The Wheel of Life

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

And despite this she was nothing to him, had no proper business in his mind. He tried to think of the other women whom he had loved and remembered, or of the more numerous ones still whom he had loved only to forget. Well, he had lived a man's life, and the deuce of it was that women should have come into it at all. He had never wanted sentiment in the abstract, he told himself half angrily; he was bored to death by the deadly routine of what in his own mind he alluded to as "the business of love." It had always come to him without his sanction—even against his will, and he had never failed to combat the feeling with shallow cynicism, to exhaust it speedily in racing motors. There was no satisfaction in sentiment, of this he was quite convinced; and he remembered the voice of Madame Alta, with her peculiar high note of piercing sweetness, which entered like wine and honey into his blood. The hold she still kept upon his senses through his memory was strengthened by the knowledge which fretted him to the admission that she had wearied first—that while her fascination was still potent to work its spell upon him, she had fled in a half lyric, half devilish pursuit of the flesh she worshipped. To live life thoroughly, to get out of it all that it contained of pleasure or of experience, this was the germ of his applied philosophy; and it was only by some fortunate mental power of selection, some instinctive sense for comeliness, for a well-ordered, healthful physical existence, which had left him at the end of his forty years of pleasure with a perfectly sound and active mind and body. He himself was accustomed to declare that though he had lived gayly, he had lived decently, too, and he was even inclined at times to flatter his vanity rather upon the things which he had left undone than upon those more evident achievements which had stamped him to his social world. A religious instinct, which was hardly definite enough for a conviction, still survived in him, and it was entirely characteristic of the man that he should find cause for shame, not congratulation, in his old relations with Madame Alta.

The last remaining bit of toast and marmalade had vanished from his plate, and as he never allowed himself more than his usual number of slices, he carefully brushed the crumbs from his coat, and pushing back his chair, rose from the table. The movement, slight as it was, served to dispel his passing dejection, and as he gathered up his papers and passed into the adjoining sitting-room, he smiled at Wilkins with such genial brightness that the man was almost deluded into attributing the changed atmosphere to his own personal attentions instead of to the agreeable sensation following upon digestion. When he left the dining-room Kemper was already humming a little Italian air, and it was not until he was seated, with his cigar, in an easy chair upon his hearthrug, that he suddenly recognised the music as a favourite aria of Madame Alta's. He had heard her sing it a hundred times, and he recalled now that she had a trick of throwing her head back as the notes issued from her round, white throat, until her beautiful, though coarsened face, was seen in an admirable foreshortening, while her eyes were shadowed by her drooping lids, which were faintly tinted to look like rose-leaves. With the memory his expression was again overcast. Then a pleased smile chased the heaviness from his eyes, for he remembered suddenly that he held a firm grip on the promising Chericoke Valley Central stock. He lighted his cigar, tossed the match into the empty fireplace, and pushing the papers from his knees, relapsed for twenty minutes into an agreeable vacancy of mind.

The room in which he sat was essentially a man's room, furnished for comfort rather than for beauty, and one saw in it an unconscious striving after large effects, a disdain of useless bric-a-brac as of small decorations. On the mantel the solitary ornament was an exquisite bronze figure of a wrestler at the triumphant instant when he subdues his opponent, a spirited and virile study of the nude male figure, and just above it hung a portrait in oils of Madame Alta, painted in a large black hat with a falling feather which shadowed the golden aureole of her hair. Kemper seldom looked at the picture, and when he did so it was with the casual glance he bestowed upon a piece of household furniture; his emotion had been so bound up with the concrete fact of a fleshly presence that in the continued absence of the prima donna he had found it difficult even to realise the condition of her unchanged existence. In his whole life the past had never engrossed him to the immediate exclusion of the present.

When he had finished his cigar, he rose slowly to his feet, shook himself with an energetic movement as if to settle his body more comfortably in his clothes, and went into the hall to put on his overcoat before going out. Here he was overtaken by a remonstrance from Wilkins.

"You aren't going to the office, I hope, sir, until you've written those notes?"

Kemper stared at him silently an instant, one arm still in the sleeve of the overcoat he was putting on.

"Oh, I say, Wilkins, I'll do them at the club," he replied at last.

Wilkins shook his head with decision written in every line of his smooth-shaven English profile. He was faithful, he was even affectionate, but he had been in Kemper's service for fifteen years and he knew his man.

"You'd better get them off now, sir," he urged in a persuasive voice, "it won't take you a minute, and unless I post them myself, they are like to lie over."

"Well, I suppose you'll have your way with me, Wilkins," remarked Kemper, as he withdrew his arm from his overcoat, which his servant promptly took from him. "Most people do, you know." Then he turned back into his sitting-room and placing himself at his desk, took up his pen and accepted three invitations out of the round dozen he had to answer. This accomplished, the discreet Wilkins gave him his hat and coat and permitted him to depart rapidly upon his way.