"Look here, old chap, come and dine with me at Sherry's," he burst out, "and I'll telephone Gerty that I've thrown over that beastly dinner."
To offer something to eat to the afflicted was the solitary form in which consolation appeared to him invested with solidity; and so earnest was the generous impulse by which he now felt himself to be prompted, that before Adams could reply to the invitation he had begun already to run over mentally the courses he was prepared to order. For a colossal, a consolatory, an unforgettable dinner he was determined that it should be—such a dinner as he permitted himself only upon the rare occasions when one of his intimate friends had lost heavily in stocks or been abandoned by his wife. "Come to Sherry's," he urged again, halting in the ecstatic working of his mind, "and I promise you that we will make an evening."
But the sly incarnate devil which lurked in Adams in the form of an ironic spirit asserted itself with an explosion which shook the plethoric gravity with which Perry contemplated an orgy of indigestion. The universal scheme appeared planned to fulfil the law of a Titanic humour, and his own credulity and Connie's indiscretions showed suddenly to Adams as mere mote-like jests which circled in a general convulsion of Nature's irony.
"Well, you are a capital fellow," he stammered, after a moment, while the spasm of his unholy laughter rocked him from head to foot. "I—I'd like it of all things—but I can't. The fact is it is all so funny—the whole business of life."
Even as he uttered the words he realised that to Perry they would convey an infamous lightness, but at the thought his hysterical humour redoubled in its energy. It was as if he stood outside—afar off—and watched as a god the little tangled eccentricities of earth. And they were little, even though Perry should continue to regard the situation with such large magnificence.
By the time, however, that he had parted from Perry Bridewell and turned in at his own door, the gravity of the occasion had grown almost oppressive in his reflections. Connie had gone an hour before—he was too late to have detained her upon a pretext—and while sitting speechless before the dinner he could not eat—his heated imagination wove visions of horror in which his wife was entangled as a fly in a spider's web. What if Connie were really possessed by the influence of some drug which rendered her incapable of willing rationally? What if he missed her at the entrance to the opera? Or what if—most desperate supposition—she should, in the event of his finding her, refuse to accept his manufactured excuse to recall her home? She was capable, he knew, of any recklessness, but he had never for an instant conceived her as walking open eyed into dishonour, and he felt again the awful, if partly comforting conviction that she was not herself—that an infernal drug was working in her and bending her to some particular uses of the devil. Why had she wasted her beauty and even her life? he wondered bitterly—and did the moment's mad exhilaration compensate for the slow deliberate eating away of her moral consciousness? He recalled again the violent flutter of her manner, the excitement as of intoxication in her voice, the yellow tinge which had crept gradually over the ivory of her skin; her spasmodic movements and the ineffectual lies which deluded neither of them for an instant. The tragedy of life rose before him as vividly as the humour of it had done an hour ago—a tragedy which was hideous because it was ignoble, in which there was neither the beauty of resignation nor the sublimity of defiance. Had there been the least—even the smallest redeeming honesty in the situation he felt that he might have faced it, if not with positive sympathy yet with a tolerant, a merciful comprehension. Love he might have understood—for women needed it, he knew, and he was burdened by no delusion concerning the place he occupied in Connie's horizon. But before the breathless chase of excitement in which she lived, the frenzied invocation of pleasure that filled her thoughts, he found himself groping blindly for some meaning which would explain the thing it could not justify.
The hours dragged so heavily that by ten o'clock he put on his overcoat and snow-shoes and went out again into the street. He was possessed at the moment by a growing fear of missing Connie, and as he walked toward the opera house he had sense of a premonition almost occult in power that the terrible destiny which had her in its clutch was gathering energy for some pitiless catastrophe. With characteristic patience he searched his own conscience, the incidents of his daily life, and held himself rather than his wife to account. After all, he was the stronger of the two, and yet when had he put forth his strength or his pity on her behalf? In the closer human relations mere indifference showed suddenly as sin, and the sluggish spirit which had controlled his married life appeared in his memory as a form of moral apathy. Was a human soul so small a thing that it could perish at his side and he be none the Wiser? What was his boasted intellect worth if it could paralyse the human part of him and exhaust the fount of his compassion? In his widening vision he saw that in the spirit of things humanity is one and indivisible, a single organism held together by a common pulse of life. To live or to die apart he realised, is beyond the scope of an individual destiny, for in the eye of God each man that lives is the keeper not of his own but of his brother's soul.
The self reproach which moved in his heart impelled him so rapidly upon his way that when he reached the doors he had still an hour to wait before the opera ended. Remembering that if he were so fortunate to find Connie he must take her home, he went to a livery stable for a carriage, and then coming back, walked nervously up and down upon the frozen pavement. His mind was divided between the fear that she might leave by another entrance—that he might miss her altogether—and the more horrible dread that in seeing her he should be unable to prevail upon her to come away. She might, he felt, demand a reason, exact from him the meaning of his unexpected appearance; there was even a hideous possibility that she might fly into a temper.
The wind was bitter and he went into the lobby, where a few men were hurrying out to secure their carriages. Then at last came the crowd in evening dress, and it seemed to him that the acuteness of his perception was reinforced by an almost unnatural power of vision. Out of the moving throng the face of each woman stood forth distinctly as if relieved by a spectral illumination; and he saw them clearly one after one, fair or dark, plain or beautiful, until from among them there shone toward him the elaborately arranged blonde head of Connie, under a winking diamond which shed over her an unbecoming light. He had hoped to the last that she would be with several others, but he perceived when she came out at Brady's side, with her babyish chin tilted upward and her thin features working in a forced and unhealthy animation, that they were alone and would probably be alone for the remainder of the evening.
Standing beyond the entrance, and watching her unseen, while she paused for an instant in the crowded lobby, Adams felt again the strange stir of emotion he had experienced when he looked at her the evening before under the lamplight in his study. In a single vivid instant he saw her winking diamonds, her rouged cheeks, the nervous flutter that shook her fragile figure, and the consuming fire which was destroying the appealing prettiness of her face. Then he looked deeper still to the naked terrified soul of her, caught in a web from which, because of her weakness, there could be no escape.