"Beals was always in the market—and this panic hit him hard; he was on the wrong side lately."
It was an old story, not in every case with the same details, but horribly common,—a man of the finest possibilities, of sturdy character, rising up to the heights of ambition, then losing his head, playing the game wantonly for mere pride and habit in it,—his judgment giving way, but playing on, stumbling, grasping at this and that to stop his sliding feet, breaking the elementary laws! And finally, in the face of disaster, alone in a hotel room the lonely old man—no doubt mentally broken by the strain—putting the pistol to his head with his shaking hand. And, afterwards, the debris of his wreck would be swept aside to clear the road for others!
Farrington Beals was not a single case. In this time of money disturbance, suicide and dishonor were rife in the streets, revealing the rotten timber that could not stand the strain of modern life, lived as it had been lived the past ten years. It was not one blast that uprooted weak members of the forest, but the eating decay of the previous years, working at the heart of many lives. "The frantic egotism of the age!" Yes, and the divided souls, never at peace until death put an end to the strife at last,—too much for little bodies of nerve and tissue to stand,—the racking of divided wills, divided souls.
"John!" Isabelle cried that night, after they had again talked over the tragedy; "let us go—go out there—to a new land!" She rose from the lounge and swept across the room with the energy of clear purpose—of Vision. "Let us put ourselves as far as possible out of this sort of thing! …. It will kill us both. Do it for my sake, even if you can't feel as I do!"
And then there poured forth all the story of these years, of their life apart, as she had come to see it the last months, in the remote and peaceful hills, in the court-room, in the plain pathos of Steve's death and Alice's heroism, and now in this suicide,—all that had given her insight and made her different from what she had been,—all that revealed the cheapness of her old ideals of freedom, intellectual development, self-satisfaction, that cult of the ego, which she had pursued in sympathy with the age. Now she wished to put it away, to remove herself and her husband, their lives together, outwardly as she had withdrawn herself inwardly. And her husband, moved in spite of himself by her tense desire, the energy of her words, listened and comprehended—in part.
"I have never been a real wife to you, John. I don't mean just my love for that other man, when you were nobly generous with me. But before that, in other ways, in almost all ways that make a woman a wife, a real wife…. Now I want to be a real wife. I want to be with you in all things…. You can't see the importance of this step as I do. Men and women are different, always. But there is something within me, underneath, like an inner light that makes me see clearly now,—not conscience, but a kind of flame that guides. In the light of that I see what a petty fool I have been. It all had to be—I don't regret because it all had to be—the terrible waste, the sacrifice," she whispered, thinking of Vickers. "Only now we must live, you and I together,—together live as we have never lived before!"
She held out her hands to him as she spoke, her head erect, and as he waited, still tied by years of self-repression, she went to him and put her arms about him, drawing her to him, to her breast, to her eyes. Ten years before he had adored her, desired her passionately, and she had shrunk from him. Then life had come imperceptibly in between them; he had gone his way, she hers. Now she was offering herself to him. And she was more desirable than before, more woman,—at last whole. The appeal that had never been wholly stifled in the man still beat in his pulses for the woman. And the appeal never wholly roused in the woman by him reached out now for him; but an appeal not merely of the senses, higher than anything Cairy could rouse in a woman, an appeal, limitless, of comradeship, purpose, wills. He kissed her, holding her close to him, realizing that she too held him in the inner place of her being.
"We will begin again," he said.
"Our new life—together!"
* * * * *