The Shadow of Life

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

With his quick looking away he did not know whether Eppie had seen him see. He went on, knowing nothing definite, until, suddenly, as if some fierce beast had seized him, he found himself struggling, choking, torn by a hideous, elemental jealousy.

He stood still in the afternoon sunlight as he became aware of this phenomenon in himself, his hands involuntarily clenched, staring as if at a palpable enemy.

The savage, rudimentary man had sprung up in him. He hated Grainger. He longed to beat him into the earth, to crush the breath out of him; and for a moment, most horrible of all,—a moment that seemed to set fangs in his throat,—he could not tell whether he more hated Eppie or more desired to tear her from the rival, to seize her and bear her away, with a passion untouched by any glamour.

And Gavan was conscious, through it all, that only inhuman heights made possible such crumbling, crashing falls into savagedom; conscious that Grainger could not have known such thoughts. They were as ugly as those of a Saint Anthony. Wholesome manhood would recoil from their debasement. He, too, recoiled, but the debasement was within him, he could not flee from it. The moment of realization, helpless realization, was long. Ultra-civilization stood and watched barbarian hordes swarm over its devastated ruins. Then, with a feeling of horrible shame, a shame that was almost a nausea, he went on into the house.

In his own room he sat down near the window, took his head in his hands, the gesture adding poignancy to his humiliation, and gazed at the truth. He had stripped himself of all illusion only to make himself the more helpless before its lowest forms. More than the realized love was the realized jealousy; more than the anguish at the thought of having lost her was the rage of the dispossessed, unsatisfied brute. Such love insulted the loved woman. He could not escape from it, but he could not feel the added grace and piety that, alone, could make it tolerable. From the fixed contemplation of his own sensations his mind dropped presently to the relief of more endurable thoughts. To feel the mere agony of loss was a dignifying and cleansing process. For, apparently, he had lost her. It was strange, almost unthinkable, that it should be so, and stranger the more he thought. He, who had never claimed, had no right to feel a loss. But he had not known till now how deep was his consciousness of their union.

She had long ago guessed the secret of the voiceless, ambiguous love that could flutter only as far as pain, that could never rise to rapture. She had guessed that behind its half-tortured, momentary smile was the impersonal Buddha-gaze; and because she so understood its inevitable doom she had guarded herself from its avowal—guarded herself and him. He had trusted her not to forget the doom, and not to let him forget it, for a moment. But all the time he had known that in her eyes he was captive to some uncanny fate, and that could she release him from his chains her love would answer his. He had been sure of it. Hence his present perplexity.

Perplexity began to resolve itself into a theory of commonplace expediency, and, feeling the irony of such resentment, he resented this tame sequel to their mute relationship.

Unconsciously, he had assumed that had he been able to ask her to be his wife she would have been able to consent. Her courage, in a sense, would have been the reward of his weakness, for what he would see in himself as weakness she would see as strength. Courage on her part it certainly would have needed, for what a dubious offering would his have been: glamour, at its best,—a helpless, drugged glamour,—and, at its worst, the mere brute instinct that, blessedly, this winding path of thought led him away from.

But she had probably come to despair of releasing him from chains, had come to see clearly that at the end of every avenue she walked with him the Buddha statue would be waiting in a serenity appalling and permanent; and, finding last night the child friendship dangerously threatened, discovering that the impossible love was dangerously real and menaced both their lives, she had swiftly drawn back, she had retreated to the obvious safeguards of an advantageous marriage. He couldn’t but own that she was wise and right; more wise, more right,—there was the odd part of it, the unadjusted bit where perplexity stung him,—than he could have expected her to be. Ambition and the common-sense that is the very staff of life counted for much, of course; but he hadn’t expected them to count so soon, so punctually, as it were.

Perhaps,—and his mind, disentangled from the personal clutch where such an interpretation might have hurt or horrified, safe once more on its Stylites pillar, dwelt quite calmly on this final aspect,—perhaps, with her, too, sudden glamour and instinct had counted, answering the appeal of Grainger’s passion. He suspected the whole fabric of the love between men and women to be woven of these blind, helpless impulses,—impulses that created their own objects. Her mind, with its recognition of danger, had chosen Grainger as a fitting mate, and, in his arms, she had felt that justification by the senses that people so funnily took for the final sanctification of choice.