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The Precipice: A Novel, a novel by Elia W. Peattie |
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Chapter 16 |
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_ CHAPTER XVI Then came the day of Honora's victory! It had been long expected, yet when it came it had the effect of a miracle. It was, however, a miracle which she realized. She was burningly aware that her great moment had come. She left the lights flaring in the laboratory, and, merely stopping to put the catch on the door, ran down the steps, fastening her linen coat over her working dress as she went. David would be at home. He would be resting, perhaps,--she hoped so. For days he had been feverish and strange, and she had wondered if he were tormented by that sense of world-stress which was forever driving him. Was there no achievement that would satisfy him, she wondered. Yes, yes, he must be satisfied now! Moreover, he should have all the credit. To have found the origin of life, though only in a voiceless creature,--a reptile,--was not that an unheard-of victory? She would claim no credit; for without him and his daring to inspire her she would not have dreamed of such an experiment. Of course, she might have telephoned to him, but it never so much as occurred to her to do that. She wanted to cry the words into his ear:-- "We have it! The secret is ours! There _is_ a hidden door into the house of life--and we've opened it!" Oh, what treasured, ancient ideas fell with the development of this new fact! She did not want to think of that, because of those who, in the rearrangement of understanding, must suffer. But as for her, she would be bold to face it, as the mate and helper of a great scientist should be. She would set her face toward the sun and be unafraid of any glory. Her thoughts spun in her head, her pulses throbbed. She did not know that she was thinking it, but really she was feeling that in a moment more she would be in David's arms. Only some such gesture would serve to mark the climax of this great moment. Though they so seldom caressed, though they had indulged so little in emotion, surely now, after their long and heavy task, they could have the sweet human comforts. They could be lovers because they were happy. Perhaps, after all, she would only cry out to him:--"It will be yours, David--the Norden prize!" That would tell the whole thing. People looked after her as she sped down the street. At first they thought she was in distress, but a glance at her shining face, its nobility accentuated by her elation, made that idea untenable. She was obviously the bearer of good tidings. Dr. von Shierbrand, passing on the other side of the street, called out:-- "Carrying the good news from Ghent to Aix?" An old German woman, with a laden basket on her arm nodded cheerfully. "It's a baby," she said aloud to whoever might care to corroborate. But Honora carried happiness greater than any dreamed,--a secret of the ages,--and the prize was her man's fame. She reached her own door, and with sure, swift hands, fitted the key in the lock. The house wore a welcoming aspect. The drawing-room was filled with blossoming plants, and the diaphanous curtains which Blue-eyed Mary had hung at the windows blew softly in the breeze. The piano, with its suggestive litter of music, stood open, and across the bench trailed one of Mary's flowered chiffon scarfs. "David!" called Honora. "David!" Two blithe baby voices answered her from the rear porch. The little ones were there with Mrs. Hays, and they excitedly welcomed this variation in their day's programme. "In a minute, babies," called Honora. "Mamma will come in a minute." Yes, she and David would go together to the babies, and they would "tell them," the way people "told the bees." "David!" she kept calling. "David!" She looked in the doors of the rooms she passed, and presently reached her own. As she entered, a large envelope addressed in David's writing, conspicuously placed before the face of her desk-clock, caught her eye. She imagined that it contained some bills or memoranda, and did not stop for it, but ran on. "Oh, he's gone to town," she cried with exasperation, "and I haven't an idea where to reach him!" Closing her ears to the calls of the little girls, she returned to her own room and shut herself in. She was completely exasperated with the need for patience. Never had she so wanted David, and he was not there--he was not there to hear that the moment of triumph had come for both of them and that they were justified before their world. Petulantly she snatched the envelope from the desk and opened it. It was neither bills nor memoranda which fell out, but a letter. Surprised, she unfolded it. Her eyes swept it, not gathering its meaning. It might have been written in some foreign language, so incomprehensible did it seem. But something deep down in her being trembled as if at approaching dissolution and sent up its wild messages of alarm. Vaguely, afar off, like the shouts of a distant enemy on the hills, the import besieged her spirit. "I must read it again," she said simply. She went over it slowly, like one deciphering an ancient hieroglyph.
"I am off and away with Mary Morrison. Will this come to you as a complete surprise? I hardly think so. You have been my good comrade and assistant; but Mary Morrison is my woman. I once thought you were, but there was a mistake somewhere. Either I misjudged, or you changed. I hope you'll come across happiness, too, sometime. I never knew the meaning of the word till I met Mary. You and I haven't been able to make each other out. You thought I was bound up heart and soul in the laboratory. I may as well tell you that only a fractional part of my nature was concerned with it. Mary is an unlearned person compared with you, but she knew that, and it is the great fact for both of us. "It is too bad about the babies. We ought never to have had them. See that they have a good education and count on me to help you. You'll find an account at the bank in your name. There'll be more there for you when that is gone. "DAVID."
"My God," said the old woman in her own tongue, "the child did not live!" Honora walked as somnambulists walk, seeing nothing. But she found her way to the door of the laboratory. The white glare of the chemical lights was over everything--over all the significant, familiar litter of the place. The workmanlike room was alive and palpitating with the personality which had gone out from it--the flaming personality of David Fulham. The woman who had sold her birthright of charm and seduction for his sake sat down to eat her mess of pottage. Not that she thought even as far as that. Thought appeared to be suspended. As a typhoon has its calm center, so the mad tumult of her spirit held a false peace. She rested there in it, torpid as to emotion, in a curious coma. Yet she retained her powers of observation. She took her seat before the tanks in which she had demonstrated the correctness of David's amazing scientific assumption. Yet now the creatures that he had burgeoned by his skill, usurping, as it might seem to a timid mind, the very function of the Creator, looked absurd and futile--hateful even. For these things, bearing, as it was possible, after all, no relation to actual life, had she spent her days in desperate service. Then, suddenly, it swept over her, like a blasting wave of ignited gas, that she never had had the pure scientific flame! She had not worked for Truth, but that David might reap great rewards. With her as with the cave woman, the man's favor was the thing! If the cave woman won his approval with base service, she, the aspiring creature of modern times, was no less the slave of her own subservient instincts! And she had failed as the cave woman failed--as all women seemed eventually to fail. The ever-repeated tragedy of woman had merely been enacted once more, with herself for the sorry heroine. Yet none of these thoughts was distinct. They passed from her mind like the spume puffed from the wave's crest. She knew nothing of time. Around her blazed and sputtered the terrible white lights. The day waned; the darkness fell; and when night had long passed its dark meridian and the anticipatory cocks began to scent the dawn and to make their discovery known, there came a sharp knocking at the door. It shattered Honora's horrible reverie as if it had been an explosion. The chambers of her ears quaked with the reverberations. She sprang to her feet with a scream which rang through the silent building. "Let me in! Let me in!" called a voice. "It's only Kate. Let me in, Honora, or I'll call some one to break down the door." * * * * * Kate had mercy on that distorted face which confronted her. It was not the part of loyalty or friendship to look at it. She turned out the spluttering, glaring lights, and quiet and shadow stole over the room. "Well, Honora, I found the note and I know the whole of your trouble. Remember," she said quietly, "it's your great hour. You have a chance to show what you're made of now." "What I'm made of!" said Honora brokenly. "I'm like all the women. I'm dying of jealousy, Kate,--dying of it." "Jealousy--you?" cried Kate. "Why, Honora--" "You thought I couldn't feel it, I suppose,--thought I was above it? I'm not above anything--not anything--" Her voice straggled off into a curious, shameless sob with a sound in it like the bleating of a lamb. "Stop that!" said Kate, sharply. "Pull yourself together, woman. Don't be a fool." "Go away," sobbed Honora. "Don't stay here to watch me. My heart is broken, that's all. Can't you let me alone?" "No, I can't--I won't. Stand up and fight, woman. You can be magnificent, if you want to. It can't be that you'd grovel, Honora." "You know very little of what you're talking about," cried Honora, whipped into wholesome anger at last. "I've been a fool from the beginning. The whole thing's my fault." "I don't see how." Kate was getting her to talk; was pulling her up out of the pit of shame and anguish into which she had fallen. She sat down in a deal chair which stood by the window, and Honora, without realizing it, dropped into a chair, too. The neutral morning sky was beginning to flush and the rosiness reached across the lead-gray lake, illuminated the windows of the sleeping houses, and tinted even the haggard monochrome of the laboratory with a promise of day. "Why, it's my fault because I wouldn't take what was coming to me. I wouldn't even be what I was born to be!" "I know," said Kate, "that you underwent some sort of a transformation. What was it?" She hardly expected an answer, but Honora developed a perfervid lucidity. "Oh, Kate, you've said yourself that I was a very different girl when you knew me first. I was a student then, and an ambitious one, too; but there wasn't a girl in this city more ready for a woman's role than I. I longed to be loved--I lived in the idea of it. No matter how hard I tried to devote myself to the notion of a career, I really was dreaming of the happiness that was going to come to me when--when Life had done its duty by me." She spoke the words with a dramatic clearness. The terrific excitement she had undergone, and which she now held in hand, sharpened her faculties. The powers of memory and of expression were intensified. She fairly burned upon Kate there in the beautiful, disguising light of the morning. Her weary face was flushed; her eyes were luminous. Her terrific sorrow put on the mask of joy. "You see, I loved David almost from the first--I mean from the beginning of my University work. The first time I saw him crossing the campus he held my attention. There was no one else in the least like him, so vivid, so exotic, so almost fierce. When I found out who he was, I confess that I directed my studies so that I should work with him. Not that I really expected to know him personally, but I wanted to be near him and have him enlarge life for me. I felt that it would take on new meanings if I could only hear his interpretations of it." Kate shivered with sympathy at the woman's passion, and something like envy stirred in her. Here was a world of delight and torment of which she knew nothing, and beside it her own existence, restless and eager though it had been, seemed a meager affair. "Well, the idea burned in me for months and years. But I hid it. No one guessed anything about it. Certainly David knew nothing of it. Then, when I was beginning on my graduate work, I was with him daily. But he never seemed to see me--he saw only my work, and he seldom praised that. He expected it to be well done. As for me, I was satisfied. The mere fact that we were comrades, forced to think of the same matters several hours of each day, contented me. I couldn't imagine what life would be away from him; and I was afraid to think of him in relation to myself." "Afraid?" "Afraid--I mean just that. I knew others thought him a genius in relation to his work. But I knew he was a genius in regard to life. I felt sure that, if he turned that intensity of his upon life instead of upon science, he would be a destructive force--a high explosive. This idea of mine was confirmed in time. It happened one evening when a number of us were over in the Scammon Garden listening to the out-of-door players. I grew tired of sitting and slipped from my seat to wander about a little in the darkness. I had reached the very outer edge of seats and was standing there enjoying the garden, when I overheard two persons talking together. A man said: 'Fulham will go far if he doesn't meet a woman.' 'Nonsense,' the woman said; 'he's an anchorite.' 'An inflammatory one,' the man returned. 'Mind, I don't say he knows it. Probably he thinks he's cast for the scientific role to the end of his days, but I know the fellow better than he does himself. I tell you, if a woman of power gets hold of him, he'll be as drunk as Abelard with the madness of it. Over in Europe they allow for that sort of thing. They let a man make an art of loving. Here they insist that it shall be incidental. But Fulham won't care about conventionalities if the idea ever grips him. He's born for love, and it's a lucky thing for the University that he hasn't found it out.' 'We ought to plan a sane and reasonable marriage for him,' said the woman. 'Wouldn't that be a good compromise?' 'It would be his salvation,' the man said." Honora poured the words out with such rapidity that Kate hardly could follow her. "How you remember it all!" broke in Kate. "If I remember anything, wouldn't it be that? As I say, it confirmed me in what I already had guessed. I felt fierce to protect him. My jealousy was awake in me. I watched him more closely than ever. His daring in the laboratory grew daily. He talked openly about matters that other men were hardly daring to dream of, and his brain seemed to expand every day like some strange plant under calcium rays. I thought what a frightful loss to science it would be if the wilder qualities of his nature got the upper hand, and I wondered how I could endure it if--" She drew herself up with a horror of realization. The thing that so long ago she had thought she could not endure was at last upon her! Her teeth began to chatter again, and her hands, which had been clasped, to twist themselves with the writhing motion of the mentally distraught. "Go on!" commanded Kate. "What happened next?" "I let him love me!" "I thought you said he hadn't noticed you." "He hadn't; and I didn't talk with him more than usual or coquette with him. But I let down the barriers in my mind. I never had been ashamed of loving him, but now I willed my love to stream out toward him like--like banners of light. If I had called him aloud, he couldn't have answered more quickly. He turned toward me, and I saw all his being set my way. Oh, it was like a transfiguration! Then, as soon as ever I saw that, I began holding him steady. I let him feel that we were to keep on working side by side, quietly using and increasing our knowledge. I made him scourge his love back; I made him keep his mind uppermost; I saved him from himself." "Oh, Honora! And then you were married?" "And then we were married. You remember how sudden it was, and how wonderful; but not wonderful in the way it might have been. I kept guard over myself. I wouldn't wear becoming dresses; I wouldn't even let him dream what I really was like--wouldn't let him see me with my hair down because I knew it was beautiful. I combed it plainly and dressed like a nurse or a nun, and every day I went to the laboratory with him and kept him at his work. He had got hold of this dazzling idea of the extraneous development of life, and he set himself to prove it. I worked early and late to help him. I let him go out and meet people and reap honors, and I stayed and did the drudgery. But don't imagine I was a martyr. I liked it. I belonged to him. It was my honor and delight to work for him. I wanted him to have all of the credit. The more important the result, the more satisfaction I should have in proclaiming him the victor. I was really at the old business of woman, subordinating myself to a man I loved. But I was doing it in a new way, do you see? I was setting aside the privilege of my womanhood for him, refraining from making any merely feminine appeal. You remember hearing Dr. von Shierbrand say there was but one way woman should serve man--the way in which Marguerite served Faust? It made me laugh. I knew a harder road than that to walk--a road of more complete abnegation." "But the babies came." "Yes, the babies came. I was afraid even to let him be as happy in them as he wanted to be. I held him away. I wouldn't let him dwell on the thought of me as the mother of those darlings. I dared not even be as happy myself as I wished, but I had secret joys that I told him nothing about, because I was saving him for himself and his work. But at what a cost, Kate!" "Honora, it was sacrilegious!" Honora leaped to her feet again. "Yes, yes," she cried, "it was. And now all has happened according to prophecy, and he's gone with this woman! He thinks she's his mate, but, I--I was his mate. And I defrauded him. So now he's taken her because she was kind, because she loved him, because--she was beautiful!" "She looks like you." "Don't I know it? It's my beauty that he's gone away with--the beauty I wouldn't let him see. Of course, he doesn't realize it. He only knows life cheated him, and now he's trying to make up to himself for what he's lost." "Oh, can you excuse him like that?" The daylight was hardening, and it threw Honora's drawn face into repellent relief. "I don't excuse him at all!" she said. "I condemn him! I condemn him! With all his intellect, to be such a fool! And to be so cruel--so hideously cruel!" But she checked herself sharply. She looked around her with eyes that seemed to take in things visible and invisible--all that had been enacted in that curious room, all the paraphernalia, all the significance of those uncompleted, important experiments. Then suddenly her face paled and yet burned with light. "But I know a great revenge," she said. "I know a revenge that will break his heart!" "Don't say things like that," begged Kate. "I don't recognize you when you're like that." "When you hear what the revenge is, you will," said Honora proudly. "We're going now," Kate told her with maternal decision. "Here's your coat." "Home?" She began trembling again and the haunted look crept back into her eyes. Kate paid no heed. She marched Honora swiftly along the awakened streets and into the bereaved house, past the desecrated chamber where David's bed stood beside his wife's, up to Kate's quiet chamber. Honora stretched herself out with an almost moribund gesture. Then the weight of her sorrow covered her like a blanket. She slept the strange deep sleep of those who dare not face the waking truth. _ |
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