Thriller Classic
According to ordinary standards, I should consider Charlie Corcoran's tragedy greater than mine—particularly as I am almost as big a figure in his as in my own. But I can not. There are times when the ordinary standards are worth no more than the words in which they are framed. They neither define justice nor afford consolation. And now I can not be bound by the mockery of trite conventions and accepted rules. I must do, not what people would have me do, but what I want to do.
When all is said and done, do we not, under the hot urge of the things that make life worth while, do always what we want to do?
I am utterly unable to make myself say that I am as sorry for Charlie as I am for myself. It does not matter to me at all, in the last analysis, that his, like mine, is a love tragedy. I am a woman—and what woman can be so grieved by the ruin of another's love life as by the desolation of her own? My heart eries out for comforting, my soul is so burdened that I must have help. That is why Charlie's grief is, to me, like a thing distant and shadowy.
If I can help him, that is well and good. But the thing I desire—desire with a very anguish of longing—is my own peace of mind.
That is why I have made today a promise which, when I consider it, frightens me. I have agreed to bare my soul to the scrutiny of another, and that other is a man. There is to be neither mental reservation nor deception nor half-truth in what I am to say to him. When I have told him of my actions, I shall have merely begun my confidences to him, for, after the actions, will come the description of my motives. And, when one tells the naked truth about why one does things, one unveils those desires and incentives and longings which are the very structure of one's soul.
Would any other woman have the courage to do this? My determination to undertake it is the result of a long agony. Only agony can drive one to such exposure of one's real self.
It seems to matter very little that Doctor Doyle, the man to whom I am going in my unspeakable need, is an old friend of mine, was a friend of my father and mother. In a way, this fact alone increases the difficulty. But "D R "—I call him D R because, as a little girl, I never could understand the "Dr." in front of his name and invariably spelled it out—is a very wonderful person in the world of mental problems and psychology, and I know that he, more than anybody else, is able to bring me some measure of peace and com fort. Indeed, nobody else could.
"Tell me, D R," I asked him just a few hours ago, " can you—do you think you can help me?"
"I know it," he answered.
And for the moment I almost believed him. D R is so persuasive. He is tall, with great broad shoulders and a deep chest—I don't think any little man ever seems exactly authori tative to a woman—and his round head seems huge. But his eyes are tender as any woman's, a clear gray which, when he is greatly moved, turns almost purple in certain lights, and his mobile lips curve in a smile that makes you forget altogether the grimness of his rather heavy jaw. Even without these, he would be consoling and winning, for his voice, although it is a deep bass, has the sonorous sound of the notes of a cathedral organ. Finally, he is forty-eight years old, and I am only twenty-five. If he were my own age, I know I could not talk to him as I shall have to do.
"First," he explained to me, down in the library just now, " you will tell me all the things that have been worrying you. After that, we will try to see what other things, things you don't recall at once, have worried you. Then, we shall see how you can re arrange your way of living, how we can make it a better way of living."
"A better way of living? "I asked, puzzled.
"Why, yes," he said gently. "You see, you haven't been living as you should have. As a result of what you have thought and said and done, here you are confronted by a double tragedy—or what seems a double tragedy."
"Surely," I said, " to have my love for my husband die and to know that my husband's love is dead, and to see what Charlie Corcoran has come to—surely, that is a double tragedy!"
He did not answer that, but looked at me in the queerest, and yet the most reassuring, way.
"Ruth," he told me, " this will take a lot of patience on your part, and a lot of work and enormous courage. Can you go through with it?"
"I must have advice and consolation," I said, " or I shall go mad. Yes, I can do it."
"You will have to tell me all things," he elaborated. ' This is to be an analysis of your soul, of the depths of your soul. You will have to tell me what you believe about religion, the most intimate things about your life with your husband, the big things and the little things, sex things and all. You may keep nothing back from me. In this way only can we analyze your soul and see in what way it has gone wrong—so that, in the end, we may put it on the right track and bring you peace, happiness. You see, you suffer, not because you are sick, but because you are unhappy."
I was anxious to convince him that I would stop at nothing he asked of me.
Then, he told me that we would start to work tomorrow, that the first thing he wanted me to do was to tell him the story of every thing leading up to last night, and that we would discuss it afterwards. I can see that he thinks George and I really love each other. But he will realize his mistake after he has heard my story. My husband and I are lost to each other forever.
If that were not true, I would not be miser able now—more than miserable, for, in addi tion to my grief, I feel that I am going insane. I can not think properly. The most awful ideas come into my mind. I can no longer control my thoughts. Night and day it is as if I were being ridden by devils. Real love between a man and a woman can not cause that. It is because my love is a terrible tragedy that I feel as I do.
D R told me I might spend all this afternoon and this evening writing out a description of the details of what happened last evening. He said it would freshen my memory and would enable me to tell him the story more clearly. That is what I shall do— write it all out, up to the time my mind became a blank. He has already told me what happened after that, what occurred between then and this morning, when I awoke and found him bending over me in the library.
It is an awful sensation, this knowledge that for ten or eleven hours I was saying things and doing things without knowing that I even was alive. It is such a terror to me that, if I did not have this writing to occupy me, I should go raving mad. Perhaps, that is why he told me I might make this diary.
At any rate, I go back now to the beginning of my tragedy and Charlie Corcoran's. I shall set down everything that began three days ago and resulted in the awful thing of last night—in my own house.
It is strange that I have spoken of my tragedy and Charlie's and not of Marjorie Nesbit's. This may be the result of what she has made me suffer. How she has made me suffer, I can not describe—the days of weeping, the nights thronged by nameless terrors. People would call me nervous. That is what they say of all women whose hearts are broken, whose lives have come to be nothing but a wringing of hands and a shedding of tears. "Nerves!" —and they shrug and pass on! But I know the truth. I have borne more than any woman can bear, and the result is that my reason is tottering, or practically destroyed.
I am, to all intents and purposes, a mad woman. And my one hope is D R.
I say he is my " hope." And yet, he is not even that to me. I do not hope. Rather, I sit here and say to myself that there is no hope, and I ask myself, how can D R expect to give me back my happiness, my beautiful happiness? Without hoping, I am letting him try his best, and, in the meantime, I am convinced that nothing, nobody, can ever unravel the tangle of my life or ever give me again the sweet, clean thoughts that once were mine.
George Marden is my husband, and for the last year the one consuming desire of my soul has been to love him—but I can not. Three days ago, when I went down to breakfast, that thought was in my mind: that I wanted to love him, and could not.
He had reached the dining room ahead of me and was standing with his back to the open fire, waiting for me. I did not offer to let him kiss me. I knew he expected it, but I could not force myself to endure the farce of it. When I went to my chair at the table, he made no comment, but took his own place, a light little ironic smile on his face. I noticed how good-looking he was with the rays of the morning sun on his forehead and dark brown hair,
I began to pour the coffee.
"What's the matter? " he asked.
That question made me angry. I could not answer it with the cool statement that the love between us was over. He would have laughed and refused to discuss it. Besides, he would not have understood.
"There's nothing the matter, George," I said evenly.
"I'm sorry," he retorted, in the tone he would have used to complain that the coffee was cold.
"Sorry?"
"Yes. If there were something the matter, we might be able to—to make things go better."
I did not reply to that.
After a pause, he inquired, "Seen Marjorie lately?"
My heart bounded at that question. She was the woman about whom the misunderstanding between us centered. I was amazed that he volunteered any reference to her.
"No," I said, buttering a muffin with elaborate care.
"I saw her last night," he went on.
I made no comment on that.
"She told me," he said, and I knew he was looking directly at me, " she hadn't received her invitation to your dance."
I met his gaze squarely.
"Hasn't she? "I returned coolly.
"I told her," he continued, " that it must have been lost in the mails."
Of course, he knew no such thing had happened. He knew I had deliberately left her off the list. Nevertheless, I said:
"It must have. I'll send her another by messenger this morning—with a note of explanation."
I said that because, all of a sudden, I made up my mind that my pride was superior to my distaste for Marjorie. I would not let my husband see that I disliked the girl because of him. And yet, this was ridiculous because he knew exactly how I felt toward her.
He looked at me with his broad smile.
"Why don't you go to see her?" he suggested.
That was to hurt me!
"I shall," I said calmly.
He stared for the fraction of a second.
"Good for you! " he said, as he would have congratulated a friend for putting a horse over a stiff jump.
He was convinced, apparently, that he had never been in fault so far as Marjorie was concerned. That is his way all the time. He does things with a laugh and an air of aban don. Nothing is wrong because there is nothing wrong in his motives! He goes through life on the assumption that " everything is all right," and, if it isn't, it will be soon!
Everybody likes him. People say to me every day, "Mrs. Marden, what a charming husband you have!" His popularity is restricted to no particular class, and men as well as women like him. He is a man who uses up away from home so much of his likable qualities, so much of his pleasantness, so much of his affection, that he seems to have remain ing very little demonstrativeness for his wife. At home he drifts along, giving little, accept ing everything.
I do not think I am doing him an injustice. I was desperately in love with him when I married him over four years ago. He was an ideal lover. Do ideal lovers, I wonder, ever become dependable husbands? Does the verve, the dash, the exquisite spirit, which makes the man a fascinating wooer, compel him after marriage to seek much of his happiness abroad? Trying to solve my pitiful problem, I have wondered about this until my head swam.
His attitude toward Marjorie at breakfast that morning was typical of his daily behavior with me. He knew the town had been gossiping about him and her. He knew I was aware of her efforts to attract him to her side, to flatter her vanity if for nothing else. Above all, he could not have forgotten my grief and humiliation six months before, when he and Marjorie had spent an entire summer night on the roadside four miles out of town.
At the time Marjorie had sighed, with laughter back of the sigh, "My dear, it was awful—simply awful! What won't people say?"
And George, regarding the affair as an in cident to be forgotten, had strolled in to break fast, announced where he had been and said:
"Don't look so tragic, Ruth. What was it, after all? You didn't feel like going out to the Winslows' dinner dance, and I did. I offered to drive Marjorie home in my machine. It was frightfully late. All of us had had too much champagne—I confess it. But you know the Winslows. It was to be expected.
' Then, when we were half-way home, something went wrong with the steering gear. I got out and pottered with it in the light of my electric torch. But I couldn't fix the thing. I got tired. You know yourself what champagne does to me—makes me sleepy as an owl. I climbed back on the front seat to rest, and the first thing I knew there we were in the cold gray dawn after having had a nice little nap, the two of us. Then we scrambled out of the car and walked to the trolley line. That's all there is to it."
He was honest in what he said. He saw nothing to worry about in the whole affair. That was the George of it.
I do not mean to create the impression that he and I always disagreed about things. For three years I managed finally to see things as he did. But, after that, the effort became too great. I realized that it was an effort, and, when one has to make an effort all the time in order to be in accord with one's husband, one draws close to disaster.
For instance, a year ago I saw George kiss a woman—Mrs. Tarone. I never said any thing to him about that. If I were to confront him with it now, he would laugh easily and advise me to quit making mountains out of molehills. That is my great difficulty. Nothing really touches him. Nothing seems to him to matter so very much. He regards my distress because of such incidents as "emotionalism." I do not believe he has ever made a serious effort to understand me, to find out whether I am a toy or a woman.
For three years, then, I had been like so many other wives. I had forced myself to believe what I wanted to believe. I had told myself that appearances had deceived me and that, in spite of everything to the contrary, my husband really loved me. I had done that until I saw that kiss. After that, I had known the truth—and kept it to myself. Instead of a confidence that had been more or less serene, I was possessed by a tortured pride. So far as all matters touching the real soul of me were concerned, I led a life apart. He could not have come close to my inner self if he had tried, for his inner self was so different.
After breakfast, I was as good as my word. I went to see Marjorie. On my way to her home, as I walked up Sixteenth Street, I heard newsboys crying extras about the first American casualties in France. The news did not touch me. I was too appalled by the knowledge of my own suffering to be in terested in the sufferings of others. I did not even buy a paper.
As I went, I thought about Marjorie. It was not so much that I disliked her. She was merely a pawn in George's careless life, I reflected. If it had not been Marjorie, it would have been somebody else. The only thing I resented—and I did not resent that very much—was the fact that she played with George, although she and I had been friends since girlhood, had shared the same room at boarding school, and, although she was a year older than I, had come out together. Until my mother's death, the two families had lived next door to each other.
Moreover, I was pleased with the fact that I was going so easily to invite her to my dance. George had not expected it. Thank heaven I had self-respect enough to disregard his flirtation with her!
After all, Marjorie would never lose her head. She was of the calculating kind. She would not precipitate matters before I could arrange for my separation from George. In a sense, I felt grateful for that! Conse quently, it was with a feeling of tolerance, rather than anger, toward her that I entered her house.
And I marveled at my calmness in the matter!
She was not downstairs. As I was about to go up to her little den on the second floor, I heard voices, hers and a man's, in the direction of the basement kitchen.
"What's Miss Marjorie doing?" I asked Maria, the maid who had admitted me.
"Deed, mum," answered Maria, "I'm not certain. There's a poor man, looks like a tramp, in the kitchen."
Distinctly surprised, I started to the base ment. Marjorie Nesbit was not a person to busy herself ordinarily with tramps. I knew that. She was a woman who instinctively despised the unfortunate. She had long since educated herself into the conviction that the grand emotions, the things of high import to the soul of a woman, must come clad in the habiliments of appropriate splendor, must be accompanied by pomp and the symbols of power. To her nothing had ever appealed as of particular interest unless its dramatic scheme had been unrolled amid inspiring stage settings. The clash of music, the loveliness of lights and the seductiveness of fragrance and flowers had always been essential factors in any event that had exercised a weighty, or even a light, influence upon her life.
Poverty, crippled bodies, misfortune, tears— these were ugly phases of existence which she had studiously avoided. She had never been able to see that they benefited anybody. They belonged among the shadows, not in the bright sunlight of life, and, when they had come too near her, she had averted her eyes and closed her ears. During all her twenty-six years— for her childhood had been a sure precursor of her womanhood—she had despised inadequate circumstances, insufficient people.
No wonder that what I saw held me breathless in the doorway. Marjorie stood and faced, across the kitchen table, a man who spoke to her in a voice of peculiar resonance. He was miserably dressed, his tattered clothes hanging upon him like bags. His black hair looked matted, and upon his face was a three days' growth of heavy beard. His features were drawn, almost haggard. At first glance, he showed the signs of intense suf fering, a suffering that must have been more mental than physical; and yet his manner was strangely imperious. I can not explain it, but there was about him the atmosphere of compelling force.
Marjorie, however, caught my attention more than he. There was upon her face a look such as I had never thought her capable of dis playing, a look of complete absorption. But there was more than that in it. While they stood there, oblivious to everything but each other, I instinctively tried to define her ex pression. Then I saw! It was such a look as a woman should give to but one man. I was thunderstruck by it, by the intimate quality of it, the lack of anything like reserve or caution. It was a physical thing, some thing that looked out at him and reached to ward him. It had in it perfect understanding and unspeakable desire.
And he, with his black, unnaturally brilliant eyes, entertained her glance appreciatively, without surprise. It was as if he had expected it and knew that she would give it to him. It seemed to me that here were two persons who had known each other throughout their lives, two persons who had met upon a common ground and had joined hands, saying, "Let us go together—we know!—we are companions."
' Why ask me what I am going to do? " he was saying. "How can I tell? How can you tell what you will do this afternoon or tomorrow or next year? You can not. I can not. People say they will do this or that. The idiots! They will do what they are made to do, made by their past. All my past is on my back. It is a tremendous weight, like an avalanche, that continually thrusts me onward and downward to—what? Every thought I have had, every act I have committed, every word I have spoken, they all have been added to this thing which, like a slowly moving and irresistible mass, pushes me hither and thither. ' You understand, I'm sure. The fraud I may have committed ten years ago—would it not urge me on to other frauds? The pain in the eyes of the bird whose nest I wantonly robbed when I was a boy—did it not predict further cruelty on my part? The tears of a woman I wronged fifteen years ago—do they not make it easier for me to mistreat some other woman now? We say we are free. Bah! When one has done many things and thought many things, one is no longer free. One will go on doing and thinking things of the same kind."
He reached down to the floor and picked up a battered derby hat. Still, Marjorie's eyes followed him—hungrily.
' You understand, I know," he said in his resonant, low voice. ' You are one who would understand. There are in you the great fires of life. You are afraid of them, but some day you will yield to their charm, will let them carry you away. And you will not be able to help it. You have felt the lure of their beauty too long."
For a brief moment their glances held, inter locked as if by physical means, his burning and assured, hers warm and eager. After that, a slow sigh came through her half-parted lips, and her bosom rose and fell once as if a mighty storm threatened her.
Then she caught sight of me. At first, she did not speak. When she called my name, I got somehow the impression that she came back to reality, as if her spirit had been far away for a while.
"He has been telling me," she said, without any trace of embarrassment, " why he will always be a tramp."
He still had his eyes upon her, drinking up the heady wine of her beauty. It seemed to me that he took in and appraised every part of her loveliness—the masses of her red-bronze hair piled high upon her head, the fire of her tawny eyes, the richness of her full, red mouth, and the ample, almost matronly, lines of her throat and neck. I had always thought of her as statuesque, but there was none of that qual ity in her then—rather, a soft voluptuousness.
The man did not even glance at me as he moved slowly toward the door.
He bowed to Marjorie, and, although I saw how gaunt and spare he was, I was struck by the native grace in his movement.
"You have been very kind," he said simply, indicating with a casual gesture of his right hand the remains of the food on the kitchen table.
Marjorie, in her turn oblivious of me, followed him to the door, and spoke.
"Tomorrow " and " come " were the only two words I heard her utter, but I knew that she asked him, a note of command in her voice, to return the following morning. And he, still assured and confident, bowed again and smiled. Somehow, the smile made me shudder a little.
Marjorie turned to me in the most natural way in the world.
"Let's go upstairs," she said in her fresh, musical voice, and followed me out of the kitchen.
As we sat down in the parlor, I asked her, "Where's your mother?"
I think the question came from my very dis tinct feeling that Marjorie needed protection, that she was in imminent danger.
"Downtown," she answered, and sat for a moment looking thoughtfully out the window. "That man, that tramp," she said, " is the most interesting man I ever encountered."
"He seems so," I agreed in a colorless tone.
"He knows life."
"Does he?"
After that, she left the subject, and I invited her to my dance, telling quite an elaborate and plausible little lie to explain why she had not received the invitation by mail. She said she would come.
Going down Sixteenth Street, I walked like one bewildered. I was not surprised that Marjorie talked familiarly to the tramp if she wished. She always did what she felt like doing. With her, I reflected, it was merely a yielding to her own desires, never a considera tion of other people or what other people might say. But the thing that astounded me was what I had seen in her face. Why, it had been indecent, something I thought foreign to her thoughts and feelings, awful!
I remembered her having repeated to me once what one of her rejected suitors had said to her:
' You tell me, and you have told others, you can't love. That isn't true. The trouble about you is that you're afraid to love. You're afraid of yourself, afraid to let yourself go."
Had that man been right in his estimate of her?
Ever since her debut, her life had been a continuous performance of attracting men, the most eligible men in the city, and then dis missing them. She always had had plenty of admirers in her train, for her beauty had been fortified by her wit and by that commanding air of aloofness which is so often such an effect ive spur to the ardor of men. But nobody had ever credited her with warmth of feeling, with " intenseness." She had always done exactly as she pleased, but her preferences had never led her into conflict with convention ality.
But on this morning, just a few minutes ago, I had seen an entirely new Marjorie. It was as if a foreign spirit had rushed into the body of Marjorie and taken violent possession of her, molding her figure to lines that had in them a certain sinuous softness, fashioning her lips to a telltale and fuller design, lighting her eyes with an evil torch.
What manner of woman was she? I asked myself. Had her life been one long wary battle to conceal from everybody her real self? Had her strongest emotions been held in leash because she was ashamed of them, or afraid of them? Was her soul a painted soul, a fugitive creature imprisoned behind the bars of her silent lips and baffling eyes?
I could not help asking myself those ques tions. Had I not seen that look on her face? Had I not been convinced that she was like a person who plays with danger gladly? I had even been reminded, involuntarily, of the beauty of those flowers which thrive best in dank, filthy soil. Had those imprisoned fires of hers helped to mold her in such unusual and striking beauty?
Then, I thought of George, and—stopped thinking of him. No matter what had happened, I would not admit that my husband had ever seen in her the strange woman whom I had surprised there in the kitchen.
Suddenly I was aware that somebody was calling to me. I looked around, and there at the curb, in his big gray roadster, was Charlie Corcoran. He sprang from the car and came toward me. It struck me that he seemed unusually elated. His step had a new buoyancy. And this was saying a great deal, for Charlie was always in good spirits.
As he stood before me, tall and almost too slender, the slight stoop in his shoulders empha sizing his graceful carriage of himself, the midday sun shining full on his handsome face and fair hair, I could not help envying him a little—he seemed so altogether blessed, so utterly a stranger to the ugly and distressing things of life.
"Come with me!" he commanded in mock authority, and led me to the machine.
Charlie has a quick, dashing air. His whole soul goes into anything he does—anything from a ride in an automobile to a love affair. I like him, always have liked him, very much. We have been chums for years.
I made him drive me home, and he followed me into the house.
I led him into the library—the library is the " homiest " room in the house—and he started in on one of his joyous tirades. Charlie's talking is always more or less of a cascade of words, even though somebody has said that his thin, expressive face is half of his vocabulary.
"Ruth," he began, flinging himself on the big leather couch in front of me, "I've come to praise you and to worship you. Please realize that at this moment I am burning incense in your temple. A string of choir boys a mile long is singing a triumphant anthem composed by myself in your honor, and the high priest of gratitude is exhorting a million devotees to live up to your example—which is mercy and loving kindness."
Somehow, his exuberance of spirits did not call forth any response from me. I was afraid he would see how weary I felt. I forced myself to ask him, "What is it all about, Charlie?"
"Ethel Gilmore," he replied. "I prostrate myself before you, I lift my voice in thanks giving, because you prevented me from marrying her."
"Oh, she?" My voice was contemptuous.
"It delights me to report," he swept on, with a sigh of mock relief, " that I saw her in a cafe last night and came away unscathed. When my eyes rested upon her, my blood pres sure was not increased, and my heart failed to beat a fraction of a second faster. Not a tear moistened my smoothly shaven cheeks. Ruth, I'm cured!"
"How on earth you ever imagined yourself in love with her, I can't understand," I said impatiently. "A woman divorced by her hus band, a woman talked about by the whole of Washington, a woman who was not received by most of us—oh, Charlie, why did you?"
"That's just the point. I didn't. But, if you hadn't brought me to my senses, this same fair Ethel would now be Mrs. Corcoran. That's why the choir boys sing in your temple and the incense goes up in suffocating clouds."
He slapped his knee with his right hand and laughed. ' Ye gods! Do you remember how my heart bled when you explained to me the folly of my loving her? I, a man twenty-nine years old, with a heart that bled!"
"But why all this jubilation now, after so long a time?"
I was wishing he would leave.
"A new divinity! " he explained. "Honestly, Ruth, this time it is for life."
I was genuinely surprised, particularly when I saw how serious his eyes were.
"Who is she?"
"Marjorie Nesbit," he said, much as he might have pronounced the name of Christ—it was so reverent.
Instinctively, I turned my face from him. For one bewildered moment two things were battling grotesquely in my consciousness, the reverence in his voice and my memory of what I had seen in Marjorie's face that morning. I wanted to scream aloud, to shake him, to tell him what a fool he was.
What I did do was to turn toward him and say, "I didn't know that was serious."
He was so taken up with his own thoughts that he did not notice the coldness in my voice.
"It's a secret so far," he confided with a solemnity that actually hurt me, " but I can tell you. She promised last night to marry me."
"She's accepted you!"
"Why, yes," he said, a little taken aback by my astonished manner, and added, "Yes, she has."
I felt my lower lip quiver, and I knew there were tears in my eyes, but I couldn't help it.
"Oh! "I said tremulously. "Oh, Charlie, I hope you'll be wonderfully—wonderfully happy."
He looked at me searchingly.
"I don't understand," he puzzled. "What do you mean, Ruth? Don't you like her?"
His voice was something new, more aloof and formal than it had ever been in talking to me.
I burst into tears.