Chapter 19. The Sixth Sense

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_ CHAPTER XIX. THE SIXTH SENSE

As Corinna went forward, with that strange premonitory chill at her heart, it seemed to her that all the fragrance of the garden floated toward her with a piercing sweetness that was the very essence of youth and spring. Through the wide-open French windows she could see the garden terrace, the pale rows of iris, and the straight black cedars rising against the pomegranate-coloured light of the afterglow. A few tall white candles were shining in old silver candlesticks; but it was by the vivid tint in the sky that she saw the large, frightened eyes of the woman who was waiting for her.

"If I had only known you were here, I should have hurried home," began Corinna cordially. Drawing a chair close to her visitor, she sat down with a movement that was protecting and reassuring. Her quick sympathies were already aroused. She surmised that Alice Rokeby had come to her because she was in trouble; and it was not in Corinna's nature to refuse to hear or to help any one who appealed to her.

Alice threw back her lace veil as if she were stifled by the transparent mesh. "In the shop there are so many interruptions," she answered. "I wanted to see you--" Breaking off hurriedly, she hesitated an instant, and then repeated nervously, "I wanted to see you--"

Corinna smiled at her. "Would you like to go out into the garden? May is so lovely there."

"No, it is very pleasant here." Alice made a vague, helpless gesture with her small hands, and said for the third time, "I wanted to see you--"

"I am afraid you are not well." Corinna spoke very gently. "Perhaps it is not too late for tea, or may I get you a glass of wine? All winter I've intended to go and inquire because I heard you'd been ill. It has been so long since we really saw anything of each other; but I remember you quite well as a little girl--such a pretty little girl you were too. You are ever so much younger, at least ten years younger, than I am."

As she rippled on, trying to give the other time to recover herself, she thought how lovely Alice had once been, and how terribly she had broken since her divorce and her illness. She would always be appealing--the kind of woman with whom men easily fell in love--but one so soon reached the end of mere softness and prettiness.

"Yes, you were one of the older girls," answered Alice, "and I admired you so much. I used to sit on the front porch for hours to watch you go by."

"And then I went abroad, and we lost sight of each other."

"We both married, and I got a divorce last year."

"I heard that you did." It seemed futile to offer sympathy.

"My marriage was a mistake. I was very unhappy. I have had a hard life," said Alice, and her lower lip, as soft as a baby's, trembled nervously. How little character there was in her face, how little of anything except that indefinable allurement of sex!

"I know," responded Corinna consolingly. She felt so strong beside this helpless, frightened woman that the old ache to comfort, to heal pain, was like a pang in her heart.

"Everything has failed me," murmured Alice, with the restless volubility of a weak nature. "I thought there was something that would make up for what I had missed--something that would help me to live--but that has failed me like everything else--"

"Things will fail," assented Corinna, with sympathy, "if we lean too hard on them."

A delicate flush had come into Alice's face, bringing back for a moment her old flower-like loveliness. Her fine brown hair drooped in a wave on her forehead, and beneath it her violet eyes were deep and wistful.

"What a beautiful room!" she said in a quivering voice. "And the garden is like one in an old English song."

"Yes, I hardly know which I love best--my garden or my shop."

The words were so far from Corinna's thoughts that they seemed to drift to her from some distant point in space, out of the world beyond the garden and the black brows of the cedars. They were as meaningless as the wind that brought them, or the whirring of the white moth at the window. Beneath her vacant words and expressionless gestures, which were like the words and gestures of an automaton, she was conscious of a profound current of feeling which flowed steadily between Alice Rokeby and herself; and on this current there was borne all the inarticulate burden of womanhood. "Poor thing, she wants me to help her," she thought; but aloud she said only: "The roses are doing so well this year. They will be the finest I have ever had."

Suddenly Alice lowered her veil and rose. "I must go. It is late," she said, and held out her hand. Then, while she stood there, with her hand still outstretched, all that she had left unspoken appeared to rush over her in a torrent, and she asked rapidly, while her lips jerked like the lips of a hurt child, "Is it true, Corinna, that you are going to marry John Benham?"

For an instant Corinna looked at her without speaking. The sympathy in her heart ceased as quickly as a fountain that is stopped; and she was conscious only of that lifeless chill with which she had entered the room. Now that the question had come, she knew that she had dreaded it from the first moment her eyes had rested on the face of her visitor, that she had expected it from the instant when she had heard that a woman awaited her in the house. It was something of which she had been aware, and yet of which she had been scarcely conscious--as if the knowledge had never penetrated below the surface of her perceptions. And it would be so easy, she knew, to evade it now as she had evaded it from the beginning, to push to-day into to-morrow for the rest of her life. Nothing stood in her way; nothing but that deep instinct for truth on which, it seemed to her now, most of her associations with men had been wrecked. Then, because she was obliged to obey the law of her nature, she answered simply, "Yes, we expect to be married."

A strangled sound broke from Alice's lips, but she bit it back before it had formed into a word. The hand that she had thrown out blindly fell on the fringe of her gown, and she began knitting it together with trembling fingers. "Has he--does he care for you?" she asked presently in that hurried voice.

For the second time Corinna hesitated; and in that instant of hesitation, she broke irrevocably with the past and with the iron rule of tradition. She knew how her mother, how her grandmother, how all the strong and quiet women of her race would have borne themselves in a crisis like this--the implications and evasions which would have walled them within the garden that was their world. Her mother, she realized, would have been as incapable of facing the situation as she would have been of creating it.

"Yes, he cares for me," she answered frankly; and then, before the terror that leaped into the eyes of the other woman, as if she longed to turn and run out of the house, Corinna touched her gently on the shoulder. "Don't look like that!" It was unendurable to her compassionate heart that she should have brought that look into the eyes of any living creature.

She led Alice back to the chairs they had left; and when the servant came in to turn on the softly shaded lamps, they sat there, facing each other, in a silence which seemed to Corinna to be louder than any sound. There was the noise of wonder in it, and tragedy, and something vaguely menacing to which she could not give a name. It was fear, and yet it was not fear because it was so much worse. Only the blank terror in Alice's face, the terror of the woman who has lost hope, could express what it meant. And this terror translated into sound asked presently:

"Are--are you sure?"

A wave of pity surged through Corinna's heart. Her strength became to her something on which she could rest--which would not fail her; and she understood why she had had to meet so many disappointments in life, why she had had to bear so much that was almost unbearable. It was because, however strong emotion was in her nature, there was always something deep down in her that was stronger than any emotion. She had been ruled not by passion but by law, by some clear moral discernment of things as they ought to be; and this was why weak persons, or those who were the prey to their own natures, leaned on her with all their weight. In that instant of self-realization she knew that the refuge of the weak would be for ever denied her, that she should always be alone because she was strong enough to rely on her own spirit.

"Before I answer your question," she said, "I must know if you have the right to ask it."

The wistful eyes grew bright again. How graceful she was, thought Corinna as she watched her; and she knew that this woman, with her clinging sweetness, like the sweetness of honeysuckle, and her shallow violence of mood, could win the kind of love that had been denied to her own royal beauty. This other woman was the ephemeral incarnate, the thing for which men gave their lives. She was nothing; and therefore every man would see in her the reflection of what he desired.

"I have the right," she answered desperately, without pride and without shame. "I had the right before I got my divorce--"

"I understand," said Corinna, and her voice was scarcely more than a breath. Though she did not withdraw the hand that the other had taken, she looked away from her through the French window, into the garden where the twilight was like the bloom on a grape. The fragrance became suddenly intolerable. It seemed to her to be the scent not only of spring, but of death also, the ghost of all the sweetness that she had missed. "I shall never be able to bear the smell of spring again in my life," she thought. She had made no movement of surprise or resentment, for there was neither surprise nor resentment in her heart. There was pain, which was less pain than a great sadness; and there was the thought that she was very lonely; that she must always be lonely. Many thoughts passed through her mind; but beyond them, stretching far away into the future, she saw her own life like a deserted road filled with dead leaves and the sound of distant voices that went by. She could never find rest, she knew. Rest was the one thing that had been denied her--rest and love. Her destiny was the destiny of the strong who must give until they have nothing left, until their souls are stripped bare. "He must have cared for you," she said at last. Oh, how empty words were! How empty and futile!

"He could never care again like that for any one else," replied Alice, reaching out her hand as if she were pushing away an object she feared. "Whatever he thinks now, he could never care that much again."

Whatever he thinks now! A smile tinged with bitter knowledge flickered on Corinna's lips for an instant. After all, how little, how very little she knew of John Benham. She had seen the face he turned to the world; she had seen the crude outside armour of his public conscience. A laugh broke from her at the phrase because she remembered that Vetch had first used it. This other woman had entered into the secret chamber, the hidden places, of John Benham's life; she had been a part of the light and darkness of his soul. To Corinna, remembering his reserve, his dignity, his moderation in thought and feeling, there was a shock in the discovery that the perfect balance, the equilibrium of his temperament, had been overthrown. Certainly in their serene and sentimental association she had stumbled on no hidden fires, no reddening embers of that earlier passion. Yet she understood that even in her girlhood, even in the April freshness of her beauty, she had never touched the depths of his nature. It was Alice Rokeby--frightened, shallow, desperate, deserted, whom he had loved.

"What do you want?" she asked quietly. "What do you wish me to do?"

"Oh, I don't know!" replied Alice. "I don't know. I haven't thought--but there ought to be something. There ought to be something more permanent than love for one to live by."

In her anguish she had wrung a profound truth from experience; and as soon as she had uttered it, she lifted her pale face and stared with that mournful interrogation into the twilight. Something permanent to live by! In the mute desperation of her look she appeared to be searching the garden, the world, and the immense darkness of the sky, for an answer. The afterglow had faded slowly into the blue dusk of night; only a faint thread of gold still lingered beyond the cedars on the western horizon. Something permanent and indestructible! Was this what humanity had struggled for--had lived and fought and died for--since man first came up out of the primeval jungle? Where could one find unalterable peace if it were not high above the ebb and flow of desire? She herself might break away from codes and customs; but she could not break away from the strain of honour, of simple rectitude, which was in her blood and had made her what she was.

"Yes, there ought to be something. There is something," she said slowly. Though her hand still clasped Alice Rokeby's, she was gazing beyond her across the terrace into the garden. She thought of many things while she sat there, with that look of clairvoyance, of radiant vision, in her eyes. Of Alice Rokeby as a little girl in a white dress, with a blue hair ribbon that would never stay tied; of John Benham when she had played ball with him in her childhood; of Kent Page and that young love, so poignant while it lasted, so utterly dead when it was over; of her long, long search for perfection, for something that would not pass away; of the brief pleasures and the vain expectations of life; of the gray deserted road filled with dead leaves and the sound of voices far off--Nothing but dead leaves and distant voices that went by! In spite of her beauty, her brilliance, her gallant heart, this was what life had brought to her at the end. Only loneliness and the courage of those who have given always and never received.

"There is something else," she said again. "There is courage." Then, as the other woman made no reply, she went on more rapidly: "I will do what I can. It is very little. I cannot change him. I cannot make him feel again. But you can trust me. You are safe with me."

"I know that," answered Alice in a voice that sounded muffled and husky. "I have always known that." She rose and readjusted her veil. "That means a great deal," she added. "Oh, I think it means that the world has grown better!"

Corinna stooped and kissed her. "No, it only means that some of us have learned to live without happiness."

She went with Alice to the door, and then stood watching her descend the steps and enter the small closed car in the drive. There was a touching grace in the slight, shrinking figure, as if it embodied in a single image all the women in the world who had lost hope. "Yet it is the weak, the passive, who get what they want in the end," thought Corinna, as dispassionately as if she were merely a spectator. "I suppose it is because they need it more. They have never learned to do without. They do not know how to carry a broken heart." Then she smiled as she turned back into the house. "It is very late, and the only certain rules are that one must dine and one must dress for dinner."

A little later, when John Benham was announced and she came down to the drawing-room, her first glance at his face told her that she must be looking her best. She was wearing black, and beneath the white lock in her dark hair, her face was flushed with the colour of happiness. Only her eyes, velvet soft and as deep as a forest pool, had a haunted look.

"I have never," he said, "seen you look better."

She laughed. After all, one might permit a touch of coquetry in the final renouncement! "Perhaps you have never really seen me before."

Though he looked puzzled, he responded gaily: "On the contrary, I have seen little else for the last two or three months."

There was an edge of irony to her smile. "Were you looking at me or my shadow?"

He shook his head. "Are shadows ever as brilliant as that?"

Then before she could answer the Judge came in with his cordial outstretched hand and his air of humorous urbanity, as if he were too much interested in the world to censure it, and yet too little interested to take it seriously. His face, with its thin austere features and its kindly expression, showed the dryness that comes less from age than from quality. Benham, looking at him closely, thought, "He must be well over eighty, but he hasn't changed so much as a hair of his head in the last twenty years."

At dinner Corinna was very gay; and her father, whose habit it was not to inquire too deeply, observed only that she was looking remarkably well. The dining-room was lighted by candles which flickered gently in the breeze that rose and fell on the terrace. In this wavering illumination innumerable little shadows, like ghosts of butterflies, played over the faces of the two men, whose features were so much alike and whose expressions differed so perversely. In both Nature had bred a type; custom and tradition had moulded the plastic substance and refined the edges; but, stronger than either custom or tradition, the individual temperament, the inner spirit of each man, had cast the transforming flame and shadow over the outward form. And now they were alike only in their long, graceful figures, in their thin Roman features, in their general air of urbane distinction.

"We were talking at the club of the strike," said the Judge, who had finished his soup with a manner of detachment, and sat now gazing thoughtfully at his glass of sherry. "The opinion seems to be that it depends upon Vetch."

Benham's voice sounded slightly sardonical. "How can anything depend upon a weathercock?"

"Well, there's a chance, isn't there, that the weather may decide it?"

"Perhaps. In the way that the Governor will find to his advantage." Benham had leaned slightly forward, and his face looked very attractive by the shimmering flame of the candles.

"Isn't that the way most of us decide things," asked Corinna, "if we know what is really to our advantage?"

As Benham looked up he met her eyes. "In this case," he answered, with a note of austerity, as if he were impatient of contradiction, "the advantage to the public would seem to be the only one worth considering."

For an instant a wild impulse, born of suffering nerves, passed through Corinna's mind. She longed to cry out in the tone of Julius Gershom, "Oh, damn the public!"--but instead she remarked in the formal accents her grandmother had employed to smooth over awkward impulses, "Isn't it ridiculous that we can never get away from Gideon Vetch?"

The Judge laughed softly. "He has a pushing manner," he returned; and then, still curiously pursuing the subject: "Perhaps, he may get his revenge at the meeting Thursday night."

"Is there to be a meeting?" retorted Corinna indifferently. She was thinking, "When John is eighty he will look like Father. I shall be seventy-eight when he is eighty. All those years to live, and nothing in them but little pleasures, little kindnesses, little plans and ambitions. Charity boards and committee meetings and bridge. That is what life is--just pretending that little things are important."

"That's the strikers' meeting," the Judge was saying over his glass of sherry. "The next one is John's idea. We hope to arbitrate. If we can get Vetch interested there may be a settlement of some sort."

"So it's Vetch again! Oh, I am getting so tired of the name of Gideon Vetch!" laughed Corinna. And she thought, "If only I didn't have to play on the flute all my life. If I could only stop playing dance music for a little while, and break out into a funeral march!"

"He has already agreed to come," said Benham, "but I expect nothing from him. I have formed the habit of expecting nothing from Vetch."

"Well, I don't know," replied the Judge. "We may persuade him to stand firm, if there hasn't been an understanding between him and those people." The old gentleman always used the expression "those people" for persons of whose opinions he disapproved.

"You know what I think of Vetch," rejoined Benham, with a shrug.

It seemed to Corinna, watching Benham with her thoughtful gaze, that the subject would never change, that they would argue all night over their foolish strike and their tiresome meeting, and over what this Gideon Vetch might or might not do in some problematic situation. What sentimentalists men were! They couldn't understand, after the experience of a million years, that the only things that really counted in life were human relations. They were obliged to go on playing a game of bluff with their consecrated superstitions--playing--playing--playing--and yet hiding behind some graven image of authority which they had built out of stone. Sentimental, yes, and pathetic too, when one thought of it with patience.

When dinner was over, and the Judge had gone to a concert in town, Corinna's mockery fell from her, and she sat in a long silence watching Benham's enjoyment of his cigar. It occurred to her that if he were stripped of everything else, of love, of power, of ambition, he could still find satisfaction in the masculine habit of living--in the simple pleasures of which nothing except physical infirmity or extreme poverty can ever deprive one. Moderate in all things, he was capable of taking a serious pleasure in his meals, in his cigar, in a dip in a swimming pool, or a game of cards at the club. Whatever happened, he would have these things to fall back upon; and they would mean to him, she knew, far more than they could ever, even in direst necessity, mean to a woman.

The long drawing-room, lighted with an amber glow and drenched with the sweetness of honeysuckle, had grown very still. Outside in the garden the twilight was powdered with silver, and above the tops of the cedars a few stars were shining. A breeze came in softly, touching her cheek like the wing of a moth and stirring the iris in a bowl by the window. The flowers in the room were all white and purple, she observed with a tremulous smile, as if the vivid colours had been drained from both her life and her surroundings. "What a foolish fancy," she added, with a nervous force that sent a current of energy through her veins. "My heart isn't broken, and it will never be until I am dead!"

And then, with that natural aptitude for facing facts, for looking at life steadily and fearlessly, which had been born in a recoil from the sentimental habit of mind, she said quietly, "John, Alice Rokeby came to see me this afternoon."

He started, and the ashes dropped from his cigar; but there was no embarrassment in the level glance he raised to her eyes. Surprise there was, and a puzzled interrogation, but of confusion or disquietude she could find no trace.

"Well?" he responded inquiringly, and that was all.

"You used to care for her a great deal--once?"

He appeared to ponder the question. "We were great friends," he answered.

Friends! The single word seemed to her to express not only his attitude to Alice Rokeby, but his temperamental inability to call things by their right names, to face facts, to follow a straight line of thought. Here was the epitome of that evasive idealism which preferred shams to realities.

"Are you still friends?"

He shook his head. "No, we've drifted apart in the last year or so. I used," he said slowly, "to go there a great deal; but I've had so many responsibilities of late that I've fallen into the habit of letting other interests go in a measure."

It was harder even than she had imagined it would be--harder because she realized now that they did not speak the same language. She felt that she had struck against something as dry and cold and impersonal as an abstract principle. A ludicrous premonition assailed her that in a little while he would begin to talk about his public duty. This lack of genuine emotion, which had at first appeared to contradict his sentimental point of view, was revealed to her suddenly as its supreme justification. Because he felt nothing deeply he could afford to play brilliantly with the names of emotions; because he had never suffered his duty would always lie, as Gideon Vetch had once said of him, "in the direction of things he could not hurt."

"It is a pity," she said gently, "for she still cares for you."

The hand that held his cigar trembled. She had penetrated his reserve at last, and she saw a shadow which was not the shadow of the wind-blown flowers, cross his features.

"Did she tell you that?" he asked as gently as she had spoken.

"There was no need to tell me. I saw it as soon as I looked at her."

For a moment he was silent; then he said very quietly, as one whose controlling motive was a hatred of excess, of unnecessary fussiness or frankness: "I am sorry."

"Have you stopped caring for her?"

The shadow on his face changed into a look of perplexity. When he spoke, she realized that he had mistaken her meaning; and for an instant her heart beat wildly with resentment or apprehension.

"I am fond of her. I shall always be fond of her," he said. "Does it make any difference to you, my dear?"

Yes, he had mistaken her meaning. He was judging her in the dim light of an immemorial tradition; and he had seen in her anxious probing for truth merely a personal jealousy. Women were like that, he would have said, applying, in accordance with his mental custom, the general law to the particular instance. After all, where could they meet? They were as far divided in their outlook on life as if they had inhabited different spiritual hemispheres. A curiosity seized her to know what was in his mind, to sound the depths of that unfathomable reserve.

"That is over so completely that I thought it would make no difference to you," he added almost reproachfully, as if she, not he, were to be blamed for dragging a disagreeable subject into the light.

Fear stabbed Corinna's heart like a knife. "But she still loves you!" she cried sharply.

He flinched from the sharpness of her tone. "I am sorry," he said again; but the words glided, with a perfunctory grace, on the surface of emotion. Suppose that what he said was true, she told herself; suppose that it was really "over"; suppose that she also recognized only the egoist's view of duty--of the paramount duty to one's own inclinations; suppose--"Oh, am I so different from him?" she thought, "why cannot I also mistake the urging of desire for the command of conscience--or at least call it that in my mind?" For a minute she struggled desperately with the temptation; and in that minute it seemed to her that the face of Alice Rokeby, with its look of wistful expectancy, of hungry yearning, drifted past her in the twilight.

"But is it obliged to be over?" she asked aloud. "I could never care as she does. I have always been like that, and I can't change. I have always been able to feel just so much and no more--to give just so much and no more."

He looked at her attentively, a little troubled, she could see, but not deeply hurt, not hurt enough to break down the wall which protected the secret--or was it the emptiness?--of his nature.

"Has the knowledge of my--my old friendship for Mrs. Rokeby come between us?" he asked slowly and earnestly.

While he spoke it seemed to her that all that had been obscure in her view of him rolled away like the mist in the garden, leaving the structure of his being bare and stark to her critical gaze. Nothing confused her now; nothing perplexed her in her knowledge of him. The old sense of incompleteness, of inadequacy, returned; but she understood the cause of it now; she saw with perfect clearness the defect from which it had arisen. He had missed the best because, with every virtue of the mind, he lacked the single one of the heart. Possessing every grace of character except humanity, he had failed in life because this one gift was absent.

"All my life," she said brokenly, "I have tried to find something that I could believe in--that I could keep faith with to the end. But what can one build a world on except human relations--except relations between men and women?"

"You mean," he responded gravely, "that you think I have not kept faith with Mrs. Rokeby?"

"Oh, can't you see? If you would only try, you must surely see!" she pleaded, with outstretched hands.

He shook his head not in denial, but in bewilderment. "I realized that I had made a mistake," he said slowly, "but I believed that I had put it out of my life--that we had both put it out of our lives. There were so many more important things--the war and coming face to face with death in so many forms. Oh, I confess that what is important to you, appears to me to be merely on the surface of life. I have been trying to fulfil other responsibilities--to live up to the demands on me--I had got down to realities--"

A laugh broke from her lips, which had grown so stiff that they hurt her when she tried to smile. "Realities!" she exclaimed, "and yet you must have seen her face as I saw it to-day."

For the third time, in that expressionless tone which covered a nervous irritation, he repeated gravely, "I am sorry."

"There is nothing more real," she went on presently, "there is nothing more real than that look in the face of a living thing."

For the first time her words seemed to reach him. He was trying with all his might, she perceived, he was spiritually fumbling over the effort to feel and to think what she expected of him. With his natural fairness he was honestly struggling to see her point of view.

"If it is really like that," he said, "What can I do?"

All her life, it seemed to Corinna, she had been adjusting the difficulties and smoothing out the destinies of other persons. All her life she had been arranging some happiness that was not hers. To-night it was the happiness of Alice Rokeby, an acquaintance merely, a woman to whom she was profoundly indifferent, which lay in her hands.

"There is something that you can do," she said lightly, obeying now that instinct for things as they ought to be, for surface pleasantness, which warred in her mind with her passion for truth. "You can go to see her again." _

Read next: Chapter 20. Corinna Faces Life

Read previous: Chapter 18. Mystification

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