What Will People Say? A Novel
"Then I shall probably learn to hate him."
"And to love somebody else?"
"I shall never love anybody but you, Harvey. I've never told anybody
else my real mind as I have you, for I am trained to conceal--always to
conceal."
"But don't conceal from yourself the failure you are going to make of
your life. No woman can play false to her heart and prosper. I beg you
not to despise my love."
"Despise your love!" she cried. "It's myself I despise. Ah, Harvey, try
to understand me."
"I can't! I can only warn you."
"Oh, don't warn me! Don't lecture me! Just love me! Let's not think of
the future--it's always full of tragedy. If we married in all our love,
we should meet so much unhappiness! The most loving love matches I've
known have burned out--ended in divorces and open scandal, or scandal
concealed like ostriches for everybody to see and laugh at. Two people
fall in love and meet opposition and run away together to a preacher.
Then they have nobody to oppose them, so they oppose each other. And by
and by they run away from each other and don't meet till they get to a
divorce court in some small town to avoid the notoriety."
"And you think that you will escape that by marrying without love?"
"Yes. Because I don't expect love. I sha'n't expect Willie to be a
romantic saint, and then hate him for not living up to my
specifications."
"But yourself--your body--you will give that to him?"
She closed her eyes and turned ghastly white as she whispered: "I
suppose so. That's the usual price a woman pays, isn't it?"
He flung her from him as something unclean, common, cheap.
From the huddle she was in she whispered:
"I understand. I--I don't blame you."
There was a sort of burlesque saintliness about her meekness that
nauseated him. He did not realize that she forgave him because his rage
seemed a proof of his love. She would have forgiven him with bruised
lips if he had struck her in the face.
He loathed himself for his vicious wrath, but he almost loathed her more
for compelling it. Yet when she got to her feet and stood clinging to
the velvet curtain, and mumbled:
"It was better that this happened before we were married, wasn't it? And
now that you are cured of loving me I may go, mayn't I?"
He stared at her; his lips parted to utter words he could not find; he
put out his hands, and she went back to his arms. And she cried a
little, not forgetting even in her grief to sob stealthily lest some one
hear. And he understood that, too, and hated her for her eternal
vigilance. Even while he kissed the brackish tears from her cheeks and
eyes he hated her for being so beautiful and so wise, so full of passion
and so discreet.
She wept but a little while, and then she was quiet, reclining against
him in silence and meditating.
And he pondered the mystery of his own behavior. A sense of duty and a
sense of honor had always guided his acts hitherto. This woman acted
upon him like the drug that doctors use for controlling violent patients
and the criminal insane; it leaves the senses all alive but annuls the
power of motion.
Here he was, convinced to the very depths of his soul that it was
abominable to embrace the betrothed of another, yet he did not take his
arms from about her, he did not put her away from him. Instead, he held
her fast even when she made to go. And yet he blamed her.
This much at least he accomplished in the long silence: he ceased to
blame Persis and accused himself, tried himself before the tribunal of
his own soul, and denounced himself as guilty of treason to himself and
her and the laws of the world. But he did not put her from him.
And now, having condemned himself, he followed the usual program and
forgave himself. He bent down and kissed her forehead and her hair, and
tightened his arms about her. She did not answer his kiss. Once more he
felt, as in the sunlight by the brook, that he held only the shell of
her, while her soul--that other man's soul of her--was gone voyaging.
But now it was in the cold of night, in the dark chill of a room long
closed up like a grave and her body was the only warmth in the room, or
in the world for him. It seemed to glow like an ember breathing rosily
in ashes.
And now gradually desire grew imperious, the angry, sullen desire of
Tristan seeing his Isolde given to another man to wife. He burned with
resentment at the ill-treatment accorded him by the fates, who saved his
love and her love for this mockery, this money-infected, money-paralyzed
romance. His wrath rose in revolt against a world where such a sarcasm
was possible. The laws of the world became suspect with the mercy of the
world. The pangs of disprized love were so bitter that he began to claim
revenge, revenge especially on her.
He clenched his arms about her with a new and different ardor--no longer
the sacred fervor of a lover who protects his affianced from himself,
but the outlaw that raids and desecrates.
She understood and was afraid and fought against him, but her mutinous
love fought for him. And nature, and the moonlight, and the scented
breeze purring at the window fought for him. All her beauty clamored to
surrender. She was already lost when some last impulse of horror cried
out against the irreparable profanation. Even as her arms went round him
she murmured:
"Help me! Harvey, help me!"
CHAPTER XLIII
In the panic of her soul there was just honor enough awake to raise that
prayer, and in the fury of his there was just honor enough left to
answer it. It was the one irresistible appeal she could have made--the
cry of "Help!" that never falls in vain on the ears of a man unless he
has become a beast--or a god.
Mysteriously the almost stifled cry released from the dungeon of Forbes'
soul all the powers of decency; they took possession of him anew. His
senses and his muscles obeyed, and he was now so pure-hearted a defender
of Persis' integrity that he resisted even the little moan of almost
regret that escaped her tormented soul when he let her go.
The aftermath of the ordeal was an ague of reaction. The blood seemed to
flow backward into her heart. She was overwhelmed with the terror one
feels for a disaster narrowly escaped, and with shame for the
realization that the credit was none of hers.
Forbes did not take her in his arms, but contented himself with closing
out the breeze that seemed to have turned colder now, and with wrapping
about her quivering shoulders the heavy velvet of the curtain.
Whatever other flaws she had, Persis was not marred by self-conceit.
Even her nobler motives she tended to reinterpret from some cynical
point of view. When she was calmer she spoke with that intelligence of
hers that always chilled Forbes' idealizing heart.
"I can't tell you how grateful I am, Harvey, and how ashamed. I didn't
know I was so--so hopelessly like other people. I didn't know I could
forget myself so completely. But I've learned my lesson. I've had my
scare. And I must keep away from the edge of the cliff. We mustn't meet
alone this way any more, Harvey. I love you too well, and I don't want
to go altogether to the bad, do I? It isn't that I'm good; I'd love to
be good, but I'm afraid I wasn't meant to be. But I must be sensible. I
mustn't be a fool. A woman risks too much, Harvey. It's too hideously
unfair. The consequences would be nothing at all to you--and might be
utter destruction to me. I told you there were a hundred Persises in me.
And now I've seen one of them face to face that I never knew was there.
I've got to starve her to death. We mustn't meet alone any more, must
we?"
He could not say anything without saying too much. So he simply shook
his head and pressed her hand, and, rising, led her from the niche of
peril. With his free hand he found his cigar-lighter and snapped it; but
it would not flame, and they stumbled through an archipelago of
furniture, jostling together, more afraid of contact with each other
than of any other danger.
They walked into the wall, but, groping, found at last the door and
entered the dining-room again. The moonlight was gone, and the first
tide of daybreak was seeping through the windows. There was no
rose-color in this dawn. It promised to be a gray day.
They hurried to the kitchen and came back indeed to life in its most
material surfaces, a chill, drab light beating upon pots and pans.
They bade each other good night and good-by there; but their embrace was
appropriately matter-of-fact, galvanized ware upon cold iron. They
tiptoed wearily up the service stairway and into the main corridor
above.
Here, too, there was daylight like dirty pond water. Persis went
stealthily to the railing of the stairway, and, glancing down, beckoned
to Forbes, who moved to her side and peered where she pointed.
He saw that Willie Enslee, exhausted by his vigil, had fallen asleep on
a sumptuous divan. The divan would have honored a palace, and Willie's
pajamas were of silk, and his bathrobe was of brocaded silk. But after
all it was Willie Enslee that was in them. And he slept with his little
eyes clenched and his mouth ajar. And a cold cigarette was stuck to his
lower lip.
Forbes was impelled to taunt her with a whispered: "There is your
husband. Go to him!"
But when he looked at her she was so wan and pitiful that he could not
be as pitiless as the wan daylight was. She was making an advance
payment on her price; and she was shivering and lonely. So he kissed her
icy hands and whispered to her how beautiful she was and a sorrowful
"God bless you!" and sneaked back into his room, his bachelor room.
Had he paused as once before to throw her another kiss, he would have
found her with her arms stretched out to him pleading for rescue from
the vision she had seen and the unspoken taunt she had understood. But
he did not look back, and she dared not knock at his door. The click of
his lock frightened her, and she fled to her room like a ghost surprised
by the morning.
CHAPTER XLIV
When Forbes shut the door upon Persis (and unwittingly shut out her
little gesture of appeal to come back, be stronger than she was, and
rescue her from herself in spite of herself) he looked from his room
upon a world that was just the colorless color of the glass in his
window.
There was a menace of rain in the sky, and the dawn was a colorless
affair, neither night nor morning. The day woke like a sleeper that has
not rested well.
As a mere formality Forbes took off his clothes and lay down. Life was
colorless ahead of him. The woman who had fascinated him utterly had
utterly disappointed him. She loved Forbes, but not his penury; she
would marry Enslee's money, but not Enslee. She wanted success in
life--called it her "career"!
Men, he knew, put their careers first, made everything subservient to
success, asked their women to kowtow to it. Perhaps women were going to
do the same thing. Perhaps they had been all these centuries hunting
success and disguising the materialism of their ambition under more
romantic words, aided in their deceit by the numberless gallantries of
authors. Perhaps Persis was not different from millions of women, except
for being frank where the others were hypocrites, more or less
intentionally.
This thought softened his heart toward Persis, and he regretted it. He
did not want to think softly of Persis any more. It unnerved his
resolution, and uncertainty and irresolution were terrific strains on a
man of action and precision. If he could renounce Persis with contempt
he would be able to close that incident and resume the progress of
life. But to find in every beauty of hers something of ugliness, and to
find in every cruelty of hers something to respect and something to
pity, was the paralysis of decision.