The Wild Olive: A Novel

by Basil King

"Yes; about four. That would suit me perfectly."

She spoke frankly, and even smiled faintly, with just such a shadow of a blush as the situation called for. The Wise Man within him begged him once more to be content. If, the Wise Man argued, this well-poised serenity was not love, it was something so like it that the distinction would require a splitting of hairs. Conquest strove to listen and obey; but even as he did so he was aware again of that rage of impotence which finds its easiest outlet in violence. As he rose to take his leave, with all the outward signs of friendly ceremoniousness, he had time to be appalled at the perception that he, the middle-aged, spick-and-span New-Yorker, should so fully understand how it is that a certain type of frenzied brute can kill the woman whom he passionately loves, but who is hopelessly out of reach.

XXIV

Except when his business instincts were on the alert, Ford's slowness of perception was perhaps most apparent in his judgment of character and his analysis of other people's motives. Taking men and women as he found them, he had little tendency to speculate as to the impulses within their lives, any more than as to the furnishings behind their house-fronts. A human being was all exterior to him, something like a street. Even in matters that touched him closely, the act alone was his concern; and he dealt with its consequences, without, as a rule, much inquisitive probing of its cause.

So when Miriam Strange elected to marry Conquest, he accepted the settled fact, for the time being, in the spirit in which he would have taken some disastrous manifestation of natural phenomena. Investigation of the motive of such a step was as little in his line as it would have been in the case of a destructive storm at sea. To his essentially simple way of viewing life it was something to be lamented, but to be borne as best one was able, while one said as little as one could about it.

And yet, somewhere in the wide, rarely explored regions of his nature there were wonderings, questionings, yearnings protests, cries, that forced themselves to the surface now and then, as the boiling waters within the earth gush out in geyser springs. It required urgent pressure to impel them forth, but when they came it was with violence. Such an occasion had been his night on Lake Champlain; such another was the evening when he announced to Miriam his intention of becoming Norrie Ford again. When these moments came they took him by surprise, even though afterward he was able to recognize the fact that they had been long preparing.

It was in this way, without warning, that his heart had sprung on him the question: Why should she marry him? At the minute when Conquest was leaving Miriam, he, Ford, was tramping the streets of New York, watching them grow alive with light, in glaring, imaginative ugliness—ugliness so dazzling in its audacity and so fanciful in its crude commercialism that it had the power to thrill. It was perhaps the electric stimulus of sheer light that quickened the pace of his slow mentality from the march of acceptance to the rush of protest, at an instant when he thought he had resigned himself to the facts.

Why should she marry Conquest? He was shouldering his way through the crowds when the question made itself heard, with a curious illuminating force that suggested its own answer. He was walking, partly to work off the tension of the strain under which these few days were passing, and partly because he had got the idea that he was being shadowed. He had no profound objection to that, though he would have preferred to give himself up of his own free will rather than to be arrested. Perhaps, after all, it was only an accident that had caused him to catch sight of the same two men at different moments through the day, and just now it amused him to put them to the test by leading them a dance. He had come to the conclusion that he had been mistaken, or that he had outwitted them, when this odd question, irrelevant to anything he had directly in his thoughts, presented itself as though it had been asked by some voice outside him: Why should she marry him?

Up to the present his unanalytical mind would have replied—as it would have replied to the same query concerning any one else—that she was marrying him "because she wanted to." That would have seemed to him to cover the whole ground of any one's affairs; but all at once it had become insufficient. It was as if the street had suddenly become insufficient as a highway, breaking into a chasm. He stopped abruptly, confronting, as it were, that bewildering void which a psychological situation invariably seemed to him. To get into a place where his few straightforward formulæ did not apply gave him that sense of distress which every creature feels out of its native element.

It was a proof of the dependence with which, in matters requiring mental or emotional experience, he had come to lean on Miriam Strange, as well as of the directness with which he appealed to her for help, that he should face about on the instant, and turn his steps toward her.