Chapter XVI
In the month that elapsed between her conversation with Kingsnorth and the time set by Collingwood for his return, Charlotte had time for an exhausting and (as it seemed to her) fruitless self-inquisition. She was alternately the prey of a hopeless apathy and of a consuming impatience, but in either mood there ran a strong undercurrent of rebellion against all the formative influences of her life. At times the future yawned before her like a bottomless gulf, into the darkness and loneliness of which she must inevitably sink helpless. Out of love as she was with her husband, the prospect of going back to her forlorn, loveless state was one she could not contemplate. To get up day after day, knowing that there was, in all this world, no human being who took more than a casual interest in her; to go to bed at night, knowing that, if ruin and disaster overtook the world, no human thought would turn to her, no voice cry to hers out of the darkness, no warm human hand reach for hers, seemed to her a fate infinitely worse than death. Yet she had lived just that life for twenty-eight years before she married Martin Collingwood to escape from it; and, though she had been most unhappy in it, she certainly had not regarded it as a tragedy. She remembered once having seen a young soldier come forth from the court-room after he had received a life sentence for shooting his corporal. The boy had lifted his hat with his manacled hands and had raised a white face to the touch of the cool morning wind. Something in the gesture had expressed his sense of helplessness in the grasp of that terrible thing we call the law. He was looking down the long vista of years at a living death ten thousand times worse than death, at a life from which every human ambition, every hope, every natural spring had been erased. His brother had followed behind him, a short distance of twenty or thirty feet, already the emblem of a separation that was to become complete. The brother was weeping as strong men do when their hearts are wrung; but, as she had looked at them, one so quiet, the other convulsed with grief, she had recognized that, to the second man, life held comfort and healing still. In the long years to come, new interests would take the place of the old tie; a wife and babes would fill that life; healthy toil allied to honorable ambition would make the years seem to fly; and the memory of a convict brother would drop out of life, only to be recalled tenderly at those seasons when a universal festival brings back the old days and makes the rotting thread of memory seem new and strong once more. But what of the other? Nothing new would come to him, nothing to strive for, nothing to look forward to, nothing to live upon but memories that would be very, very bitter. There would be toil and food and rest, and renewed toil, and the awful knowledge that long before he ceased to live he had ceased to be even to those who had been his nearest and dearest.
Well, she had lived it once. She could live it again. As with the soldier there would be toil and food and rest, and renewed toil. But the heart cries loudly for more than these things in life, until that heart is chastened into meekness. Would she ever be meek, she wondered sadly. If she could have accepted her fate with submission and sadness only, she would have felt herself indeed treated with mercy by the unseen fates. But there was no element of submission in her mood. As often as she contemplated the future, and said to herself that these things must be, had to be, so often the wild will rose within her to say that they must not be. She lay often for hours at a time face downward on her bed, not a muscle moving, not a sound escaping her tense lips; but her passivity was the physical expression of an impotence that left her prostrate before the overwhelming fates.
Often there recurred to her mind a conversation which had taken place between her and a fellow nurse, a young, joyous, magnetic creature for whom she had formed a friendship more nearly approximating intimacy than any other that had come into her life. It was in the last days of her engagement, and she had spoken of a fear of what unhappiness love might bring into her life. The other had looked at her with amazement. “Love!” she said. “I can imagine it bringing a lot of joy, but why unhappiness?”
“Why unhappiness?” Charlotte asked in vain for the reason; but the fact stood stronger than any “why’s,” that there had been, in all her life, some fundamental outrage of human sentiment. It had existed in that strange paternal attitude of her father’s; it had lived on in that perfunctory kindness of the nuns who had found her an antipathetic and incomprehensible child; and it had grown and intensified in the curious, prying interest developed in those who had governed her later years. That any such a condition could exist by a series of fortuitous events was out of the question. There had to be cause running through it all. Yet search her heart and mind as she would, she found there no wells of bitterness or evil thought or envy or malice to justify relations so peculiar as had finally established themselves between her and human society.
The solution of the question came to her suddenly, when, on a particularly dreary day, she had been trying to discipline herself and to keep her thoughts from running on her own troubles. She had spent two hours trying to read the story, written by a great modern author, of three precocious school-boys. She had been a great admirer of the author, and, up to that time, had found fascination in his pages; but the three boys were little to her taste. As she mused sadly, a flash of insight came, and another; and, little by little, she saw clearly what had so long puzzled her.
The precocious child is abnormal, and inspires in his fellow men that blind instinct to worry and torment which runs all through the animal world. She had been a precocious child, made uncanny by perceptions of the hidden currents and causes of life at a time when she should have been gurgling over its toys. As she recalled her sensitiveness to impressions, her powers of reading what was passing in others’ minds, and the singular growth of self-concealment and self-control that had grown out of them, it seemed to her that her keen brain had been her lifelong curse. Little by little, she went back to her convent days and tried to put herself in the place of the good sisters who had taught her. How distressing it must have been to them to feel the dumb interrogation that was always so strong under outward obedience! If she could have been unconscious of her father’s mental state and could have made a happy child’s claim upon his affections, would he not in time have come to love her? If, when she was a lonely orphan, living on her cousin’s sufferance, she had been able to reveal to her relatives the suffering that she really underwent in the strange ostracism which she had built up for herself, would not pity have conquered their selfishness? She drew a long, pained sigh, as she thought of what a difference might have been made in her life by a little less brain and a little more moral courage.
She was lying in her steamer chair on the veranda of her house at the time; and by her side, on a taboret, stood a glass of water. She picked it up and smiled over it. It was full of microbes (dead, of course, for Americans drink no unboiled water in the Philippines), and she knew it, and cared little, for she could not see them. But had she possessed an eye with the magnifying power of a strong microscope, she could not have tasted the water for the sight of the dead organisms would have made it unpalatable. She began to wonder what would be the effect on society, if there were let loose upon it a body of persons with microscopic eyes. They would shrink and exclaim and turn faint at dishes that the epicure delights in. How they would upset dinners and spoil little suppers and picnic luncheons! How eagerly would their society be avoided, and how soon their name become anathema!
But though physically the microscopic eye does not yet exist, the mental and spiritual microscopic eye does exist, and it has about the same distressing effect upon its human brethren who do not possess it as the other sort might have. She had had the microscopic eye—nothing could blind her to facts—and her starts and shrinkings had made her antipathetic to most of the persons with whom she had come in contact. It had remained for Martin, the indomitably ignorant, to be blind to her mental attitude, to assume her a normal woman of the world in which he found her. What of gratitude did she not owe him?
The thought pricked her to her feet, set her to restless pacings of the floor. Whatever of gratitude she owed him, she was preparing ingratitude in the course she was still bent upon pursuing. Never had she appreciated the stubborn inheritance of her own will till she measured herself against it in this struggle. Whatever the conscience and the intelligence might say, her will said “No” as often as she contemplated forgiving Martin and going back to her life with him. The feeling which had been warm in her heart for him so long was dead—killed by his own brutal words, buried in her own shame and self-reproach. She saw with unutterable sadness, that there was no hope of its resuscitation. But did that break the tie that she had of her own volition forged? Could not that same will of hers which resisted so bitterly be schooled to duty and to right? For against a year’s tenderness and kindness, where was the justice of weighing the utterances of a single hour of pain and disappointment? The one ought not to balance the other. She had no right to think so for an instant. Alas, though, one did balance the other, outweighed it many times!
Her marriage had been all wrong. But had she been less conscious of the fact on the day she married him than on the day when she vainly struggled to convince herself that she ought to go on living with him? Marriage can not be for love alone any more than it can be for selfish material interest alone. In its appeal to human emotion and in its relation to the family it may be, as the church calls it, a sacrament; but marriage as a lifelong partnership must have its material side. Love must enter in; but no healthy marriage can exist, unless there be equally the consciousness of a good bargain, of a legitimate exchange of values, added to the affection which sanctifies it. Well, Collingwood had played fairly. It was she who had entered into the alliance, knowing its weakness, knowing herself.
But did she know herself? What more that was disappointing and agonizing was she to learn of herself? What was even then struggling in her breast? Was there some secret hope holding itself in concealment behind her oft repeated thought that life was ended for her? Did some hidden ambition prompt her to take the step that she believed came from self-respect? She had learned only too well her capacity for self-deception. She had advanced step by step along the path by which she had come to the church door with Martin Collingwood, denying every motive which, in the end, had proved itself the stronger. Was it possible that she was turning blindly, as women naturally turn, to a second man to lift her from the wreck to which she had brought her life with the first? Again she faced that truth which she had long before discovered, that too passionate a denial constitutes an assertion; and while every atom of her intelligence bade her distrust her own sophistry, every throb of a strong emotional nature bade her turn from the conclusions of her reason.
In these hours of agonizing inquisition when her soul seemed literally torn in two, she contemplated with added despair, the loss of her early religious faith. It did not come back to her in the least. No impulse for prayer seized her. The conviction that the world is made up of blind forces, and that there is no help outside of ourselves was very strong in her. She might pray and pray, but when she arose from her knees, the elements of struggle would be there still, tearing at her, filling her soul with pain. Prayer would not bring sleep to her aching eyeballs in the night, it would not silence the cry in her heart, it would not keep the thronging thoughts from her weary brain. Time alone could do that. Give her time—she smiled bitterly—and change of circumstances, and she might put the experiences of the last three years behind her, put even the man who had ruled her life and thought for a year (and a happy year) behind her.
Of course she wrestled with the temptations which must present themselves to the intelligent mind which has had the ways of the world set before it. Intelligence said that nothing mattered except the material. She could be good or bad, noble or contemptible, so long as she played her game well and kept on good terms with that thing we call the world. Little the world cares what we do or what we are, said intelligence; the question with it is how much power do we own in this vale of tears. Intelligence told her that with the backing of her family and the successful use of her own powers, and with Judge Barton’s political influence, they two might make a very comfortable place for themselves in this material universe. She felt dangerously sure of the Judge. The knowledge had come to her (how she knew not) that all she needed to insure her an absolute dominion over the man’s soul was a little less moral fastidiousness, a little more worldliness. Indeed, a strange confidence in her own powers of attraction was working itself out of all the miserable situation. She realized how completely she had under-estimated her own charm. Less conscience, less good taste, more charity (which is a much misused term in these days, signifying lack of all social and moral tradition), in fact, a general elimination of the best qualities of her nature would constitute a humanizing process which would work decidedly to her material advantage. But she was not willing to submit herself to the process. She wanted her own way, and she wanted to remain her ideal self. More and more clearly she saw the unreasonableness of her demand.
So the days slipped by one by one, and she marked them off on her calendar. In the end, the time for the launch to go up to Romblon arrived without her having taken any decisive steps toward the act which she still declared to herself she was bent upon. She excused herself on the ground of Martin’s letter, saying to herself that she owed him a personal interview and explanation for her refusal to accept his offer of reconciliation. But in truth, she was pulling away again from the uncomfortable. She could contemplate the action, but until circumstances more disagreeable than those she was enduring forced her into activity, she would not take a decisive step.
It had been the original intention that Kingsnorth should take the launch over for Collingwood, but, as the time slipped by, and the typhoon season was at hand this idea was deemed impracticable. Maclaughlin was a licensed engineer, while Kingsnorth was not, and the launch was not in the best of repair.
Maclaughlin left at daybreak on an exceedingly hot morning, when the sea rolled lazily in long, metallic swells shining as if the brilliant surface were oiled. All that day the heat was like a vapor, but in mid-afternoon the clouds rolled up, showers fell at intervals, and cool gusts of wind made the cocoanut trees writhe and their stiff leaves to rattle. Once or twice Charlotte looked at the barometer, which fell steadily.
At dinner their common anxiety made the three more companionable than anyone had hoped to be. “We are going to have a baguio, that’s flat,” said Kingsnorth, “but it has been kind in holding off. Mac’s safe in Romblon harbor by this time, and that is landlocked, and shut in by mountains. If Collingwood is there, they’ll wait anyway to come out. Mac’s got sense enough not to leave port on a falling barometer, though Collingwood might take the chances.”
“I hope Martin isn’t out on the ocean to-night,” said Charlotte. “It makes me ill to think of it.” She shivered and glanced into the darkness where the oily surf fell over in ghostly green fire, and the wash rolled back pricked with millions of vanishing light points.
“Spooky, isn’t it?” remarked Kingsnorth. He set down his coffee-cup (they were just finishing dinner), and as his hostess rose, held back the rattling shell curtain for her, then went to inspect the barometer. He whistled.
“What is it?” inquired Mrs. Mac.
“Oh, just so-so.” Something in his tone betrayed an effort to retrieve the impression made by his bit of carelessness. Mrs. Maclaughlin went over to the instrument.
“It’s nearly 750,” she said in a dismayed tone.[1] “I’ve never known it to go that low without warning since I’ve lived on the island. I wish Mac and Martin were here.”
Charlotte said nothing, but in her heart she echoed the other’s words.
“Can’t be helped,” replied Kingsnorth, curtly. “I hope that you will not feel it presumptuous in me to suggest that Mrs. Maclaughlin stay with you to-night, Mrs. Collingwood. I’ll come over also if there is anything very bad.”
Both women were grateful for the suggestion. Each had been secretly longing to broach the matter, and had felt ashamed to do so.
“I’ll go over with you while you lock up your place,” said Kingsnorth to Mrs. Maclaughlin. They disappeared almost instantly in the profound blackness of the night. Charlotte marvelled at it. The gloom was like a solid substance save where the phosphorescence showed a glimpse of foaming suds, and a few lights gleaming from the distant village seemed golden by contrast with the green and blue fires.
The servants all begged leave to absent themselves for the night. Each had discovered an ailing relative in the village to whom his presence was an absolute necessity.
“Let ‘em go,” said Kingsnorth. “They are in a dead fright. They know we’ll probably have Tophet before the night is over, and they want to get into their flock.” Even as he spoke, a little moan of wind came off the sea, and a pattering shower drenched the earth.
“Curtain rung up,” said Kingsnorth. He had been standing tentatively, hat in hand, after escorting back Mrs. Maclaughlin and some, as it seemed to Charlotte, preposterously large bundles. Charlotte motioned him to a chair. “We may as well watch the first act,” she smiled, humoring his metaphor.
“Just as well,” he answered, “because I fancy we’ll be on the second.”
“Do you mean that there may be any actual danger?” Charlotte asked, startled.
“Danger? no! At the worst we might have to spend a night under the pandan bushes. But one of these big storms is a trying thing while it lasts.”
“Trying isn’t the word,” Mrs. Maclaughlin precipitated this dictum into the conversation with her usual vigor. “It’s just nerve-wracking. Lord! Lord! what fools we women are! Here are two of us out here likely to be swallowed up by a tidal wave or Heaven only knows what, just because we were so tarnation ready to take up with a man. I’ve traipsed around this world at Andrew Maclaughlin’s heels twenty-two years, and the good Lord only knows what he hasn’t asked me to go through with; and now he’s left me unprotected in the face of the biggest storm we’re likely to have.” She fairly choked with fear and anger.
Mrs. Maclaughlin’s untrammelled speech was at all times an affront to Kingsnorth. The intimation that he was a poor substitute for Maclaughlin as a protector stung him. When he spoke, his voice had a quality of suave ugliness that grated like a rasped saw on Charlotte’s nerves.
“You’re panicky,” he said. “Why don’t you pattern on Mrs. Collingwood and me? We’re ready for anything; are we not, dear lady?”
A heavy gust of wind and another downpour silenced them all for a few seconds.
“This,” said Kingsnorth to Charlotte, as the gust subsided, “is just preliminary to the theme; it’s the scale playing in the key with which the virtuoso dazzles his audience before he rolls up his cuffs, runs both hands through his hair, and gets into the first movement. Ah, here’s the theme.”
“What’s a virtuoso?” snapped Mrs. Maclaughlin.
“A virtuoso is a gentleman who can play the piano or some other instrument exceedingly well,” Kingsnorth replied, with the same dangerous suavity.
“I hate the nasty long-haired things.” It was quite evident that Mrs. Mac’s nerves had gone to splinters. Charlotte threw herself into the breach.
“Well, don’t hate this storm,” she said, “even if Mr. Kingsnorth did compare it to a sonata. It’s beautiful. It’s grand.” Another howl and downpour, and this time the framework of the house shivered under its impact.
“Merely the andante,” said Kingsnorth, shrugging his shoulders.
“You make my blood run cold,” cried Mrs. Maclaughlin.
It was too dark to see him, but Charlotte knew that his lips were apart and his teeth grinning in an evil smile.
“But why, Mrs. Maclaughlin?” said Charlotte suddenly. “If danger is coming, it will come. No human power can stop it. The future is as unreadable as the very sky. But why borrow trouble for what we are powerless to resist? And if there is beauty and majesty in all this conflict of the elements, surely it is better to see that, than to sit dreading the unknown. Mr. Kingsnorth’s comparisons are not unjust. It is like a great piece of music, divided into movements. Whatever it may come to later, it is glorious now.”
“Spoken like a brave woman,” Kingsnorth cried. “Let loose the dogs of war and make Rome howl! Well, we don’t care; do we, Mrs. Collingwood?”
“Not much,” Charlotte assented, though somewhat coldly. Her manner brought him to a sudden check.
“I forgot,” he stammered. “Excuse me.”
“Forgot what?” This point blank query about a remark not addressed to herself emanated from Mrs. Maclaughlin.
“Dear Mrs. Mac,” Kingsnorth said, and Charlotte winced at his tone, “you do not realize how quickly you deteriorate once out of reach of Mac’s disciplining eye. Mac would never have permitted you to ask that question. I often wonder if, had it been my good fortune to marry, I should have been able to exert the strong guiding influence over my wife that Mac evidently holds over you.”
“Oh, you have,” replied Mrs. Mac, while Charlotte sat in helpless embarrassment at the scene. “Well, let me tell you that you wouldn’t have. You might have broken her heart, the Lord knows, as you’d probably have broken your children’s spirits, if you’d ’a’ had ’em; but no woman would ever be proud to be ruled by you as I’m proud to be ruled by Mac. I’m disciplined. You hit the nail on the head there. And maybe I fall back when Mac isn’t around. But I love that old man of mine. I’ve followed him over deserts and oceans. I may have let my mind go once in a while; but no woman on God’s green earth would have married you and lived with you twenty-two years, and still have loved you as I love Mac. I’ve been rebellious sometimes with the Almighty, and it hasn’t always seemed as if the powers above knew what they were about. But the good Lord did a wise thing when He kept women and children out of your hands, John Kingsnorth.” She arose with a snort of wrath and passed into the house. “Where’s my Bible?” they heard her saying to herself. “I brought it.”
For a second or two, Charlotte remained like Kingsnorth, half paralyzed by the outburst. Then a helpless, pitying embarrassment settled upon her. It was all so terribly true, it was such a baring of naked underfeelings. Would it ever be possible, she wondered, to resume the island life after such an indecent exposure of what simmered deep in Mrs. Maclaughlin’s heart? Then, as the silence grew, she cast about vainly for some change of subject. As if divining her thoughts, Kingsnorth rose.
“Already the tempest has broken,” he said. “It’s been brewing three years. I can’t complain; and I know you think she told the truth.”
A sudden impulse stirred Charlotte. “No, no,” she said. “You must not think that. I believe that, if you had married the right woman (that’s the stock phrase, isn’t it?) you would have been a tender husband, and if you had had children, a kind father. I don’t know what perversity of fate kept those influences out of your life, but all that is wayward in you and bitter seems to have been caused by their lack.”
She uttered the words with real warmth, and for an instant wondered that he made no reply. Then, as the pause grew more marked, she heard him breathing heavily, and it flashed into her mind that the man was on the point of an utter breakdown. Her few sincere words had gone straight through the armor that Mrs. Maclaughlin’s blows had apparently failed to affect. An absolute horror of such a possibility seized upon her. They had had, she felt, an indecent exhibition of naked human emotions. If more were to follow, what intimate revelations might not take place? Yet the impossibility of uttering some banality was clear to her mind. Anything short of the sincerity and earnestness demanded by the situation would be insulting. So she remained as if transfixed, in a kind of shivering expectation of what might be coming.
Kingsnorth, however, pulled himself together after a convulsive movement or two of his chest. He stood for an instant without a word, and then walked away to his own quarters, whence Charlotte soon heard his voice shouting angrily for his servant.
Mrs. Maclaughlin, somewhat appeased by finding the Bible which she had brought along for her usual nightly chapter, came out on the piazza as the strident tones of Kingsnorth penetrated the sitting-room.
“Taking it out on his boy,” she remarked. “Well, I’ve been aching to tell the truth to John Kingsnorth for two years, and now I’ve done it.”
“Do you feel any better for it?”
“Yes—no. I’m always sorry when I blurt out. He’s right: Mac holds me in.” Her voice broke. “Oh, my Lord! My Lord! I wish I knew where he was this minute. You’re a strange woman, Charlotte Collingwood. You sit here and watch them waves roll in and hear the wind blowing, and you don’t seem to give one thought to the man that you’ve lived here with side by side for a year. Ain’t you got no love for him?”
Charlotte put up a hand. “I can’t discuss that with you, Mrs. Maclaughlin. Surely I have made it plain before this.”
“You’ve made a lot plain,” replied Mrs. Maclaughlin. There was endless reservation in her tone. It heaped such mountains of unuttered reproach that Charlotte quite bowed under it.
“The rain is coming in strong,” said Mrs. Maclaughlin, when she had extracted sufficient healing from her companion’s discomfort. “You’ll get drenched out here. I’m going to read my Bible. You had better come in.”
But Charlotte motioned her away. “I’m not religiously inclined to-night,” she replied.
“Charlotte Collingwood, do you defy your Maker?”
“I’m rebellious to-night, Mrs. Maclaughlin. There are His waves and His winds, but still I’m rebellious. I’m not apologetic to-night, not even in the face of a baguio.”
“I’ll speak for you,” said Mrs. Maclaughlin earnestly. She went inside, closed the doors and shell windows to keep out the storm, and Charlotte heard her keeping her word. Mrs. Maclaughlin’s prayers were simple but fervent. They seemed to consist chiefly of a few reiterated sentences. “O Lord, protect and save my old husband. You know I love him, Lord; but it isn’t all selfishness. O God, give me back my Mac.” At times she asked that the Divine Power might soften the hardened heart of Mrs. Collingwood.
[1] Barometric pressure in Philippines is measured in millimeters. In typhoons where fifth signal is flown, about 742 is lowest pressure recorded. In great storm of 1908, 739.8 was lowest. Generally the falling of the barometer is gradual for several days during the continuance of the storm. When it falls suddenly, as here indicated, before a storm, it means that a storm of short duration but of terrific violence is coming.