The Empty Sack

by Basil King

"And all the while this is what the trouble was."

What he meant by this was more than the picture, "Life and Death," though how much more he made no attempt to measure. The truth that now emerged for him out of his memory of the winter months was that Wray loved Jennie, that Jennie loved Wray, and that he had been a blind fool never to have seen it. He threw himself on his mother's couch, burying his face in the cushions.

As much as from anything else he suffered from the breakdown of his convictions. He had been so glib on the subject of his instinct. Love could make mistakes, he had said to Edith, but instinct couldn't. He had been the other half of Jennie; Jennie had been the other half of him. She couldn't be unfaithful to him, because he knew she couldn't. His love was protecting her like a magic cloak, while she was.... The awful shame of a man whose foolish stammerings of passion are held up to public ridicule seemed to kill the heart in his body.

And yet, when he staggered to his feet and strode toward the obsessing thing to pull the cloth over it again, he started back once more. The woman with the skull had changed. She was a coarse creature now, common and sensual. Amazement pinned him to the spot, his hands raised as if at sight of an apparition. Then slowly, insensibly, weirdly, Jennie came back again, though not quite the Jennie he had seen at first. This Jennie retained the traits of the second woman—a Jennie coarsened, common, and sensual, in spite of being exquisite, too.

He walked in and out of the other rooms on the floor, so as to clear his mind of the suggestion. When he came back, he saw the second woman, and the second woman only; but having moved into a new light, he found Jennie there as before. It was like sorcery. Whether the thing had a baleful life, or whether his perceptions were growing crazed, he couldn't tell.

Neither could he tell what he was to do with regard to the plans he had been making. A hotel in New York now....

But the immediate duties were evident. Nominally he had come back to befriend the boy, and the boy must be befriended. To do that he must have a knowledge of the facts. Farther than this he had been unable to progress even by the hour, in the early afternoon, when he was limping along Indiana Avenue.

He had telephoned his coming, and Jennie had answered in a dead voice which could hardly be interpreted as a welcome. It was like a guilty voice, he said to himself, though he corrected the thought instantly, to argue in favor of emotion.

He had spent the intervening two or three hours arguing. Jennie was a model, and he must not be surprised if a model's work, however startling to one who was not a model, should seem a matter of course to her. All professions had peculiarities strange to those who didn't belong to them, and the model's perhaps most of all. He couldn't judge; he couldn't condemn. He must try to understand her from her own point of view. Probably her posing in this way seemed the most natural thing in the world to her; and, if so, he must make it seem the same to himself. He couldn't expect her to have the hesitations and circumspections of a girl from Marillo Park. If she was true to her own standards, it was all he had a right to look for.

And yet there was Wray. He had long seen in Hubert a fellow whom no girl could love "and get away with it." These were the words he had used of his friend, and he had considered the detail none of his business. Most men were that way, more or less, and if he himself wasn't, it was not a moral excellence, but a trick of temperament. But that Jennie was in danger from Wray was a thought that never occurred to him. Her innocence and defenselessness, combined with what he had taken to be a kind of studio code of honor, would have been enough to protect her, even had his suspicions been roused, which they never were. He tried to smother those suspicions even now, saying to himself that he had nothing against her except that she had been a model—in all for which a model was ever called upon.