“That woman!” I said, with a return of the horror. “I wish someone would kill her!”
Chapter Twenty-Three
It was a long while before we came in contact with Beatrice and Dan Hendricks again. Bee avoided us as assiduously as we avoided her. I happened to hear that she had given no real explanation of refusing to attend any affair where we were expected, but opinion seemed rather stately towards us. I raged at this, but Livy merely smiled. Of course, Dan was not invited anywhere.
I suppose to follow out tradition I should have hated Dan Hendricks. But I did not. I felt merely sad; I felt that fate had warped all our lives in some incomprehensible fashion, and that as victims we ought to sympathize with each other. What if Dan had not come to Sarah Faire’s house that spring day, and if she had not taken any interest in him? And those violin lessons, given to an impressionable and lonely boy? In the natural course of events, meeting with sympathy and kindness and complete, voiceless understanding from Livy, he would surely have loved her, as who did not? Her honesty would have answered his honesty; her amusement at illusions and delusions would have replied to his. And I? I would not have had this sick heaviness in me all the time. It would have taken a long time to get over Livy, but I would have done it eventually. Not that I even now doubted Livy’s love for me. I knew she loved me. She was devoted to everything that concerned me. No one could have had a finer wife. But I had always known of a little reserve in her; her ideas often conflicted with mine, and so eventually she did not argue with me on anything important to her. But that quiet, reserved room would have been flung wide open for Dan; he would have been at home there, familiar with everything in it.
No, I did not hate him. Strange to say, what I knew only made my love for him stronger. I pitied him, and this pity prohibited any hate or jealousy I might have felt otherwise.
Months telescoped into months, and a year passed. And another. We had no children, and my mother, who felt deprived, seemed to feel that Livy might have had a child if she had wanted it. At any rate, when she mentioned our childlessness she would glance at Livy reproachfully. I did not care particularly, and as we grew older, I cared less.
Livy did not mention Dan or Bee to me. I did not speak of them, either. But one day something brought Beatrice irresistibly to my mind, and I cursed her to Livy. To my surprise, she shook her head slowly.
“No, you ought to pity her, Jim,” she said sadly. “You see, Dan is the one at fault. He did her a great wrong. He married her, not caring for her; he knew all about her. He had some vague obsession in his mind, and made her a victim of it. I saw Bee a few times before she married him. Of course, his new money was the most important thing in her mind, and I think she despised him for what she believed he felt for her mother. But I think in a way she came to care about him as much as she could care about anyone before they were married. He—he could be very nice when he wanted to be. And then when she married him, she must have seen anything wholesome or decent would never happen. If he had liked her at all, he might have saved her from herself, or himself. But he didn’t. So she tried something else. I don’t know why, but a standing in this little town was important to her. She tried to substitute what she would call social position for what Dan had cheated her out of. But he would not help her. I’m not blaming him, Jim. It seemed so trivial to him that he hardly thought of it. But he could have helped her, even out of kindness. That’s all she had, her poor little ambitions. But, he would not help her.” She took a few careful stitches, without looking at me. “And that’s why she really hates him, though I don’t suppose she knows why. He had no right to marry her, knowing that he could not, and would not, try to make her at all happy. He just didn’t consider Bee as a human being at all. She was just a symbol to him. He bought her just like he would have bought a picture that reminded him of something precious, without a single personal regard for the picture at all.”
I was astounded at this compassion and mercy. So I could say nothing. I knew that Livy had hit upon part of the truth, anyway. But not all of the truth, I am sure.
Sarah was sick again that winter, and I cared for her. I looked into her soft and bewildered eyes, the skin wrinkled about them like old silk. Her red hair was almost white, and her fingers trembled continually. I remembered what Livy had said, and I could not help wondering what Bee might have been if her mother, during Bee’s childhood, had recognized the inherent evil in her daughter and had met that evil nobly and courageously, marching towards it, full of love and understanding, breaking it down, raising up what good there was in the girl, and resolutely and honestly cultivating it. But she had been shrinkingly silent before that evil; she had turned from it, and so it had flourished. Perhaps that was because Sarah was not intelligent, and Bee was very intelligent. Intelligence of any kind seems to loathe cowardice, and Sarah, in her gentleness and retiring timidity, had been a coward. Bee, as much as Dan, stood alone.
I found myself pitying her, and angrily tried to whip up resentment again. She was an adult now, no longer very young, and, as I have said, exceptionally intelligent. She must have seen that there was something besides baseness in other human beings, that occasionally an altruistic act is done for other than ulterior motives. She must have known that our new little free hospital gave profits to no one, and that my father and I worked in it without recompense, and that the salaries of the nurses and other attendants came out of private pockets, many of which felt the pinch. She must have known that there was beauty in the world besides greed, honor besides dishonor, unselfishness as well as avarice. But she would not see. If she had been a fool, this might have been forgiven her.
The Spanish-American War threw us into wild excitement. I went, of course, very smart if I must admit it, in my officer’s uniform. I was assigned to Army hospitals, and was never in any danger at all, even what there was of it in that comic-opera war. I met Theodore Roosevelt, and was not particularly impressed either by his sincerity, oratory, or teeth. I thought the Big Stick idea very silly, personally. He lacked dignity, and I have always been a stickler for dignity and smoothness.
Practically every young man in South Kenton enlisted or tried to enlist. All of them, except Dan Hendricks. He was as remote from this war as he was from South Kenton. I doubt if any calamity would ever have brought him very close to living as we knew it, not even the World War that occurred so many years after his death. For the first time I resented his remoteness; I thought it unhuman, almost insolent. No human being, I thought, has the right to show by every gesture and glance, that he considered himself not one with the rest of humanity. Then I had to admit, with bewilderment, that I knew very little about him after all. No one had ever known much about him.
Except, perhaps, Mortimer Rugby. Mortimer was growing old. He had retreated into himself like an old tree, turning his roots away from the tangle of roots of his fellows. When I returned on a furlough, I asked him somewhat sarcastically if Dan had enlisted yet. He smiled at me dryly, and shook his head.
“Dan doesn’t think much of war,” he said, eying me humorously. “He doesn’t disapprove of it, either. Thinks it’s a healthy, natural instinct. Only last night he talked to me about it. Said we had transformed the sexual instinct into literature, sculpture, music, and brotherly love. But we hadn’t transformed the natural, primitive instinct of war into anything valuable. We can’t have war in civilized society, he said, not if that society is to exist. But, we haven’t turned its great force into anything valuable. All we’ve done is to substitute monotony for it; we teach monotony in our schools, we preach it, calling it law and order and regularity and peace. We get deadly people to teach it, mediocre people without strength or integrity. No, Dan said, the deadly people are not the criminals and the warmakers. They are not the exploiters or the thieves. They are the people who teach conformity, mediocre wretches without imagination. Remember what Napoleon said, Jim, when advisors told him that he wouldn’t be able to get war-tired men to follow him again? And he said: ‘Ye
s, they will. You see, I am rescuing them from button factories.’
“And that’s the cause of war, Jim: button factories. Squeezing out of the adventurous human animal every drop of color and adventure and excitement and glamour. People go mad in monotony, Jim. Monotony is death, living death. And, as Dan says, they’ll escape from this death in life, this organized and colorless living, into the grand and healthy and natural explosion of War. To prevent war, you must direct its glory and power into an exciting, valuable and adventurous peace.”
“Sounds crazy to me,” I said. “How would you, or Dan, do it?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Dan says the first thing you must do is to get rid of mediocrity of any kind, any formula, whatever its name. Mediocrity, he says, is always dead. It never lives. It is static and motionless. Part of ‘deadliness.’ It’s like a corpse’s hand on a living heart. You’ve got to get rid of it.”
I did not see Dan during that visit. If possible, public hatred was stronger against him than ever. War is a great knitter of all sorts of souls, but he had not been touched. As far as he was concerned, there was no war.
When I came home after peace was declared (wondering what it had all been about, anyway), Livy told me that Dan had left Beatrice. Oh, nothing final and public, of course. He had merely gone back to his farm. Beatrice had explained that the separation was only temporary, and that she had to stay in town because of her mother’s chronic illness. But, she said—and I found it to be true—she visited Dan at his farm, and often stayed two or three days. Sarah had refused to live with Bee, much to public indignation, but Bee gently and affectionately explained that Sarah was deeply attached to her own dear little house. Wasn’t Dan queer, liking to live out there in that old farmhouse, without conveniences and everything? However, when Mama was better, she would, as a dutiful wife, leave town and live with him on his farm, if he did not finally decide to return “home.”
I felt that Dan and I would never meet as friends again. I often passed his farm, and glanced at it from a distance, wistfully. At night there would be a light in one of the windows, and the garden was full of color in summer. But somehow it seemed as remote as Dan, in another dimension, where one could not go.
I remember most vividly passing there late one night. It was early spring, a still night full of sharply exploding stars and breathing earth. Everything was very still. I stopped my horse and waited. I had no intention of turning in, but looking at the house I had a sense of remoteness, of other-worldliness, of great peace, foreign to my experience. I felt the old sadness, the old puzzled longing for Dan, a desire that did not seem connected with any human emotion or affection.
I could see the yellow light pouring out onto the earth through the leaded windows. It was not a light that invited or beckoned; its very warmth warned one away. Then, of a sudden, Dan began to play his violin, and the distance muffled the usual strong blurring with which he played. The notes entered the silence of the night, pure and lonely, as lofty as unearthly thought, full of unhuman pain and longing. They were like the clear, faint light of the stars, untouchable, unwarming, unknowable. I recognized the melody as being that of the Meditation from Thaïs, but into it Dan had infused his own meditation, so that it seemed like a strange voice singing a familiar song, giving to it alien meaning and unknown emotion. I felt somehow that if I could only understand it, I would understand Dan, but though the notes reached my ear they told me nothing, and only made me unbearably depressed, filling me with a sort of vague and spiritual suffering. I could stand it no longer and rode on; I had the odd feeling that I was leaving a friend forever behind because I could not understand him.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Late that fall there was an unusually violent outbreak of influenza in South Kenton, and my father and I were kept very busy. My father finally took sick and the whole burden fell upon me. We moved patients from the farms and slums into the little free hospital, and sent to Ripley for nurses. Dr. Winslow came to South Kenton to help me, but as he was a genial tea-drinker, and better at holding feminine hands than at making a correct diagnosis, he was not of much assistance.
Livy’s sister, Lucille, was ill in Ripley, and Livy went there to be with her, and to help in the crowded household of little children and two servants. I ate my meals with my mother, who was tired from nursing my father.
The farm folk, as usual, seemed to be hardest hit of any, and I rode in a weary daze over the country roads, half asleep in my saddle, and arrived home in a state of total exhaustion. Even when asleep, I shuddered at the ringing of the telephone, for it meant a weary crawl out of warm sheets into the cold and bitter air of November nights. But eventually the accumulating fatigue-poisons in my systems served to intoxicate me so that I felt a high nervous tension, and could not sleep even when I finally got to bed. I was painfully awake, every nerve twitching, “worms crawling in my bones,” as my father used to express it. For the first time in a long while I was conscious of a feverish desire for excitement, for color and vivacity. My life suddenly seemed drab and tedious, when it wasn’t aching with weariness. I hated to return home at night, even when I was so exhausted that every step was an ache. To return, to close the door after me, to go to bed, was revoltingly final, as though I had shut life out.
I came back from a country trip one night about eight o’clock. The town looked unbearably shut and shabby by the few street lamps. Not a friendly light anywhere, not a gay voice or an invitation to relaxing merriment and cheer. I knew that I could not return home just then; I had to see a healthly face, hear a healthy, serene voice.
I passed Mortimer Rugby’s house, gaunt, grim, unclothed under the cold November sky. Every window was shut and dark, except one. This one was called Mortimer’s “study,” and was on the first floor. It was his retreat from a life that harassed and tore him even now. It had a separate entrance with a little porch hidden from the street, so that in the summer the thick vines gave him privacy. In the large window of the study shone a friendly lamplight. Mortimer was poor company, if one was seeking lightness and gaiety, but he was better than nothing. I could smoke a pipe with him, look at his books, and warm myself at his fire. I remembered that he had a few bottles of old wine which he occasionally brought out for me when I visited him. I decided to go in, and went round the side of the house to the separate entrance.
Looking back, now, I wonder what would have happened if I had not gone there that night, if I had ridden by? I did not know, then, that on this innocent act a man’s life hung. Sometimes, remembering, I wonder if I would have gone in, knowing in my heart of hearts what a coward I really am, how I have always felt a passion for ease, for lack of complications.
I knocked on the door of Mortimer’s study. I thought I heard the murmur of voices in there, and I was pleased. I knew it was not his wife, for he did not let her in there often, and besides, I had passed her only fifteen minutes ago on the way to see a sick friend.
The door opened, and Mortimer blinked at me. For a long moment he hesitated, then he said so heartily that I suspected he spoke for the benefit of his other, invisible visitor: “Jim! By my soul! Come in, boy, come in!”
I went in. It was warm in there, shabby and a little gaunt, but comfortable. Sitting by the fire, placidly smoking, sat Dan Hendricks. He looked up idly as I stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, and nodded, smiled, as though he had seen me only yesterday.
“Hello,” he said in a friendly voice. “Cold out?”
“Yes,” I answered. I could feel my face burn, and even my ears. My heart thumped dizzily; if I could have run out without shame I would have done it. Mortimer pulled off my coat, and pushed me towards the fire. I stood before it, rubbing my hands in an agony. The last time I had seen Dan rushed up, obliterating time, making it only yesterday. And in the meantime he looked at me with his bland and unreadable eyes, smiling affectionately, his legs crossed as he slouched in his chair, his pipe gripped between his teeth. He looked much older than his thirty year
s, but it did not seem the physical age of wrinkles or even of the small gray patches that had begun prematurely to bleach his temples. No, it was an age that had nothing to do with the flesh. He was a great deal thinner than when I had last seen him, and shabbier. Yet I had an impression of unusual force and power in him, a compactness and ease.
Again, there was no mention of the years that had passed silently between us. He merely asked me, with casual solicitude if I hadn’t had my hands full lately. Fools, he said, blamed the unusually cold weather, but wise men were looking for a virus. There was always a virus in every illness, he said, looking at me with the clear eyes of a child. But somehow of all the casual and hatefully indifferent things we said that night, that is the only thing I remember very clearly.
He did not ask me about my parents, of Livy, or anything that had occurred to me. He forced me back, invisibly. He never gave me a chance to cross that silent bridge. I saw you yesterday, he seemed to say. Deny that, if you dare, either to yourself or to me.
So we all talked of the weather, the late crops. Dan mentioned with a smile that, because of the flooded fields that year, he had the only decent crop of potatoes. He told us a humorous anecdote of a neighboring farmer, and we laughed. Mortimer sat between us, facing the fire, his dry, veined hands between his knees, the firelight in the wrinkles on his nutlike face, his bright and bitter eyes wandering from Dan to me and then back again. I knew I was an intruder, but not an unwelcome one, at least to Mortimer. What Dan thought of my coming I did not know. But I found myself staring at him earnestly, almost imploringly. Come back, Dan, I begged inwardly. He suddenly glanced at me as I said that in my heart, and his eyes rested on me with a grave, startled expression, as though he had heard. I felt my eyes grow tight and arid. He glanced away after a moment, and stared at the fire. His face fell into lines of grim dignity and removed weariness. My throat was dry and taut; it was as if he had openly repudiated me, warned me off, and I could taste a heavy sickness in my mouth.