The Shadow of Life

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

He appreciated what his attitude must seem to her—priestly indeed, almost sleek in its lack of personal emotion, its trite recourse to the preaching of renunciation. And, almost with a sense of humor, that he felt as hateful at such a moment, the perception came that he might serve her through the very erroneousness of her seeing of him. The sense of humor was hateful, and his skilful seizing of her suggestion had a grotesque aspect as well. Even in his weariness, he was aware that the cup of contemplation was full when it could hold its drop of realized irony.

“I think that I have become a priest, Alice,” he said. “I see everything differently. And weren’t you brought up in a religious way—to go to church, seek props, say your prayers, sacrifice yourself and live for others? Can’t you take hold of that again? It’s the only way.”

Her quick flaming was justified, he knew; one shouldn’t speak of help when one was so far away; he had exaggerated the sacerdotal note. “Oh, you despise me! It is because of that, and you are trying to hide it from me! What is religion to me, what is anything—anything in the world to me—if I have lost you, Gavan? Why are you so cruel, so horrible? I can’t understand it! I can’t bear it! Oh, I can’t! Why are our lives wrecked like this? Why did you leave me? Why have I become wicked? I was never, never meant to be wicked.” Tears, not of abasement, not of appeal, but of pure anguish ran down her face.

He was nearer to that elemental sadness and could speak with a more human tone. “You are not wicked—no more—no less—than any one. I don’t despise you. Believe me, Alice. If I hadn’t changed, this would have drawn me to you; I should have felt a deeper tenderness because you needed me more. But think of me as a priest: I have changed as much as that. And remember that what you have yourself found out is true—the only thing to be afraid of is oneself, and the only escape from fear is to—is to”—he paused, hearing the triteness of his own words and wondering with a new wonder at their truth, their gray antiquity, their ever-verdant youth—“is to renounce,” he finished.

He was standing now, ready for departure. In her eyes he saw at last the dignity of hopelessness, of an accepted doom, a pain far above panic.

“Dear Alice,” he said, taking her hand—“dear Alice.” And, with all the delicacy of his shrinking from a too great directness, his eyes had a steadiness of demand that sank into the poor woman’s tossed, unstable soul, he added, “Don’t ever do anything ugly—or foolish—again.”

Her lover lost,—the very slightness of the words “ugly,” “foolish,” told her how utterly lost,—a deep thrill of emotional exaltation went through the emptiness he left. She longed to clasp the lost lover and to sink at the knees of the priest.

“I will be good. I will renounce myself,” she said, as though it were a creed before an altar; and hurriedly she whispered, poor child, “Perhaps in heaven—we will find each other.”

Gavan often thought of that pathetic human clutch. So was the dream of an atoning heaven built. It kept its pathos, even its beauty, for him, when the whole tale ended in the world’s shrug and smile. He heard first that Alice had become an emotionally devout churchwoman;—that lasted for a year;—and then, alas! alas!—but, after all, the smile and shrug was the best philosophy,—that she rode once more with the Nietzschian lover. He had one short note from her: he would have heard—perhaps, at any rate, he would know what to think when he did hear that she saw the man again. And she wanted him to know from her that it was not as he might think: she really loved him now—the other; not as she had loved Gavan,—that would always be first,—but very much; and she needed love, she must have it in her life, and she was lifting this man who loved her, was helping his life, and she had broader views now and did not believe in creeds or in the shibboleths that guided the vulgar. And she was harming no one, no one knew. Life was far too complicated, the intricacies of modern civilization far too enmeshing, for duty to be seen in plain black and white. The whole question of marriage was an open one, and one had a right to interpret one’s duty according to one’s own lights. Gavan saw the hand of the new master through it all. Shortly after, the death of Alice’s husband, killed while tiger-shooting, set her free, and the new master proved himself at all events a fond one by promptly marrying her. So ended Alice in his life.

There was not much more to look back on after that. His return to England; his entering the political arena, with neither desire nor reluctance; his standing for the town his uncle’s influence marked out for him; the fight and the very gallant failure,—there had been, for him, an amused interest in the game of it all. The last year he had spent in his Surrey home, usually in company with a really pathetic effigy of the past—his father, poor and broken in health, the old serpent of Gavan’s childhood basking now in torpid insignificance, its fangs drawn.