A little afterward she was saying in her queer, unjointed way, as if she spoke only here and there a sentence from the thoughts running swiftly through her mind:
“... And once, (it was only a few weeks after the Armory, and I was playing eastward) I heard your name mentioned among some musicians. They had been talking about your war, and they had seen the great story.... I couldn’t tell them that I know you?... It was known you were in New York, and one of the musicians spoke of an early Broadway engagement—of starting for New York that very night. It was the most common thing to say—but I went to my room and cried. Going to New York—where you were. Can you understand—that it didn’t seem right for him, just to take a train like that? And I had to go eastward so slowly. For a while after that, traveling out there, I couldn’t hold you so clearly; but as we neared New York—whether I wished it or not—I began to feel you again, to expect you at every turning. Sometimes as I played—it was uncanny, the sense that came to me, that you were in the audience, and that we were working together.... And then you came.”
Her picture changed now. Morning grew restless. It was almost as if there were a suggestion from Duke Fallows in her sentences:
“I thought of you always as alone.... You have gone so many ways alone. Perhaps the thought came from your work. I never could read the places where you suffered so—but I mean from the tone and theme of it. You were down among the terrors and miseries—but always alone.... You will go back to them—alone, but carrying calmness and cheer. You will be different.... It’s hard for me to say, but if we should clutch at something for ourselves—greedily because we want something now—and you should not be able to do your work so well because of me—I think—I think I should never cease to suffer.”
A dozen things to say had risen with hostility in his mind to check this faltering expression, the purport of which he knew so well in its every aspect. He hated the thought of others seeing his future and not considering him. He hated the fear that came to him. There had been fruits to all that Fallows had said before. He had plucked them afterward. And now Betty Berry was one with Fallows in this hideous and solitary conception of him. And there she sat, lovely and actual—the very essence of all the good that he might do. He was so tired of what she meant; and it was all so huge and unbreakable, that he grew calm before he spoke, from the very inexorability of it.
“There is no place for me to go—that you could not go with me. Every one seems to see great service for me, but I see it with you. Surely we could go together to people who suffer.... I have been much alone, but I spent most of the time serving myself. I have slaved for myself. If Duke Fallows had left me alone, I should have been greedy and ambitious and common. I see you now identified with all the good of the future. You came bringing the good with you to the Armory that day, but I was so clouded with hatred and self-serving, that I really didn’t know it until afterward.... All the dreams of being real and fine, of doing good in work, and with hands and thoughts, of sometime really being a good man who knows no happiness but service for others—that means you—you! You must come with me. We will be good together. We will serve together. Everybody will be better for us. We will do it because we love so much—and can’t help it——”
“Oh, don’t say any more—please—please! It is too much for me. Go away—won’t you?”
She had risen and clung to him, her face imploring.
“Do you really want me to go away?” he said.
“Yes—I have prayed for one to come saying such things—of two going forth to help—prayed without faith.... I cannot bear another word to be said to-day.... I want to sit here and live with it——”