Basil King

“ Leaning on the balustrade, all faces turned one way, they fringed the promenade, leaving the broad, paved spaces empty.
For this reason Chip's eye caught the more quickly at the other end of the terrace the figures of a man and a woman who stood back from the line of gazers. They were almost in profile toward himself, the man's erect, stately form allowing the fact that a woman was clinging to his arm to be just perceptible. It required no such movement as that of a few minutes later—a movement by which the woman came more fully into view—for Chip to recognize Edith. ”

“ He looked at her steadily. "Edith! What are you made of?"
She returned his look. "I think—of stone. Up till to-day I've been a woman of flesh and blood; but I'm not sure that I am any longer. You can't kill the heart in a woman's body—and still expect her to feel."
"But, Edith—Edith darling—there's no reason why I should have killed the heart in your body when I never dreamed of doing you a wrong—that is, an intentional wrong," he corrected. ”

“ He was a man who would have been noticeable anywhere, if it were for no more than the dignified gravity of his manner and the correctness of his dress. Not only did he wear what was impeccably the right thing for the right occasion, but his movements were of the sedate precision that never displaces a button. As straight and slim and erect as a guardsman, he was nevertheless stamped all over as a civilian. From the lines in his gray, clean-shaven face of regular profile, and the silvery touches in his hair, Chip judged him to be fifty years old. ”

“ Man might buy a piece of ground and camp on it; but if he had sensibilities he would remain conscious of an essence that eluded him, the real thing—withdrawn. He could be on the spot, but he could never be of it—not any more than he could give his dwelling the air of springing from the soil.
Chip noticed that, too—the intrusive aspect of any kind of roof that man could make to cover him, unless it were a wigwam. Emery Bland had tried to temper this resentment of the landscape to what was not indigenous to itself by making the lines of his shelter as simple and as straight as possible. ”

“ What's her name, Chip?"
"Lily. She was Lily Bland."
"Yes, yes; of course. I knew that. And she loves you? But how could she help loving you? I'd hate her if she didn't. Curiously enough I don't hate her now. I wonder why? I suppose it's because I'm so sorry for her. She's a sweet woman, isn't she?"
He answered, with head averted. "She's as noble in her way as—as this man is in his." ”

“ She might have been a person with a sorrow—a love-sorrow. At that thought Edith's heart went out to her in sympathy. She herself was so happy, with a happiness that had grown more intense each month, each week, each day, of her six years of married life, that it filled her imagination with a blissful, pitying pain to think that other women suffered. ”

“ Chip went on, "there are two who must be unhappy in any case."
"Precisely. There are two for whom there's no escape. Whatever happens now, nothing can save them. But, since that is so, the question arises whether it wouldn't be, let us say, a greater economy of human material if the other two—"
Edith looked mystified. "I don't know what you mean. Which are the two who must be unhappy in any case?"
Chip answered quietly, without turning his head: "He's one; my—my wife is the other." ”

“ Chip's heart bounded. Edith was in New York. She had heard of his condition. She was coming back to him. He was to have his reward for taking pity on Maggie Clare. His tongue and lips were parched as he forced out the words:
"Then it's good news—or you wouldn't want to break it?"
She was not visibly perturbed. Rather, she was pensive, sitting with an elbow resting on the arm of her chair, the hand raised so as to lay a forefinger on her cheek. "Don't you think that we often make news good or bad by our way of taking it?" ”

“ In the silence that followed it seemed to Chip that he could hear the murmur of the almost soundless river below. Somehow the sound of the river was all he could think of. Quietly moving, low-voiced couples paced up and down the promenade, and from the music-pavilion in the distance came the whine and shiver of the Mattiche. "In divorce," the measured voice resumed, "there are some dangerous risks. It's a dangerous risk for a man to divorce his wife. It's a more dangerous risk for a woman to divorce her husband. ”

“ With a book she hardly looked at in her hand she could sit at her window or on the terrace, soothed incomprehensibly by the blue-green sweep of the immemorial sea beside which so many other sad hearts had watched49 before her own. She felt herself caught into a fellowship that included not only Hagar and Hecuba, but myriads of unremembered women whose tears alone might have filled this vast inland ocean—drawing a comfort that was not wholly morbid from the reflection that there was an end even to the breaking of hearts. ”

“ Chip spent much of his time in the Kleine Schanze, noticing that the distinguished stranger frequented it less. Idleness would have got on his nerves, and Berne begun to bore him, had it not been for the knowledge that he was under the same roof with Edith. That gave him patience. It was the kind of comfort a man or a woman finds in being near the prison where some loved one is shut up in a cell. ”

“ Its transparent air, in which there was not a shred of atmosphere, its high lights, and long shadows, and restful, clambering woods, and singing birds, and sweet, strong winds were like those of some perpetual, paradisical present, with no story to tell, and none that would ever be enacted. It was a world in which Nature seemed to hold herself aloof from man, refusing to be tamed by him, rejecting his caress, keeping herself serene, inviolate, making his presence incongruous with her sanctity.
It was this incongruity that struck Chip first of all. ”

“ Sepia would have done justice to the even tan of his complexion, to the soft-brown of his eyes, of his hair, of his mustache, and rendered the rich chestnut which was oftener than not his choice for clothes. Gertie flirted with him outrageously—there was no other phrase for it. It was the kind of flirting one was obliged to consider innocent, since the alternative would have been too appalling. Edith opted for the innocent construction, lending an abashed countenance to the situation out of loyalty to the sisterhood of loneliness. ”

“ That, dear, is nothing but the talk of feminist meetings. Men are men, and women are women. You can't make one law for them both. Besides, it's too big a subject to go into now."
"I'm not trying to. I wasn't thinking of men in general; I was thinking only of you."
"But, good Lord, Edith, you don't think I've been better than any one else, do you?"
Her forlorn smile made his heart ache. ”

“ As it was one o'clock, he took his seat in the luncheon-car, making sure in advance that she wasn't there. He had come to the conclusion by this time that she was not on the train at all—that she hadn't been on the steamer. He did not, however, regret his precautions, because—well, because the sense of her proximity had made him feel as he had felt in the days—fourteen years ago now—when the very streets of the city in which she lived were hallowed ground. He had supposed that emotion dead. Probably it was dead. It must be dead. ”

“ It was obviously impossible for two little mites to kiss a man of that height at that distance. Chip dropped into an arm-chair, waiting jealously for the two dutiful little pecks that might pass as spontaneous, and then throwing his big arms about his young ones in a desperate embrace. After that the ice was broken, and, with the aid of the games and the picture-books provided by Lily Bland, the meeting could go forward to a glorious termination in ice-cream. ”

“ It was true that there had been a moment like a descent into hell, from which she thought she must come up another woman. Aunt Emily and the lawyer had whirled her somewhere in a motor. Veiled as heavily as was consistent with articulation, she had told a tale that seemed abominable, though it was no more than a narrative of the facts. It added to her sense of degradation to learn that one of the cheaper dailies had published a snapshot of her taken as she was re-entering the motor to come away. ”

“ The stranger seemed to examine the burning end of his cigar. "Oh, nothing but the obvious things—pursuing another man's wife, for instance. A man who's happily married doesn't do that."
There was no aggression in the tone, and yet Chip felt a curious chill. Who was this man, and what the devil was he driving at? It was all he could do to answer coolly, knocking the ash off the end of his own cigar: "And yet, I've known of such cases." ”

“ Madame is too much by herself. Wouldn't it distraire Madame to dine to-night, let us say, at Ciro's, or the Hotel de Paris, and look in at the Casino afterward? Madame is always so sad."
The man was too insignificant for her wrath, but not so insignificant that he couldn't be a warning. He was a warning that even if he failed to touch her heart it was by no means certain that another man might not succeed; and not long afterward a man did.
That was Sir Noel Ordway. She had met him almost at once after moving to Cannes. ”

“ Even if she were willing to rebel he couldn't do it—with a wife and boy in New York. He had married again on purpose to satisfy his longing for a child—a family. He felt very tenderly toward them, the little chap and his mother; but he was clear as to the fact that he felt tenderly toward them, pityingly tender, largely because when face to face with Edith he wished to God that they had never been part of his life. And doubtless she felt the same toward her Mr. Lacon and the child of that union. ”

“ A half-hour ago, while I was talking to that—that poor creature—before you came up—I was quite aware of being like a woman with a dose of cyanide of potassium in her hand, and doubting whether or not to take it. Well, I took it. I took it and I—died. That is, the Edith who was your wife—died. What survives of her personality is something else. ”

“ We can't. The contract we've made with them must come before the one we made with each other. We're bound, not only in law but in honor. Aren't we?"
He made some inarticulate sign of assent.
"And I suppose that's what he meant by the penalty—the penalty in its extreme form: that we've put ourselves where we can't keep the higher contract, the complete one, we made together—because we're bound by one lower and incomplete, to which we've got to be faithful. Isn't that the spirit now, don't you think?"
Again he muttered something inarticulately assenting.
"Well, then, Chip, I'm going." ”

“ Chip didn't remember having said so, and replied to that effect. The stranger was unperturbed.
"No? But you are?" By way of pressing the question, he added, with a glance at Chip through the moonlight: "Aren't you?"
"I've a wife and little boy in New York," Walker answered, soberly.
"Ah!" There was no emphasis on this exclamation. It signified merely that a certain point in their mutual understanding had been reached. "A happy marriage must be a great—safeguard."
The tone was of a man making a moral reflection calmly, but Chip was startled again. ”

“ A good enough woman she was of her kind; but it was no more her husband's kind than it was that of the gods immortal. What was the secret that kept these unequal yoke-fellows together, sympathetic, and tolerably happy, when he and Edith, who were made for each other, had by some force of mutual expulsion been thrust apart? Bland himself was of the type which, in the language that was almost more familiar to him than English, Chip would have called charmeur ”

“ As it was, he found himself driven to a choice between mental aberration on her part and a witch's spell, inclining to the latter—with the witch in the guise of Aunt Emily.
Not that he absolved himself. He made no attempt to do that. But he looked upon his offense as of the kind that naturally calls for mercy rather than severity. What was the letter of the contract in comparison with the spirit?—and he had kept the spirit sacredly. Of course he had done wrong. Who in thunder, he asked, impatiently, ever denied that? But how many men had not done wrong in the same way? ”

“ In it all Chip had found two subjects of wonderment: first, the strange egoism of this middle-aged woman who could see nothing in the expansion of her husband's affections but what was stolen from herself; and then, the extraordinary freak111 of marital loyalty that could keep a man like Emery Bland, with his refinement and his knowledge of the world, true to a woman whom he had once loved, no doubt, in a youthful way, but who was now his inferior by every token of character. ”

“ Turning, Edith saw the woman with the rose-colored parasol rapidly descending the path by which she had come.25
He turned from the girl to his wife. "I'm willing to explain anything you like—as far as I can."
29"I'd still rather stay out here," she said. "If I were to go in, I think it would—"
"Yes? What?"
"I think it would kill me."
"Oh, come, Edith. Let's face the thing calmly. Don't let us become hysterical."
"Am I hysterical, Chip?"
"In your own way, yes. Where another woman would make a fuss, you're unnaturally frozen; but it comes to the same thing. ”