Chapter XII The Hidden Current Turns
The winter passed and spring came. Point of Pines awoke late but very lovely. Mam’selle and Donelle had at last burned the old clothes of the long-dead Morey. That phase, at least, was done with and much else had been laid on the pyre with them.
“And you came just because you wanted to, child?” Jo often asked when she even yet doubted her right to happiness.
“Yes, Mamsey, just for that. Wasn’t I a silly?” And then Donelle would look into Jo’s deep, strange eyes and say:
“You never run and hide any more, Mamsey. I see how glad you are; how you love me! Kiss me, Mamsey. Isn’t it strange that I had to teach you to kiss me? Now don’t keep thinking you mustn’t be happy, it’s our duty to be happy.” Donelle gloried in her triumph.
Jo dropped a good many years in that winter and Nick inherited his second puppyhood. He no longer doubted, he no longer had a struggle of choice, for Mam’selle and Donelle kept close.
They read and worked together, and sometimes while Jo worked Donelle played those tunes that made Nick yearn to howl. But he saw they did not understand his feelings so he controlled himself.
“And when spring comes, child, you will go to Mrs. Lindsay, won’t you?”
Jo played her last card.
“You see, it has all been going out and nothing coming in for years. You cost a pretty figure, Donelle, though I never grudged a cent, God knows! But you must help now, I’m seeing old age in the distance.”
“Come spring,” whispered Donelle, and she struck into the Spring Song, “we’ll see, we’ll see! But, Mamsey, we can always keep boarders. I should love that and you have always dreamed of it. That room upstairs,” the lovely tones rose and fell, “I can just see how some tired soul would look into that room and find peace. We’d make good things for him to eat, we’d play the fiddle for him, and——”
“A man’s so messy,” Jo put in, “I’d hate to have the room messed after all these years.”
“Well, there are women boarders,” Donelle was adaptable to possibilities. “We’d be firm about messiness; man or woman. How much are you going to charge, Mamsey?”
This was a joke between them.
Longville’s rapacity disgusted Jo. On the other hand, she felt that what one got for nothing he never valued. It was a nice question.
“I’m figuring about the price, child. The Longvilles never count what the boarders give them besides money.”
“What do they give, Mamsey?”
“Rightly handled, they give much. Think, Donelle,” Jo’s eyes lighted, “they come from here, there, and everywhere! If they are treated right, they can let you share what they know. Why once, when I was waiting on table at the Longvilles’, there was a man who had been around the world! Around the world, child, all around it. One day he got talking, real quiet, to the man next to him and I’ll never forget some things he said. I got so interested I stood stock still with a dish in my hands. I stood until——”
“Until what, Mamsey?”
“Until the Captain called from the kitchen.”
“Oh! my poor, Mamsey. Well, dear, our boarder shall talk and we’ll not stop him and you shall not be called from the kitchen.”
“You are laughing, Donelle.”
“No, Mamsey, just planning.”
“But you must go away, child. You must learn, and then perhaps they’ll take you at the St. Michael’s Hotel. Someone always plays there summers, you know. Could folks dance to your tunes, Donelle?”
The girl stared.
“Anyway you could learn,” Jo sought to comfort.
“Perhaps I could, Mamsey, but I’d rather take boarders.”
“We could do both, Donelle,” Jo was all energy. “Old age is within eye shot, but I’m long sighted. There’s a good bit of power in me yet, child, and I’m eager for you to go with Mrs. Lindsay when she comes.”
Poor Jo, having had the glory of Donelle’s choice, was almost desperate now in her desire to send the girl forth. She had not been blind; she was wise, too, and she realized that if the future were to be secure and her own place in it worthy of love and respect, she must refuse further sacrifice. And sacrifice it would be, a dull, detached life in Point of Pines.
It was May when a letter came to Jo from Anderson Law. It was a brief letter, one written when the man’s heart was torn with grief and shock. It told of Mrs. Lindsay’s sudden death just when she was preparing for her return to the Walled House.
It dwelt upon Law’s knowledge of the affection and ambition of Mrs. Lindsay for her protégée, and while her will did not provide for the carrying out of her wishes, Law, himself, would see to it that everything should be done that was possible.
He would come to Canada later and consult with “Mam’selle Morey.”
Jo looked at Donelle blankly.
What the two had thought, dreamed, and hoped they, themselves, had not fully realized until now. In the passing of Alice Lindsay they felt a door closing upon them.
Donelle was crying bitterly. At the moment she felt only the personal loss, the sense of hurt; later the conviction grew upon her that what had unconsciously been upholding her was taken away. She had been hoping, hoping. The blow given her by Pierre Gavot, the paralyzing effect of it, had worn away during the secluded winter months; she was young, the world was hers, nothing could really take it away. Nothing had really happened in Point of Pines and they all knew! The larger world would not care, either. She had adjusted herself and in silence the fear and shame had departed, she had even grown to look at Jo as if—it were not true! But now, all was different.
“This man, this Mr. Law,” Jo comforted, “will have some plan. And there are always my linens, Donelle, and if there is a boarder——”
But Donelle shook her head; a little tightening of her lips made them almost hard.
“This Mr. Law does not come, Mamsey,” she said, “and besides, what could I do in that big, dreadful city with just him?”
“There would be that Professor Revelle,” Jo’s words were mere words, and she, herself, knew it. Donelle again shook her head.
But what humiliated her most of all was that she had let Jo see the truth! All the fine courage that had borne her from the Walled House to Point of Pines; where was it? She had meant to make up to poor Jo for the bitter wrong that was a hideous secret between them, and all the time there had been the longing for release; the expectation of it.
“I am like my father,” shuddered the girl, “just as that awful Pierre said—only I did not run away.”
With this slight comfort she began her readjustment, but her hope was dead. She struggled to forget that it had ever existed, and she put her violin away.
This hurt Jo cruelly, but she did not speak. Instead she wrote, in her queer, cramped handwriting, to Anderson Law.
It was a stilted, independent letter, for poor Jo was struggling between the dread of losing her self-respect and her fear that Donelle should lose her opportunity.
Law received the letter and read it while young James Norval was in his studio.
“Jim, do you remember that girl that Alice Lindsay discovered up in Canada?” he said; he was strangely moved and amused by Jo’s words.
“The little Moses?” Norval was standing in front of an easel upon which rested one of his own pictures, one he had brought for Law’s verdict.
“What?” Law stared at Norval.
“Oh! wasn’t that the girl that some woman said she had adopted out of a Home?”
“Yes. What of it?”
“Only a joke, Andy. You remember Pharaoh’s daughter said she took Moses out of the bulrushes. Don’t scowl, Andy; you don’t look pretty.”
“Listen to this letter, Jim, and don’t be ribald.” Law read the letter.
“What are you going to do, Andy?” Norval was quite serious now.
“As soon as I can I’m going up there, and take a look at things.”
“You are going to help the girl?”
“Yes, if I can.”
“After all, Andy, can you? Could Alice? The girl would have to be rather large-sized to overcome her handicaps, wouldn’t she?”
“Alice had faith.”
“I know, but a man might muddle things.”
“I shall run up, however.” Law was still scowling.
Then Norval changed the subject.
“How’s Helen?” he asked, deep sympathy in his eyes. The insane wife of Anderson Law was rarely mentioned, but her recent illness made the question necessary.
“Her body grows stronger, her mind——” Law’s face was grim and hard.
“Andy, can’t you be just to yourself? Have the years taught you nothing? There can be but one end for Helen and if you see to her comfort, you have every right to your freedom.”
“Jim, I cannot do it! God, Man! I’ve had my temptations. When I saw her so ill, I saw—Jim, I saw hope; but while she lives I cannot cast her off. It would be like stealing something when she wasn’t looking.”
“But Lord, Andy! Helen can never come back. They all tell you that.”
“It seems so, but while life remains she might. She loved me, Jim. The woman I loved in her died when our child came but I cannot forget. I’m a fool, but when I’ve been most tempted the thought has always come: how could I go on living if she did recover and found that I had deserted her?”
“You’re worn to the edge, Andy, better chuck the whole thing and come off for a vacation with me. But first look at this, tell me what you think.”
Law’s face relaxed. He shifted his burden to where it belonged, and walked over to the easel.
“Umph!” he said, and stepped to the right and to the left, his head tilted, his eyes screwed up.
“Another, eh?”
“Yes.”
“Jim, what in thunder ails you to let a woman play the devil with you?”
“You ask that, Andy?”
“Yes. Our cases are quite different, Helen’s dead, but Katherine knows damned well what she is doing.”
“She doesn’t, Andy. In one way she’s as dead as Helen, she hasn’t waked up.”
“And you think she will? You think the time will come when she can see your genius and get her little carcass out of the way?”
“Hold up, Andy! I came to have you criticise my picture, not my wife.”
But Law did not pay any attention.
“She ought to leave you alone, if she cannot understand. No human being has a right to twist another one out of shape.”
Norval retreated; but he was too distraught to refuse any haven for his perplexity.
“After all,” he said, “there’s no more reason for my having my life than for Katherine having hers. She wanted a husband and we were married. If I had known that I couldn’t be—a husband, I might have saved the day, but I didn’t, Law, I didn’t. Getting married seemed part of the game, nearly everyone does get married. And then, well, the trouble began. There are certain obligations that go with being a husband. Katherine has never exacted more than her due only——”
“Only, her husband happened to be a genius and Katherine doesn’t know a genius when she sees one. From the best intentions she’s driving you to hell, Jim.”
“Oh! well, I may be able to get the best of it, Andy, and paint even if I do keep to the well-trodden paths of husbands. A fellow can’t call himself a genius to his own wife, you know, especially when he hasn’t proved it. One hates to be an ass. You see, Andy, when all’s said and done, I can wring a thing or two out. This is good, isn’t it?”
The two men looked at the picture.
“It’s devilish good, but it has been wrung out! Jim, it’s no use. The home-loving, society-trotting, movie-show husband role will be the end of you.”
“Well, if I slam my studio door in Katherine’s face and leave her to go about alone, or sit by herself, that would be the end of her. Andy, the worst of it is that when she puts it up to me, I see she’s right. We’re married and she only wants her share.”
“I suppose this meant,” Law was gravely contemplating the picture, “nights of prowling and days when you felt as if you’d kill any one who spoke to you?”
“Something like that, and all the while Katherine was entertaining and I’d promised to help. I didn’t go near them once.”
“Umph!”
“So you see, Testy, it isn’t Katherine’s fault. The two roles don’t jibe, that’s the long and short of it.”
“And your love,” Law was thinking aloud. “Your love and sense of right——”
“I’m not a cad, Andy.”
“Leave this thing here for a day or two, Jim,” Law raised the picture and carried it to the window. “I never saw such live light,” he said. “Where did you get it.”
“I—I was lying under the Palisades one night and just at daybreak I saw it. It’s a home product, though it looks Oriental, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does.”
There was silence for a few moments, then Norval asked in quite his natural manner, “And you won’t come away for a clip, Andy?”
“Not until autumn, Jim, then I’m going to run up into Canada.”
“All right. Having got the—the live light out of my system, and if you won’t play with me, I’m going to coax Katherine to take me to any summer orgy she wants to. I owe it to her, she hasn’t had a good dance for ages.”
“Jim, you’re a fool or——”
“A modest reflection of yourself, Testy.”
But something snapped that summer which sent the Norvals and Anderson Law whirling in widely different directions. In the upheaval Donelle and her small affairs were forgotten.
Mrs. Law died suddenly.
The doctors sent for Law and he got there in time.
“She may, toward the end,” they told him, “have a gleam of consciousness. Such things do happen. You would want to be with her.”
“Yes, in any case,” Law replied and he took his place by the bed. In his heart was that cold fear which many know in the presence of death.
The long afternoon hours drifted by. The face on the pillow, so tragically young because it did not show the tracings of experience, scarcely moved. Toward evening Law went to the west window to raise the shade, there was a particularly splendid sky. When he came back he saw that a change had come; the change, but instead of blotting out expression in his wife’s eyes, it was giving expression, meaning, to what had been, for so long, vacuous. Law wanted to call for help, but instead he sank limply into the chair and took the hand that was groping toward his.
“I’m glad you’re here——” said the strained, hoarse voice.
“I am glad, too, Helen.”
For years Law had not addressed his wife by name. That would have seemed sacrilege.
“Have you been here all the time?”
“Yes, dear.”
“That was like you! And the baby; it is all right?”
“Yes, quite all right.”
“It is a boy?”
Law struggled, then said:
“Yes, Helen, a boy.”
“I’m glad. I want him to be like his father.”
She smiled vaguely; the light went out of her eyes, she drifted back.
There were a few hours more of blank waiting, then it was over.
A week later Law left a note for Norval.
“I’m sorry, old chap, that I could not see you. Pass my regrets along. I’m off for the ends of the earth, and I’ve neglected buying a return ticket.”
And just when Norval was most sensitive to shock; just when Law’s trouble and desertion left him in the deepest gloom, Katherine devastated the one area, which he believed to be sane and impregnable, by a most unlooked-for assault.
She was the sort of woman who comes slowly and secretively to conclusions. She was as unconscious of this herself as others were. Apparently she was a most conservative, obvious person, a person with an overwhelming sense of duty and obligation and untiring in her efforts to prove this.
Since Helen Law’s death, Norval had gone as little to his studio as possible; had devoted himself to Katherine; had condoned her coldness and indifference.
“I deserve all she gives,” he thought and rose to greater effort. He even got to the point of noticing her beauty, her grace, and concluded that they, and what they represented, meant more than paint pots and canvases.
“A man cannot have everything,” he confessed, “he must make a choice.”
Virtually Norval had made his choice, when Katherine blotted out, for the time being, all his power to think straight.
He was trying to plan for the summer, he was patiently setting forth the charms of the watering places he loathed but which promised the most dissipation.
“I am not going away with you, Jim.” Katharine’s soft face grew hard. “I have a duty to myself, I see it at last. All my life I have sacrificed everything for you, Jim.”
This was humiliating, but Norval assented.
“Even my talent!” Katherine flung this out defiantly.
They were in their home, having one of their endless get-no-where talks.
Norval meant to do his full part, but the trouble was that he had no part in the actual life of his pretty, commonplace wife.
“Your talent, Katherine, your talent?”
Norval did not question this derisively, but as if she had told him of having an eye in the middle of her forehead.
“You have not even been interested enough to notice.” This with bitterness.
Norval, for some idiotic reason, or lack of it, stared at the middle of her smooth, white brow.
“I’ve written this; I did not tell you until it was between covers.”
Norval took a book she offered as he might have taken a young and very doubtful baby.
“It looks ripping!” he said.
“It—it is well spoken of,” Katherine’s eyes were tear-dimmed.
Norval gingerly handed the book back.
“You—you don’t even care, now! You won’t open it. I have dedicated it to you. The first copy is yours. I don’t believe you’ll even read it.”
“I will, Kit,” Norval grabbed the book back fiercely. He was so stunned that he could not think at all.
Katherine writing a book! It would be as easy to think of her riding the circus ring.
“I’ll sit up nights reading it, Kit. That’s what folks always do, they don’t lay it down until the last word, even if it takes all night! What is it about?”
“It is called ‘The Awakened Soul.’” Katherine tried to repress a sob. Her anger, too, was rising.
“Good God!” gasped Norval, forgetting his wife’s hatred of profanity.
Katherine reached for the book and held it to her hurt heart.
“You are selfish, you are an egotist, Jim. Your talent, your freedom to develop it have made you callous, brutal. There are more ways of killing a woman than to—beat her. Now that I am sure I have a sacred spark that must be kept alive, I shall demand my rights; freedom equal to your own!”
“Of course, Kit, if you’ve gone in for this sort of thing, we’ll have to shift our bases a little. I know that.”
“Jim, we’re not fitted for each other!” The sob rose triumphant and because in his soul Norval knew that she spoke the truth, he was furious and ready to fight.
“Rot!” he cried. “Now see here, Kit, don’t get the temperament bug; there’s nothing in it! You can do your job and yet keep clean and safe; do it best by playing the game honest. Good God! I haven’t smutted up my life along with my canvas, you don’t have to. It’s the fashion, thank the Lord, to be decent, although gifted. Your book has run you down, old girl. Let’s cut and forget it!”
The indignation of the narrow, weak, and stubborn swayed Katherine Norval.
“Jim,” she said, gulping and holding desperately to “The Awakened Soul,” “I think we should be—be—divorced.”
“Punk!” Norval snapped his fingers. “Unless you’ve given cause, there isn’t any.”
“I—I cannot live under present conditions, Jim.”
“All right, we’ll get a new set.”
“You are making fun and I am deadly in earnest.”
“You mean you want to chuck me?” Norval frowned, but something was steadying him.
“I mean that I must live my life.”
“Of course, Katherine, this all sounds as mad as a March hare, and it’s August, you know. Why, we couldn’t get free if we wanted to, we’re too decent.”
“But you’re not happy, Jim.”
“Well, who is, all the time?”
“And, Jim, you do your best work when you are leaving me horribly alone. I’ve noticed.” This was another hideous truth and it stung.
“I’ve done my best, Kit,” he said lamely.
“And it hasn’t worked, Jim. I will not stand in your way. Though I die, I will do my duty, now I seek!”
“Don’t, Kit, for heaven’s sake, don’t.”
“I mean every word that I say. I will not submit longer to being—being eliminated. I must have reality of some kind. Jim, you don’t fit into home life. Our baby died. You can forget me, and I have had to forget you. I want my freedom.”
For a full moment they stared helplessly over the chasm that for years had been widening without their knowing it. They could not touch each other now, reach as they might.
“I—why—I’m stunned,” said Norval.
“I alone have seen it coming,” Katherine went on. “If my staying made you happier, better, I would stay even now; but it does not, Jim.”
And Norval continued to stare.
“I feel I am doing you and—and your Art a great service by letting you go.” Katherine looked the supreme martyr.
“On what grounds?” mumbled Jim, “‘An Awakened Soul’?”
This was most unfortunate.
“I’m leaving for California to-morrow!” Katherine spoke huskily, she no longer cried.
“Everything ready, only good-bye, eh? Well, Kit, you’ve worked efficiently once you began.”
They looked at each other like strangers.
“I shall not follow you. When you want me, come to me. My soul has not been awakened as yours has, I’ll keep on right here and fly the flag over the ruins. My God! This is a shot out of a clear sky.”
“Jim, I’ve seen the clouds gathering ever since——”
“When, Kit?”
“That first picture that Andy said meant genius, not plain talent, and since the baby went.”
“Poor girl.”
“But not so poor as I might have been,” Katherine again clutched her book proudly.
“It’s the heat, Kit. By autumn we’ll be rational. A vacation apart will fill up the cracks.”
“Until then, Jim, we’ll be friends?”
“Friends, Kit, friends!” Norval clutched the straw. On this basis a sense of relief came.
And so Katherine went to California—and Jim Norval?