IX
It was midnight when I reached my own door that night, but I was in no mood for lying in bed stark awake in the spiritual isolation of darkness. I went straight to my study, meaning to make up a fire and then hypnotize myself into some form of lethargy by letting my eyes follow the printed lines of a book. If reading in any other sense than physical habit proved beyond me, at least the narcotic monotony of habit might serve.
But I found a fire, already falling to embers, and Susan before it, curled into my big wing chair, her feet beneath her, her hands lying palms upward in her lap. This picture fixed me in the doorway while my throat tightened. Susan did not stir, but she was not sleeping. She had withdrawn.
Presently she spoke, absently—from Saturn's rings; or the moon.
"Ambo? I've been waiting to talk to you; but now I can't or I'll lose it—the whole movement. It's like a symphony—great brasses groaning and cursing—and then violins tearing through the tumult to soar above it."
Her eyes shut for a moment. When she opened them again it was to shake herself free from whatever spell had bound her. She half yawned, and smiled.
"Gone, dear—all gone. It's not your fault. Words wouldn't hold it. Music might—but music doesn't come. . . . Oh, poor Ambo—you've had a wretched time of it! How tired you look!"
I shut the door quietly and went to her, sitting on the hearth rug at her feet, my knees in my arms.
"Sweetheart," I said, "it seems that in spite of myself I've done you little good and about all the harm possible." And I made a clean breast of all the facts and fears that the evening had developed. "So you see," I ended, "what my guardianship amounts to!"
Susan's hand came to my shoulder and drew me back against her knees; she did not remove her hand.
"Ambo," she protested gently, "I'm just a little angry with you, I think."
"No wonder!"
"Oh!" she exclaimed. "If I am angry it's because you can say stupid things like that! Don't you see, Ambo, the very moment things grow difficult for us you forget to believe in me—begin to act as if I were a common or garden fool? I'm not, though. Surely you must know in your heart that everything you're afraid of for me doesn't matter in the least. What harm could slander or scandal possibly do me, dear? Me, I mean? I shouldn't like it, of course, because I hate everything stodgy and formidablement bête. But if it happens, I shan't lose much sleep over it. You're worrying about the wrong things, Ambo; things that don't even touch our real problem. And the real problem may prove to be the real tragedy, too."
"Tragedy?" I mumbled.
"Oh, I hope not—I think not! It all depends on whether you care for freedom; on whether you're really passion's slave. I don't believe you are."
The words wounded me. I shifted, to look up at, to question, her shadowy face. "Susan, what do you mean?"
"I suppose I mean that I'm not, Ambo. You're far dearer to me than anybody else on earth; your happiness, your peace, mean everything to me. If you honestly can't find life worth while without me—can't—I'll go with you anywhere; or face the music with you right here. First, though, I must be sincere with you. I can live away from you, and still make a life for myself. Except your day-by-day companionship—I'd be lonely without that, of course—I shouldn't lose anything that seems to me really worth keeping. Above all, I shouldn't really lose you."
"Susan! You're planning to leave me!"
"But, Ambo—it's only what you've felt to be necessary; what you've been planning for me!"
"As a duty—at the bitterest possible cost! How different that is! You not only plan to leave me—I feel that you want to!"
"Yes, I want to. But only if you can understand why."
"I don't understand!"
"Ah, wait, Ambo! You're not speaking for yourself. You're a slave now, speaking for your master. But it's you I want to talk to!"
I snarled at this. "Why? When you've discovered your mistake so soon! . . . You don't love me."
She sighed, deeply unhappy; though my thin-skinned self-esteem wrung from her sigh a shade of impatience, too.
"If not, dear," she said, "we had better find it out before it's too late. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps love is something I only guess at and go wrong about. If love means that I should be utterly lost in you and nothing without you—if it means that I would rather die than leave you—well, then I don't love you. But all the same, if love honestly means that to you—I can't and won't go away." She put out her hand again swiftly, and tightened her fingers on mine.
"It's a test, then. Is that it?" I demanded. "You want to go because you're not sure?"
"I'm sure of what I feel," she broke in; "and more than that, I doubt if I'm made so that I can ever feel more. No; that isn't why I want to go. I'll go if you can let me, because—oh, I've got to say it, Ambo!—because at heart I love freedom better than I love love—or you. And there's something else. I'm afraid of—please try to understand this, dear—I'm afraid of stuffiness for us both!"
"Stuffiness?"
"Sex is stuffy, Ambo. The more people let it mess up their lives for them, the stuffier they grow. It's really what you've been afraid of for me—though you don't put it that way. But you hate the thought of people saying—with all the muddy little undercurrents they stir up round such things—that you and I have been passion's slaves. We haven't been—but we might be; and suppose we were. It's the truth about us—not the lies—that makes all the difference. You're you—and I'm I. It's because we're worth while to ourselves that we're worth while to each other. Isn't that true? But how long shall we be worth anything to ourselves or to each other if we accept love as slavery, and get to feeling that we can't face life, if it seems best, alone? Ambo, dear, do you see at all what I'm driving at?"
Yes; I was beginning to see. Miss Goucher's desolate words came suddenly back to me: "Susan doesn't need you."