The Empty Sack

by Basil King

He walked back to the studio as if wings on his feet were lifting him above the pavement. It was the seal on his success. "Sold to a private collector" would be a bomb to throw among the dealers, who had been taking their time and dickering. It was more than the seal on this one success; it was a harbinger of the next success. And with this thing behind him, the next success was calling to him to begin.

He already knew what he should begin on. It was to be called, "Eve Tempting the Serpent." He was not yet sure how he should treat the idea, but a lethargic semihuman reptile was to be roused to the concept of evil by a woman's beauty and abandonment. The thing would be daring; but it couldn't be too daring, or it would bring down on him the recrudescent blue-law spirit already so vigorous through the country. He couldn't afford a tussle with that until he was better established.

But he had made some sketches, and had written to Jennie that he should like to talk the matter over on that very afternoon. She had written in reply that, at last, she would be free to come. For the first few days after the funeral she had been either too grief stricken or too busy; but now the claims of life were asserting themselves again and she was trying to respond to them. He must not expect her to be gay; but she would grow more cheerful in time.

So he went back to the studio to lunch and to wait for her coming. Till she had ceased coming he hadn't known how much the daily expectation of seeing her had meant to him. The very occasions on which she had, as he expressed it, played him false had brought an excitement which he would have been emotionally poorer for having missed. He could not go through the experience often; he could, perhaps, not go through it again. But for that test he was apparently not to be called upon. She was coming. She knew what she was coming for. The very fact that she had written meant surrender.

And that, indeed, was what Jennie had been saying to herself all through the morning. Now that there had been this interval, she knew that her latitude for saying "Yes" and acting "No" was at an end. If she went at all, she must go all the way. To go once more and draw back once more would not be playing the game. She was clear in her mind that the day would be decisive. As to her decision, she was not so sure.

That is, she was not sure of its wisdom, though sure what she would do. She would do what she had meant to do more than two months earlier. There was no reason why she shouldn't, and the same set of reasons why she should. Not only were the money and release imperative, but Hubert meant more to her than ever. His sympathy through her sorrow had touched her by its very novelty. He had written, sent flowers, and kept himself in the background. Bob would have done more and moved her less, for the reason that doing all and giving all were in his nature. The rare thing being the most precious thing, she treasured the perfunctory phrases in Hubert's scrawl of condolence above all the outpourings of Bob's heart.

Nevertheless, she treasured them with misgivings. The consciousness of being married had acquired some strength from watching the effect of her father's death on her mother. She had known, ever since growing up, that her father and mother had been unequally mated. It was not wholly a question of practical failure or success—it was rather that the balance of moral support had been so shifted between them that the mother had nothing to sustain her. "Poor momma," had been Jennie's way of putting it, "has to take the burden of everything. She's got us on her shoulders, and poppa, too." And yet, with Josiah's death, some prop of Lizzie's inner life seemed to have been snatched away. She was not weaker, perhaps, but she was more detached, and stranger. To her children, to her neighbors, she had always been strange, always detached, but now the aloofness had become more significant. With Josiah alone she had lived in that communion of things shared which leads to understanding. Now that he was gone, something had gone with him, leaving Lizzie like an empty house.

Jennie was thrown back on what Bob had repeated so often: "You're the other half of me; I'm the other half of you." Whether it came through some impulse of affinity, or whether it was the chance of conscientiously living together, Jennie wasn't sure; but it began to seem as if in the mere fact of marriage there was a naturally unifying principle. To go against it was, in a measure, to go against the forces of the universe; and though she had only been nominally married to Bob, she was preparing to go against it. Had she been a rebel at heart, it would have been easier; but she was docile, loving, eager to be loved, with nothing more daring in her soul than the wish to live at peace with the world she saw round her.

Bob's letters were disturbing, too. In the way of a happy future, he took everything for granted. He reasoned as if, now that they had gone through a certain form together and signed it with a parson's name, she had no more liberty of will than a woman in a harem. Little as she was rebellious, she rebelled against that, preferring an element of chance in her love to a love in which there was no choice. Bob wrote as if her love was of no importance, as if he could love enough for two—did, in fact, love enough for two—so that the whole need of loving was taken off her hands.

I feel, as if my love was the air and you were a plant to grow in it. It's the sunshine to which your leaves and blossoms will only have to turn.