I remembered that the English papers, with the news doubtless in it, would not reach Territet until late that evening or the following morning. But I could not well tell her what had occurred. “Good-by,” said I, shaking hands. “Tell them how sorry I was. I may see you all in Paris.”
And away I went, with not an outward sign of my internal state. In less than half an hour I was in the Paris express.
I stopped at Paris a month. A letter came from her—a bulky letter. I tossed it unopened into the fire. A week, and a second letter came. It was not so bulky. I flung it unopened into the fire. About two weeks, and a third letter came. I got Rossiter to address an envelope to her. I inclosed her unopened letter in the envelope and mailed it. I was giving myself an exquisite pleasure, the keener because it was seasoned with exquisite pain.
All this time I had been amusing my idle days in the usual fashion. My readers who lead quiet lives—the women who sit thinking what they would do if only they were men—the men who slip away occasionally for a scampish holiday, and return to their sober routine with the cheering impression that they have been most fearfully and wonderfully devilish—those women and those men will regret that I refrain from details of how I amused myself. But to my notion I have said enough when I have said “in the usual fashion.” It passed the time as probably nothing else in the circumstances would have passed such tenacious hours, every one lingering to be counted. But I confess I have never been virtuous enough to be especially raptured by so-called vice. No doubt those who divide actions into good and bad, using the good for steady diet and the bad for dessert, have advantages in enjoyment over those who simply regard things as interesting and uninteresting. For, curiously enough, on that latter basis of division practically all the things esteemed by most human beings as the delightful but devilish dessert of life fall into the class of more or less uninteresting. But for the stimulus of the notion that he is doing something courageously, daringly wicked, I doubt if any but a dull fellow would perpetrate vice enough to lift the most easily scandalized hands in the world. The trouble with vice is that it is so tiresome—and so bad for the health. And most of it is so vulgar. Drinking to excess and gambling, for instance. I have indulged in both at times, when hard pressed for ways to pass the time or when in those stupid moods of obstinate unreasonableness in which a man takes a savage pleasure in disgusting himself with himself. Drinking has a certain coarse appeal to the imagination—coarse and slight but definite. But gambling is sheer vulgarity. I have been called money-mad, because I have made money, finding it easy and occupying to attend to business. Yet never have I cared about money sufficiently to take the faintest interest in the gaming table. Gambling—all forms of it—is for those sordid creatures who love money, and who have no intelligent appreciation of its value. Gambling—all the vices, for that matter—is essentially aristocratic; for, as I believe I have explained, aristocracy analyzes into the quintessence of vulgarity. The two incompetent classes—the topmost and the bottommost—are steeped in vice, for the same reason of their incompetence to think or to act.
A fourth letter, the bulkiest of all, came from Mary Kirkwood. A few hours before it was delivered a telegram came from her:
“A letter is on the way. Godfrey, I beg you to read it. I love you.”
I tore up the telegram, sent back the letter without opening it. You are denouncing me as inhuman, gentle reader. Perhaps you are right. But permit me to point out to you that, if I had not in my composition a vein of iron, I should never have risen from the mosquito-haunted flats of the Passaic. Also, gentle reader, if I had been a man of the ordinary sort would Mary Kirkwood have been sufficiently interested in me to send those letters and that telegram?
A day or so after the return of her last letter I was seized—I can’t say why—with a longing to see my father and mother and sister, on that lonely farm out in New Jersey. I had never felt that desire since I first left home, but had made my few and brief visits out of a sense of duty—no, of shame. The thought of them gave me no sensation of horror, as it gave Edna and her daughter. When I remembered them it was simply as one remembers any random fact. They did not understand me; and in them there was nothing to understand. We had few subjects for conversation, and those not wildly interesting and soon exhausted. You will smile when I say I loved them. Yet it is the truth. We do not always love those we like to be with; we do not always like to be with those we love.
There was nothing to detain me in Paris. The hours hung like guests who do not know how to take leave. So not many days elapsed between my seizure and my appearance at the spacious and comfortable stone farmhouse where the four old people were awaiting in a semi-comatose or dozing state what they firmly believed was a summons to a higher life. Their belief in it, like that of most religious people, was not strong enough to make them impatient to get it; still they believed, and found the belief a satisfactory way of employing such small part of their minds as remained awake.