“I think just that,” I replied. “Sit down, please. We shall see if I can drive a little sense into that fuddled mind of yours.”
I stood there waiting. He did not move, except, it seemed to me, to square his shoulders. And there was the same set to his chin that I had noted a few moments earlier, when he was drinking.
“I'm standing a good deal from you, Eckhart,” he said. “But after all, I've got nothing against you. You can't be expected to understand these things.” This evidently struck him as a happy idea, and he repeated it: “You can't be expected to understand these things.”
Suddenly he frowned. “How'd you know her name was Heloise?” he asked.
“How did I know?” I repeated. “I will tell you how. I will tell you much that you yourself do not understand.” My voice was rising. I had to struggle to control myself. But I knew that I must, for it was not myself I was fighting for now. “We will not waste words, you and I. We are past that, Crocker—far past it, if you only knew. I have seen”—the words “your wife” had come to my tongue, but I could not say them; it was a profanation even to think of that fine woman as “his”—“I have seen Heloise. I have come to know her. I have seen how sad she is, and what a struggle she has been making to begin doing something with her life. For she has been alone, Crocker—”
“Alone?”
“Yes. She did not stay with that other man. She could not. And she has been struggling all alone.” I fought back the emotion that was breaking into my voice. “I know you both now, Crocker—pretty well. And knowing you both, I can see, oh, so clearly, that she could never, never be happy with a man like you. She has ability, she has spirit, she has what they call temperament. She is an artist. And do you not know, man, that the artist must always be struggling toward expression, that his whole life is nothing but that struggling? You can not make a domestic drudge of such a woman. Of some women—yes. But not of the artist. You tried to do just that. You chose the woman who was beautiful to your eyes, and whose spirit made her most desirable, and then you tried to crush that spirit. I have no doubt she tried to submit, that she fought her own finest qualities, for years, in the hopeless effort to make of herself what you demanded. And then she broke—all helpless, all dependent on you as she was—and risked everything to get away from you because it was worse than death to her to be with you. And now you hound her around the world like the savage beast that you are.... Good God, man, can't you see that she was right in leaving you! Can't you see that it was the finest, bravest thing she could have done!”
I stood, strung up, all blazing with the fire that was in me. I knew I had broken bounds. I thought that now, surely, he would turn on me and fight me; and I did not care. I even thought wildly of settling it all with him then and there, with blows, as men do. For I had the fire and the will within me; while he, with all his height and strength and native vigor, was palsied with that poison that eats away a man's will and leaves but a shell of bluster.
But instead of anger on his face, as I stared into it, I saw only bewilderment. He seemed to be groping after the ends of a new concept, with a mind that had lost something of its power to grasp new concepts.
“Good Lord,” he said then, “you're talking as if you were in love with her yourself.”