By and by a letter was brought to his room. He had refused to answer the telephone, and he ignored the knocks of the hall boys. This letter was pushed under the door. It was from Ten Eyck:
Dear Harvey,—Just a line to tell you that my heart aches for you and with you. The thought of Persis dead is almost unthinkable, nearly unbearable to me. What it must be to you I dread to imagine.
I always remember the old Persian philosopher's motto when he was tempted to enjoy joy too much or grieve too much over grief: "This, too, will pass away."
You are too big a man to let this or anything break you down. Bend to it, but don't break.
It occurs to me that you may need a little time to recuperate, where you can't read the papers or hear them bawled under your window.
On Long Island I have a little shack on a sandbar on the edge of the ocean. How would you like to run down there for a few days? You can do your own cooking. If you wish I'll go along; but if you'd rather be by yourself I won't go. I think you'd better be by yourself and think it all out.
I enclose a time-table with the best trains marked.
Take a closed taxi to the station, and you'll not be noticed. If I can do anything, command me.
Affectionately yours,
Murray Ten Eyck.
Not a reproach. Not an "I told you so." Not a minimizing of the tragedy. Just a life-preserver thrown to a man in deep waters.
Forbes wrote:
God love you for this. I'll never forget. I'll prove my gratitude by sparing you the ordeal of my company.
He packed a suit-case, bribed a porter and an elevator man, and escaped from the hotel by one of the service elevators and the trade entrance. He swore to Heaven that this should be the last time he would sneak or cower. He reached his destination without remark, and found it congenially dreary.
There was a furious storm that night. Wind and rain flogged his cabin, and the sea cannonaded the beach. But the shack survived, and the beach was still there in the morning. There was only the wreckage of a little schooner cast ashore.
At first Forbes railed against the heartlessness of the sea. But gradually he came to understand that the ocean is not heartless; it simply obeys its own compulsions, and the wrecks it makes are those that should not have been out upon the waters or those that got in the way of the laws. That was what Forbes had done.
As he strolled the sands or sat and watched the endless procession of waves, waves, waves, hurling themselves upon the shore to their own destruction, in his thoughts memories came up one after another, like waves: memories of beautiful hours that seemed to have no meaning beyond their own brief charm; visions of Persis in a thousand attitudes of enchantment, in costume after costume. He saw her at the theater, lithe, exposed, incandescent; he clasped her in the tango; he clenched her hand at the opera; he saw her riding her cross-saddle in her boyish togs; he clasped her in the taxi-cab in the rain; he walked with her in moonlight and in the auroral rose; he galloped alongside her, strode with her in the woods; he held her in his arms while they watched the building burning gorgeously at night; he saw her in all the lawless intimacies of their secret life—careless, childish ecstasies and wild throes of rapture.