“Never after you came. The look in your eyes told me what I had become. Since then I have lived—with myself.” He smiled a wretched, drawn smile.
She pointed gingerly to the bauble. “Why don’t you get rid of it? sell it?”
“Sell my soul? Did I not tell you my soul is steeped in it? No, bury it with me. Somehow I know I’ll not last long. Take this word from me. If you know anything of me when death comes, see that this does not go to the women who betrayed me and pitied me not. Women are selfish creatures. They sun themselves on their own cat premises. They have no pity for the poor devils on the outside.”
“Is it women alone? or isn’t it men as well, who are pitiless? Or isn’t it just life? Yet it isn’t pitiless to all. There are those who dance through it on rose-strewn paths.” She stopped, the sense of the great differences in individual lives overwhelming her.
Kingsnorth rose. “Well, that hasn’t been my life or yours. I have seen that you suffer. But suffer! Don’t change that look on your face. Better poignant suffering than moral decay. I tell you, you are facing it.” He rose abruptly and walked away, leaving her like a figure carved in ivory, looking out on the waste of waters, that seemed the emblem of waste in her own life.
Chapter XVI
In the month that elapsed between her conversation with Kingsnorth and the time set by Collingwood for his return, Charlotte had time for an exhausting and (as it seemed to her) fruitless self-inquisition. She was alternately the prey of a hopeless apathy and of a consuming impatience, but in either mood there ran a strong undercurrent of rebellion against all the formative influences of her life. At times the future yawned before her like a bottomless gulf, into the darkness and loneliness of which she must inevitably sink helpless. Out of love as she was with her husband, the prospect of going back to her forlorn, loveless state was one she could not contemplate. To get up day after day, knowing that there was, in all this world, no human being who took more than a casual interest in her; to go to bed at night, knowing that, if ruin and disaster overtook the world, no human thought would turn to her, no voice cry to hers out of the darkness, no warm human hand reach for hers, seemed to her a fate infinitely worse than death. Yet she had lived just that life for twenty-eight years before she married Martin Collingwood to escape from it; and, though she had been most unhappy in it, she certainly had not regarded it as a tragedy. She remembered once having seen a young soldier come forth from the court-room after he had received a life sentence for shooting his corporal. The boy had lifted his hat with his manacled hands and had raised a white face to the touch of the cool morning wind. Something in the gesture had expressed his sense of helplessness in the grasp of that terrible thing we call the law. He was looking down the long vista of years at a living death ten thousand times worse than death, at a life from which every human ambition, every hope, every natural spring had been erased. His brother had followed behind him, a short distance of twenty or thirty feet, already the emblem of a separation that was to become complete. The brother was weeping as strong men do when their hearts are wrung; but, as she had looked at them, one so quiet, the other convulsed with grief, she had recognized that, to the second man, life held comfort and healing still. In the long years to come, new interests would take the place of the old tie; a wife and babes would fill that life; healthy toil allied to honorable ambition would make the years seem to fly; and the memory of a convict brother would drop out of life, only to be recalled tenderly at those seasons when a universal festival brings back the old days and makes the rotting thread of memory seem new and strong once more. But what of the other? Nothing new would come to him, nothing to strive for, nothing to look forward to, nothing to live upon but memories that would be very, very bitter. There would be toil and food and rest, and renewed toil, and the awful knowledge that long before he ceased to live he had ceased to be even to those who had been his nearest and dearest.
Well, she had lived it once. She could live it again. As with the soldier there would be toil and food and rest, and renewed toil. But the heart cries loudly for more than these things in life, until that heart is chastened into meekness. Would she ever be meek, she wondered sadly. If she could have accepted her fate with submission and sadness only, she would have felt herself indeed treated with mercy by the unseen fates. But there was no element of submission in her mood. As often as she contemplated the future, and said to herself that these things must be, had to be, so often the wild will rose within her to say that they must not be. She lay often for hours at a time face downward on her bed, not a muscle moving, not a sound escaping her tense lips; but her passivity was the physical expression of an impotence that left her prostrate before the overwhelming fates.
Often there recurred to her mind a conversation which had taken place between her and a fellow nurse, a young, joyous, magnetic creature for whom she had formed a friendship more nearly approximating intimacy than any other that had come into her life. It was in the last days of her engagement, and she had spoken of a fear of what unhappiness love might bring into her life. The other had looked at her with amazement. “Love!” she said. “I can imagine it bringing a lot of joy, but why unhappiness?”