“Go on about your work and leave me alone. I’m trying ... I say, I’m trying to work out a better product for our special trade.”
The effort it took to destroy the illusion in his wife’s mind was so terrific that it left him shaking. He spoke almost savagely; he was in a savage frame of mind, for he had overrun his usual hour for indulgence in drug, and was trying to persuade himself that he was still in control. The compassionate attitude she had taken could hardly have been more unhappily timed.
Stella, perceiving the failure of her little desperate move, slipped away, her heart troubled with a strange conflict of emotions. He had not, despite his agonizing effort, strengthened her crumbling confidence in him.
And she knew with a pang that he had not really been working on the product for the special trade at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
BITTER COMFORT
The former delight of their life together was frequently turned to bitterness by just such disillusionizing scenes as this. The time had long passed when she could please and amuse and occasionally puzzle him with her romancing, her manifest infatuation. King seemed unable to grasp or tolerate such things as romance any more. Sometimes, indeed, he would go for days without more than casually recognizing her mere presence in the house. Again, a mood of tenderness would come upon him and she would see that his eyes glistened with tears. The sense of mirage would be strong in her heart, for Stella was growing wary; yet even so, it would seem, at such times, as though a little light were breaking along the path ahead of them. But it couldn’t last—and she was never really fooled.
Sometimes her husband’s eyes would even take on their old look of roundness and fascination, and, as though psychically stirred by the unuttered anguish within her, he would go on in the old way, laying extravagant plans—all the things they would do by and bye: the places they would visit, the brilliant life they’d live. But she felt him, to employ metaphor, puffing, a little, always, at such times, like a half spent runner, in an effort to make spontaneous what had lost the persuasive ring of spontaneity. Also, she made the discovery, after a while, that King only reverted to these flashes of the old-time splendour when an opium mood reined most benignly in his heart—a heart, after all, mysterious still, and unsearchable as the forces Stella felt at work all about her in this little empire of the poppy.
She grew bold and fearless in a new determination to tear away all the films from her own vision and face the naked facts of her life, whatever they might prove.