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The Precipice: A Novel, a novel by Elia W. Peattie |
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Chapter 23 |
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_ CHAPTER XXIII As she heard Ray coming up the stairs, she tossed some more wood on the fire and lighted the candles in her Russian candlesticks. "It's what any silly girl would do!" she admitted to herself disgustedly. Well, there was his rap on the foolish imitation Warwick knocker. Kate flung wide the door. He stood in the dim light of the hall, hesitating, it would seem, to enter upon the evening's drama. Tall, graceful as always, with a magnetic force behind his languor, he impressed Kate as a man whom few women would be able to resist; whom, indeed, it was a sort of folly, perhaps even an impiety, to cast out of one's life. "Kate!" he said, "Kate!" The whole challenge of love was in the accent. But she held him off with the first method of opposition she could devise. "My name!" she admitted gayly. "I used to think I didn't like it, but I do." He came in and swung to the door behind him, flinging his coat and hat upon a chair. "Do you mean you like to hear me say it?" he demanded. He stood by the fire which had begun to leap and crackle, drawing off his gloves with a decisive gesture. She saw that she was not going to be able to put him off. The hour had struck. So she faced him bravely. "Sit down, Ray," she said. He looked at her a moment as if measuring the value of this courtesy. "Thank you," he said, almost resentfully, as he sank into the chair she placed for him. So they sat together before the fire gravely, like old married people, as Kate could not help noticing. Yet they were combatants; not as a married couple might have been, furtively and miserably, but with a frank, almost an exhilarating, sense of equally matched strength, and of their chance to conduct their struggle in the open. "It's come to this, Kate," he said at length. "Either I must have your promise or I stay away entirely." "I don't believe you need to do either," she retorted with the exasperating manner of an elder sister. "It's an obsession with you, that's all." "What man thinks he needs, he does need," Ray responded sententiously. "It appears to me that without you I shall be a lost man. I mean precisely what I say. You wouldn't like me to give out that fact in an hysterical manner, and I don't see that I need to. I make the statement as I would make any other, and I expect to be believed, because I'm a truth-telling person. The fairest scene in the world or the most interesting circumstance becomes meaningless to me if you are not included in it. It isn't alone that you are my sweetheart--the lady of my dreams. It's much more than that. Sometimes when I'm with you I feel like a boy with his mother, safe from all the dreadful things that might happen to a child. Sometimes you seem like a sister, so really kind and so outwardly provoking. Often you are my comrade, and we are completely congenial, neuter entities. The thing is we have a satisfaction when we are together that we never could apart. There it is, Kate, the fact we can't get around. We're happier together than we are apart!" He seemed to hold the theory up in the air as if it were a shining jewel, and to expect her to look at it till it dazzled her. But her voice was dull as she said: "I know, Ray. I know--now--but shall we stay so?" "Why shouldn't we, woman? There's every reason to suppose that we'd grow happier. We want each other. More than that, we need each other. With me, it's such a deep need that it reaches to the very roots of my being. It's my groundwork, my foundation stone. I don't know how to put it to make you realize--" He caught a quizzical smile on her face, and after a moment of bewilderment he leaped from his chair and came toward her. "God!" he half breathed, "why do I waste time talking?" He had done what her look challenged him to do,--had substituted action for words,--yet now, as he stretched out his arms to her, she held him off, fearful that she would find herself weeping on his breast. It would be sweet to do it--like getting home after a long voyage. But dizzily, with a stark clinging to a rock of integrity in herself, she fought him off, more with her militant spirit than with her outspread, protesting hands. "No, no," she cried. "Don't hypnotize me, Ray! Leave me my judgment, leave me my reason. If it's a partnership we're to enter into, I ought to know the terms." "The terms, Kate? Why, I'll love you as long as I live; I'll treasure you as the most precious thing in all the world." "And the winds of heaven shall not be allowed to visit my cheek too roughly," she managed to say tantalizingly. He paused, perplexed. "I know I bewilder you, dear man," she said. "But this is the point: I don't want to be protected. I mean I don't want to be made dependent; I don't want my interpretations of life at second-hand. I object to having life filter through anybody else to me; I want it, you see, on my own account." "Why, Kate!" It wasn't precisely a protest. He seemed rather to reproach her for hindering the onward sweep of their happiness--for opposing him with her ideas when they might together have attained a beautiful emotional climax. "I couldn't stand it," she went on, lifting her eyes to his, "to be given permission to do this, that, or the other thing; or to be put on an allowance; or made to ask a favor--" He sank down in his chair and folded across his breast the arms whose embrace she had not claimed. "You seem to mean," he said, "that you don't want to be a wife. You prefer your independence to love." "I want both," Kate declared, rising and standing before him. "I want the most glorious and abounding love woman ever had. I want so much of it that it never could be computed or measured--so much it will lift me up above anything that I now am or that I know, and make me stronger and freer and braver." "Well, that's what your love would do for me," broke in McCrea. "That's what the love of a good woman is expected to do for a man." "Of course," cried Kate; "but is that what the love of a good man is expected to do for a woman? Or is it expected to reconcile her to obscurity, to the dimming of her personality, and to the endless petty sacrifices that ought to shame her--and don't--those immoral sacrifices about which she has contrived to throw so many deceiving, iridescent mists of religion? Oh, yes, we are hypnotized into our foolish state of dependence easily enough! I know that. The mating instinct drugs us. I suppose the unborn generations reach out their shadowy multitudinous hands and drag us to our destiny!" "What a woman you are! How you put things!" He tried but failed to keep the offended look from his face, and Kate knew perfectly well how hard he was striving not to think her indelicate. But she went on regardlessly. "You think that's the very thing I ought to want to be my destiny? Well, perhaps I do. I want children--of course, I want them." She stopped for a moment because she saw him flushing with embarrassment. Yet she couldn't apologize, and, anyway, an apology would avail nothing. If he thought her unwomanly because she talked about her woman's life,--the very life to which he was inviting her,--nothing she could say would change his mind. It wasn't a case for argument. She walked over to the fire and warmed her nervous hands at it. "I'm sorry, Ray," she said finally. "Sorry?" "Sorry that I'm not the tender, trusting, maiden-creature who could fall trembling in your arms and love you forever, no matter what you did, and lie to you and for you the way good wives do. But I'm not--and, oh, I wish I were--or else--" "Yes, Kate--what?" "Or else that you were the kind of a man I need, the mate I'm looking for!" "But, Kate, I protest that I am. I love you. Isn't that enough? I'm not worthy of you, maybe. Yet if trying to earn you by being loyal makes me worthy, then I am. Don't say no to me, Kate. It will shatter me--like an earthquake. And I believe you'll regret it, too. We can make each other happy. I feel it! I'd stake my life on it. Wait--" He arose and paced the floor back and forth. "Do you remember the lines from Tennyson's 'Princess' where the Prince pleads with Ida? I thought I could repeat them, but I'm afraid I'll mar them. I don't want to do that; they're too applicable to my case." He knew where she kept her Tennyson, and he found the volume and the page, and when he had handed the book to her, he snatched his coat and hat. "I'm coming for my answer a week from to-night," he said. "For God's sake, girl, don't make a mistake. Life's so short that it ought to be happy. At best I'll only be able to live with you a few decades, and I'd like it to be centuries." He had not meant to do it, she could see, but suddenly he came to her, and leaning above her burned his kisses upon her eyes. Then he flung himself out of the room, and by the light of her guttering candles she read:-- She read it twice, soothed by its vague loveliness. She could hear, however, only the sound of the suburban trains crashing by in the distance, and the honking of the machines in the Plaisance. None of those spirit sounds of which Ray had dreamed penetrated through her vigorous materialism. But still, she knew that she was lonely; she knew Ray's going left a gray vacancy. "I can't think it out," she said at last. "I'll go to sleep. Perhaps there--" But neither voices nor visions came to her in sleep. She awoke the next morning as unillumined as when she went to her bed. And as she dressed and thought of the full day before her, she was indefinably glad that she was under no obligations to consult any one about her programme, either of work or play. _ |
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