The thing I cannot struggle against is silence,—this blank wall of silence that I cannot seize and yet which fastens about me and shuts out all hope. If I could but see her, talk to her, write to her! But between that and nothingness is my promise. Yesterday, in my loneliness and rebellion, I wrote her,—a wild, incoherent letter, imploring her to release me of a promise beyond my strength to keep. I sealed it and addressed it, refusing to listen to anything but the fever and the revolt that burned through every fiber of my being. I rushed out of the house and down to the village, with only one thought,—to end the suspense, to be done with my conscience by an irrevocable act. And then I came back, slowly, with lagging steps, beaten, the letter destroyed. Why? Because, in all the checkered path of my life, there is one memory inviolate. No matter what I have done, and bitterly regretted; no matter what I may come to in some middle-aged sophistry,—I once have reached an ideal of myself. This ideal that she, Bernoline, created of me can never be lowered. Whatever in its tyranny this memory demands of me, I shall in the end obey.
VI
I remember an incident in my boyhood. A little Airedale called Frazzles had become so wild that a conference of the powers had decided on sending her away to a veterinary. The sentence was duly carried out, and Frazzles was deported in the last days of autumn, while we children howled our grief in the nursery. The next we heard of her, she had escaped and taken to the woods some twenty miles away, where she was living like a wild animal. The winter passed and then the spring, and one day Frazzles came, scratching at the door, weary, savage, and caked with mud. The door opened, she flew to her old post under the blue sofa by the fireplace. Six months had passed,—outcast from home and humanity, yet, at the hour when the tea-cakes were brought in, she crept out of her hiding; place and lay at the feet of Aunt Janie, just as though it were yesterday.
At times I feel strangely akin to that little bedraggled outcast. I have fallen back so easily into the familiar routine that all the other life seems incredible. Have I ever really lived in the wet and slime of the trenches, pillowed on a foul blanket; and is it possible that in a few short weeks the moving finger of fate will return and touch me over again? It is so far off, so obscure, fainter than a dying echo; only the memory of Bernoline is vivid and acute with the power to pain.
Against this memory I struggle day and night. There are times when I combat it fiercely in the instinct of self-preservation, when I try to reach down into my heart and tear out the thing that aches. At others, I yield to a fool’s paradise and delude myself with impossible solutions that deceive me but for an hour.
* * * * *
Yesterday, in my desperation, I went over to the Brinsmades’. I went, deliberately, to see Anne. Why, I do not know. For Anne, I think, loves me, and, despite all my reason, all my will to escape from my destiny, I do not, I cannot love her as she deserves to be loved. Perhaps, if I had not met Bernoline—
I went, hesitating and undecided. I came away convinced. Whatever comes, I care this much for my boy-hood’s companion; I shall never come to her with a memory between us.
* * * * *
It was a morning when Bernoline’s presence had been so acutely near me that there was no escape from the blank impossibility of the future. Did I go to seek some strange, healing comfort in the knowledge of another’s suffering,—even as I suffered without possibility of hope? The instinct of love is, I suppose, so fiercely primitive in us that under its tyranny we are subjected to some moral atavism. All the primitive passions that have swayed us from the dawn of time are suddenly let loose and, with the leaping impulse towards possession, comes the instinct to hate violently or to desire fiercely the joy that comes from the feeling of being able to cause pain, to turn against another all that we suffer from the one we love. Girl or courtesan, I have seen women pour out treasures of sacrifice to one man and at the same time show themselves savagely, incomprehensibly pitiless to an unwelcome lover.