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"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 bête. 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 grâce 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 aërial 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.