this sort of thing, my dear, were to be found by chasing it across country at breakneck speed in a Mercedes touring-car, instead of fusing it out in your own quiet little cambric-covered furnace of suffering! ”

“ Truly, declared Meran, this music-making business was a terrible thing.
All the rest of that day Charlotte was oppressed by a sense of loneliness, against which she struggled and fought in vain.
Even Meran took note of her depression of spirits, contrasting as it did with some strange exaltation that shone in the deepened violet-blue of her eyes, and he put a tentative question or two to her, as they made their way together that evening, to the theatre.
“It ought not to hurt a strong man to be lonely, ought it, cher maître?” ”