Phases of an Inferior Planet Part 27

To his more self-contained nature the violence of Mariana's grief was like the searing of the bleeding sores in his own heart. To avoid that cry of stricken motherhood he would have given the better portion of his life--to have been deaf to that impulsive expression of a pain he felt but could not utter he would have d.a.m.ned his soul.

And when, during the first few days, Mariana gathered together all the scattered little garments, and brooded over them with the pa.s.sion of irremediableness, he would cry aloud out of his own bitterness,

"Put them away! If you love me, Mariana, hide them."

But Mariana, in the selfishness of loss, would glance at him with reproachful eyes, and turn to stroke the rubber doll in its bright-hued dress, and the half-worn socks with the impress of restless feet.

In the night she would start from a troubled sleep with corroding self-questionings. "Make a light," she would say, fretfully, sitting up and staring into the gloom. "Make a light. The darkness stifles me. I can't breathe."

Then, when the flame of the candle would flare up beside her, she would turn upon Anthony the blaze of her excited eyes, and play upon the sheet with feverish fingers. The loss of sleep which these spasms entailed upon Algarcife was an additional drain upon his wrecking system, and sometimes in sheer exhaustion he would plead for peace.

"Mariana, only sleep. Lie still, and I will fan you--or shall I give you bromide?"

But the hot questions would rush upon him and he would answer them as he had answered such questions for the past six weeks.

"Was it my fault? Could I have done anything? Was it taken away because I didn't want it to come?"

"Mariana!"

"Do you remember that I said I hoped it would die? You knew they were idle words, didn't you? You knew that I didn't mean it?"

"Of course, my dearest."

"But somebody told me once that for every idle word we would be held to account. Is this the account?"

"Hush."

For a moment she would lie silent, and then, rising again, the torrent would come.

"Perhaps if I had not left the window open that first warm day. And I did not send for the doctor at once. I thought it was only fretful.

Perhaps--"

"You could have done nothing."

"I did not know. I was so ignorant. I should have studied. I should have asked questions."

Then she would turn towards him, laying her hot hand upon his arm.

"Tell me that it was not my fault. Tell me--tell me!"

"It was not. It was not."

"But I want her so. I want to feel her. I want to feel her soft and warm in my arms. Oh, my baby!"

And so the summer nights would wear away.

But as time went on a reactionary lethargy pervaded her. Her vitality being spent, she was left limp and devoid of energy. For hours she would lie motionless in the heated room, the afternoon sun, intensified by the reflected glare of pressed brick, streaming upon her, and she would appear to be indifferent to both heat and glare. From Algarcife she turned with an avoidance which was almost instinctive. When he touched her she shrank into silence, when he spoke she met his words with lethargic calm. It was as if the demands he made upon her emotional nature became irksome to her when that nature lay dormant.

"I suppose I love you," she said one day, in answer to his questions. "I think I do, but I don't feel it. I don't feel anything. I only want to forget."

"Not to forget me, Mariana?"

Mariana shook her head impatiently.

"Do you know," she continued, "that the thought of feeling makes me positively sick? I haven't any left, and I don't like it in other people. I am tired of it all."

"And of me?"

"I don't know. I think not, but I oughtn't to have married you."

"Mariana!"

"It would have been much better. You said so yourself once. But love is so strange. It makes people do such absurd things."

Algarcife did not reply. There was resentment in the look he bent upon her. He had not learned that even a woman in love is not a woman always in love--that love, in common with all other conditions, is subject to the forces which attract and repel, and that its equilibrium is maintained by a logical adjustment of opposites. To him Mariana's alienation betokened a fundamental failing in her nature, and with the thought he experienced a dull anger.

"I have felt so much in my life," continued Mariana, "that my capacity for sensations is lying fallow. The lack of ice in my tea and the heat in my room are of more importance than the excesses of affection. Were you ever that way?"

For a moment Algarcife did not reply; then he said, "You are very uncomfortable?"

"Yes."

"When we leave The Gotham it will be still worse. That room on Fourth Street is h.e.l.lish."

"No doubt."

"How will you stand it?"

Mariana interlaced her fingers with impatient weariness and yawned.

"I don't know. As I stand it now, I suppose. We are poorer than ever, aren't we?"

"Poorer than ever."

She fingered her gown softly. "I suppose I shouldn't have bought this mourning," she said. "What a pity!"

When Anthony had gone she went out upon the fire-escape and looked down into the street below. The cry of a vender rolling his cart of over-ripe melons came up to her, and she followed his figure with curious intentness. From some indefinable cause, the vender suggested Signor Morani to her mind, and she recalled his warning, as she had recalled it in a different mood that rainy evening over a year ago. She realized now that Anthony's objection to her accepting Signor Morani's offer was still a canker within her heart. There remained, and there would always remain, the possibility that had she overruled his objection and entered into the engagement, Isolde might have been sent from the city, and might now be playing in some country meadow. The possibility, facing her as it did in all its ghastliness, produced a gnawing remorse, as invincible as a devil's thrust.

Upon this followed the conception that her marriage had doomed to failure not only her own life, but Anthony's; and there came a pa.s.sionate regret for the part she had played in drawing him from his isolated abstraction into the turmoil of life and its pa.s.sions. She blamed herself that she had gone to him that night, carrying the letter in her hand. She blamed herself that she had not resisted the appeal of her love, and, with a sudden pang, she realized all that the change had meant to him--the book that remained unwritten, the treadmill of uncongenial toil, the physical hardihood which was being slowly ground to dust. She realized this in its fulness, but with no determination of endeavor, no resolutions to battle more with fate. There was regret for the past, but there were no pledges for the future. The outcome was beyond her and beyond Anthony, this she knew. It was something to be left to the floodgates of hope that would be overborne by the press of time. In the lowered state of her vitality she felt almost indifferently her own inability to contest for larger measures of individual gain. She accepted destiny, and acquiesced, not in resignation, but in the apathy of one whom despair has drugged.

And above it all there rose the desire to escape, to be freed from it forever. "If he had never seen me!" she cried, pa.s.sionately. "If he had never seen me!" Then colorless adumbrations of her own past blocked her horizon--and she confronted the ashes of her aspirations. She saw those illuminated dreams of her girlhood--the ideals which had crumbled at the corroding touch of care. She saw the demand for power which had been thwarted, the ambitions which had been undone, the cry for life more abundant which had been forced back upon her quivering lips. She saw herself walking day after day with empty arms along the way she had carried the child. She saw herself a drag upon her own existence and upon the existence of the man for whom she thought a love she had no power to feel. She saw the stretch of those monotonous and neutral-toned years, saw the sordid fight for bread, saw her sense of joy and beauty blunted, saw the masculine brain that was fitted to grasp universal laws decaying in the atmosphere of vulgar toil. And, woven and interwoven in her thoughts, was the knowledge that the affection to be invigorated by deprivations and to rise triumphant over poverty was not hers--that the love which in happier surroundings might have shown inviolable, which the great calamities of life might have left una.s.sailed, had grown gray in the round of unsatisfied desires and victorious commonplaces. In the days to come, would not the jarring notes of their natures be exaggerated, the sympathetic ones suppressed? When old age came, as come it surely would, what would remain to them save a memory of discords and a present of unfulfilment? Was not death itself preferable to death in life?

Down on the sidewalk below a ragged urchin was turning somersaults in the shade. Suddenly, with a howl of delight, he pounced upon a half-rotten peach which a pa.s.ser-by had thrown into the gutter. Mariana smiled faintly, left the fire-escape, and went in-doors.

A week later they gave up The Gotham and moved into the room on Fourth Street. Algarcife made an attempt to sell the greater part of his library before moving, but the price offered was merely nominal, and at the last moment his heart misgave him. So he hired a dilapidated van, and the books were transported to the new lodgings and stacked along the south wall.

When the hour came for their departure, it was with a feeling of despair that he took Mariana's bag and descended for the last time the steps of The Gotham. A black finality seemed looming beyond their destination.

At the entrance, Mr. Nevins, with tears in his eyes, grasped Anthony's hand, and Miss Ramsey fell upon Mariana's neck.