Fidelity: A Novel

by Susan Glaspell

"I thought it better for me to come," she said simply, and as she said it and he remembered her drawn, wretched face in telling him, he was quieted a little by a sense of what it had cost her to come. "Because," she added, "you're my friend, you know."

He did not say anything, miserably wondering what she now thought of him as her friend.

"Oh, Deane," she broke out, "don't be hard! If you could know what he's suffering! Being a man—being a little older—what's that? If you can understand me, Deane, you've got to understand him, too!"

He stood there in silence looking at Ruth as, looking away from him now, she brooded over that. In this hour of her own humiliation her appeal was for the man who had brought it upon her. "How you love him!" escaped from him, in bitterness, and yet marvelling.

She turned to him then in her swift way, again, as on that night of his first seeing, her face transformed by that flaming claim for love; it was as if life was shining triumphant through the cloud of misery it had brought down around her. He could not rage against that look; he had no scorn for it. It lighted a country between them which words could not have undarkened. They came together there in that common understanding of the power and beauty of love. He was suddenly ashamed, humbled, feeling in her love a quality upon which no shameful circumstance could encroach. And after that she found relief in words, the words she had had to deny herself so long. It was as if she found it wonderfully good to talk, in some little measure linking her love, as love wants to link itself, with the other people of the world, coming within the human unit. Things which circumstances had prisoned in her heart, too intensified by solitude, leaped out like winged things let loose. But in that hour of talking with him, though words served her well, it was that proud, flaming claim for love which again and again lighted her face that brought him into understanding, winning him for her against his own love of her.

In the year which followed, that last year before circumstances closed in too tight and they went away, it was he who made it possible for Ruth to move a little more freely in the trap in which she found herself. He helped her in deceiving her family and friends, aided them in the ugly work of stealing what happiness they could from the society in which they lived. He did not like doing it. Neither did he like attending the agonies of child-birth, or standing impotently at the bed of the dying. It might seem absurd, in trying to explain one's self, to claim for this love the inevitability of the beginning and the end of life, and yet, seeing it as he saw it he did think of it, not as a thing that should or should not be, but as a thing that was; not as life should or should not be lived, but as life. This much he knew: that whatever they might have been able to do at the first, it had them now. They were in too powerful a current to make a well considered retreat to shoals of safety. No matter what her mood might have been in the beginning, no matter what she could have done about it then, Ruth was mastered not master now. Love had her—he saw that too well to reason with her. What he saw of the way all other people mattered so much less than the passion which claimed her made him feel, not that Ruth was selfish, but that the passion was mastering; the way she deceived made him feel, not that she was deceitful, but that love like that was as unable to be held back in the thought of wrong to others as in the consideration of safety for one's self; the two were equally inadequate floodgates. Not that those other things did not matter—he knew how they did make her suffer—but that this one thing mattered overwhelmingly more was what he felt in Ruth in those days when she would be thought to be with him and would be with Stuart Williams.

For himself that was a year of misery. He saw Ruth in a peculiarly intimate way, taken as he was into the great intimacy of her life. His love for her deepened with his knowing of her; and anxiety about her preyed upon him all the time, passionate resentment that it should have gone like that for her, life claiming her only, as it seemed, to destroy her.

He never admitted to himself how much he really came to like Stuart Williams. There seemed something quixotic in that; it did not seem natural he should have any sympathy with this man who not only had Ruth's love, but was endangering her whole life. Yet the truth was that as time went on he not only came to like him but to feel a growing concern for him.

For the man changed in that last year. It was not only that he looked older—harassed, had grown so much more silent, but Deane as a physician noticed that he was losing weight and there was a cough that often made him look at him sharply. A number of times Ruth said, "I don't think Stuart's well," but she looked so wretched in saying it that he always laughed at her. The Williams' were not patients of his, so he felt that professional hesitance, even though he thought it foolish professionalism, in himself approaching Stuart about his health. Once when he seemed particularly tired and nervous Deane did venture to suggest a little lay-off from work, a change, but Stuart had answered irritably that he couldn't stop work, and didn't want to go away, anyhow.

It was almost a year after the day Ruth came to him steeled for telling what had to be told that the man of whom she that day talked came to tell him what he had been suspecting, that he had tuberculosis and would have to take that lay-off Deane had been hinting at. It seemed it was either go away or die, probably, he added, with an attempted laugh, it was go away and die, but better go away, he thought, than stay there and give his friends an exhibition in dying.