“Tell me about it, John,” she said, very quietly.
He would have turned away from her, in his shame and unendurable agony, but he could not. He tried to find words, but they were like hot fragments on his tongue. Now the enormity of the story he must tell her appeared to him to be too frightful for speech, too shameful.
Never, in his turbulent life, had he known, or acknowledged, that certain acts of his had sprung from a weakness of character, from some rotten spot of softness. Weakness in others had been abhorrent to him, had elicited loud condemnation and expressions of disgust. Weak men were not “English,” and men who were not English were in some way contemptible; the worst could be expected of them, dismissed with a shrug of the shoulder. “Character” was “English.” Never had he suspected that perhaps he did not have complete “character.”
Now, it came to him with ghastly force that what he had done had sprung from some treacherous weakness in himself, unacknowledged or unknown. For a moment or two, in the midst of his struggle for words to tell his story, and immediately after his blinding insight into that unconscious weakness, he was stunned, appalled, stricken with terror.
“I am a weakling!” he exclaimed, in the strangest voice. “Yes, that is it: I am a weakling! I never knew it before. That is how it happened.” His humiliation, his horror, increased. He became frantic. He got to his feet, and looked down at the girl. But he did not see her. He saw himself.
Though he was not aware of it, he had taken another agonized step towards maturity. He was still too juvenile of nature to understand that awareness of inherent weaknesses and strengths grows in proportion to a man’s spiritual stature.
“A weakling?” repeated Eugenia. Her pale lip shook, became rigid. She did not understand weakness. She detested it. It became more shameful than ever when it was self-confessed. She believed men decently hid weaknesses as they hid their nakedness. There was no hope for a man when he acknowledged that he had this rottenness in himself, when he displayed it as a leper displays his sores: for pity. Eugenia did not know that a confession of weakness was the first step towards strength, that only the complete coward is capable of self-deception.
She stood up, and it was incredible how much contempt, how much inexorableness, her small and delicate body could convey.
“How were you weak, John?” she asked, mercilessly. Deep within her she was suffering desperately, overcome with desolation. But he could not know this, from her aspect, from the ruthless piercing of the gray eyes fixed upon his.
He pressed the palms of his sweating hands together. He stared at her, his horror, his loathing of himself, increasing. He began to speak, incoherently, stammering, his words rushing out as poison gushes from an abscess:
“When I left you, Eugenia, I—I thought the end of the world had come. I went to a tavern—it was a place in which we usually met. The men from Carruthers, Eugenia. There was a girl there, a barmaid—”
He paused. Eugenia flinched. She lifted her hand and put it on the mantelpiece. Her fingers clenched on the cold stone. But she said nothing. Her eyes became more ruthless, brighter than ever with her condemnation and disgust.
John’s feverish gaze, wandering, fell at last on that little hand on the mantelpiece. For some unfathomable reason, he could not look away. He saw the strained and transparent knuckles, the faint pink delicacy of the nails. The whole appearance of the hand had a curious and fragile cruelty.
His words continued to rush out, disjointedly, with great speed:
“It was Bollister, Andrew Bollister, who came in with the other chaps. We—drank.” He paused, flung out his hands despairingly, his eyes pleading with her abysmally. “Genie, I swear I don’t know how it happened! But—when I woke up—the girl was there! I don’t know!” He rubbed his trembling hands over his face. “It seems I married her, the night before. It was Bollister who arranged it—.”
Now his expression became black and savage. He clenched his fists and beat them with slow and terrible force on the mantelpiece near her own hand.
“I am going to kill Bollister,” he muttered.
Eugenia sat down, very slowly. She gazed at the fire again. She was very white. Even her lips had turned white. She spoke very quietly, after a long interval.
“John, have you told your father?”
“Yes,” he answered. His voice was muffled; the savagery was still vivid in his black eyes, and his tone was absent. “I took—her—to him. We had a talk, first. I thought—he might get me out of this. But he told me I had to live up to my bargain.”
He drew a deep breath, as if he smothered. A dullness and heaviness had come out on his face.
“He said I—we—must go to America. It was best.”
Eugenia lifted her head alertly. Now her gray eyes glittered.
“Uncle James said this, to you? You are certain? He wished you to remain married to this—creature?” Her light voice was hard and swift. “Why?”
He shook his head. Again he covered his face with his hands, “I don’t properly know. It was something about it being time for me to be a man. I’m a fool, Genie. I’ve always been a fool. Father made me see it. He was right. I know he was right.”
“You mean to imply,” cried Eugenia, “that it is your intention to continue in this impossible situation?”
He did not hear the catch in her throat; he did not see how she suddenly pressed her hands to her breast as if to quell an intolerable pain.
“What can I do?” he muttered, dully. “Father will not help me. He was quite determined. Genie, you don’t know what a fool I’ve been all my life!”
“Uncle James will not help you?” repeated Eugenia, insistently.
He shook his head. He turned away from her, abruptly, so that she might not see the burning tears which stung his eyelids.
Eugenia was silent. That stern young face became bitter, and vengeful. Her throat throbbed. She swallowed to quiet it. The firelight lay in the sockets of her eyes, and flickered over her pressed and stony mouth.
“Perhaps you don’t quite understand,” said John, almost inaudibly, his back almost completely turned to her. “I—something took place between us, Genie. She—she is my wife.”
Still, Eugenia did not speak. But a fiery blush darkened her white cheeks. She lifted her head as if stung, and again an ineffable look of supreme loathing and disgust flared over her features.
Then she spoke in a practical voice, without emotion: “You were dragooned into this impossible situation, John. Your—weakness—played a large part, one must admit. But, one must also remember other things. I can’t understand Uncle James. Has he forgotten me? He always seemed very fond of me—”
Now her voice broke. She recovered herself sternly, however.
He turned to her swiftly, dropped to his knees again, and took her cold little hands in his. Now, though she struggled for composure, her mouth trembled if her eyes were still steadfast.
“O Genie, forgive me, my darling!” he cried, hoarsely. He kissed her hands with vehemence. “Do you think I’ll ever forget you, wherever I am? Don’t you know how all this is killing me, my darling? There isn’t anything else left for me, in the whole world, Genie.”
She looked down at him. She tried to retain her inexorable sternness, her cold condemnation. But she could not. Her mouth trembled more and more, though her eyes remained dry and excessively bright. Then, with a faint and shaken sob, she dropped her head on his, and her cold hands quivered.
“O John,” she whispered. “O John!”
They clung together, these two poor young creatures, in their desolation and their anguish.
A long time passed, while they neither moved nor spoke, their arms holding fast. Now Eugenia wept. John could not bear it. Her tears came reluctantly, for she rarely cried, and the fount of weeping within her filled painfully.
But, in the meantime, the girl’s contained heart grew more icy, more swollen with misery and grief, more vengeful and determined. She felt for John only
overwhelming love, however she despised his weakness and folly, which had led to this hour of suffering. But for her uncle, James, she felt hatred and bitterness.
Defeat was not familiar to Eugenia. There was the quality of implacability in her, and an almost virulent obstinacy. She did not relapse into frantic resignation. She did not sorrow or mourn. Her quick sharp mind, so disingenuous despite her youth, was already planning. Strength returned to her.
She gently released herself from John’s arms.
“I think you had best go now, my dear. You see, I must think.”
He stood up. The face that looked down at her mutely was no longer young, with softnesses about the mouth and eyes. It was grim and desperate.
“Genie, it is goodbye, you know.”
She smiled faintly, and her eyes narrowed.
She repeated: “You had best go now, John.”
She rose, and before he could stop her, she had glided silently from the room, her smooth gleaming head high on her throat, her step unhurried but determined.
CHAPTER 8
James frequently remarked to himself that it was the passionate, the emotional, those given to profound frenzies and furies, who reached numbness first and most completely. The men of reason, he said, unfortunately rarely knew this anesthesia. As their emotions were rigidly pale and controlled, so could they keep their thoughts and passions within the cold borders of complete consciousness. Therefore, their suffering was unremitting. It was a chronic ache, very seldom lessening, always endurable. And invariably devastating, however long the final disintegration was delayed. Their pallid torment was a slow ulcer which eventually poisoned their souls, the venom cumulative, the end completely destructive.
But the wild and passionate spewed out their poison at healthy periods, exorcising the devils which beset them. A numbness followed this salutary catharsis, during which the vital forces could gather strength again, and fortitude. Rarely, a scar remained. Or, if it remained, it only throbbed at far intervals, never enough to destroy the organism. Sometimes the wild and passionate, feeling that vague throb, were hard put to it to remember the original wound, feeling only a passing dim anger, an uneasy despondency, or, at the worst, a desperate and turbulent resistance.
So it was that John, having left his cousin, was suddenly seized by a profound numbness, in which external objects took on a shifting grayness and unreality. He moved through a gray dream. He felt in himself a vast and ragged wound, diffused and empty; he was conscious of its swift bleeding, but the first anguish was gone. He looked about him at the streets; they were the streets of a dull nightmare. He hardly felt the stones under his feet, and the dank and gritty windiness and rain did not exist for him. Nor did he think acutely of past events, and the miserable black future ahead, nor of his grief and his exile. He only knew that London was strange to him, like an alien city in which he had no interest, which was devoid of memory for him, and which was only part of his vague if circumambient illness. His mind could not think; it had passed the point of endurance.
Then, as he stumbled along in a streaming crowd of wet and scurrying people, jostled by them, pricked by the points of their black umbrellas, a hot and vivid pang of pain and rage struck deep at his anesthetized heart, and he halted abruptly, staring wildly before him. He stood in the midst of the buffeting throngs, the rain streaming in his face, utterly immobile, with his eyes, blazing and fixed, seemingly fastened on some terrible thought, some savage decision. His big hands slowly clenched; his body tightened. The pale and livid light of the day flashed on the teeth which his lifted lips revealed.
Andrew Bollister remained, with a few others, in the classroom after Dr. Carruthers’ had been dismissed. There were two passages of Cicero which engrossed his attention. It was not that he was particularly interested in the sonorous phrases which he was translating, nor did their majestic meaning inspire in him any exaltation or joy in their stateliness. But it was part of his nature that he allowed nothing to conquer him, nothing to appear difficult to him. Even the smallest and most insignificant event was a challenge to that frightful and frozen egotism of his. He would set himself to conquer and subdue it, Nothing was too small for his attention, and his relentless pursuit of it.
Only that morning he had discovered that one of his boots had slightly less sheen upon it than the other. No one but Andrew Bollister would have observed that small deviation. In truth, he had to examine the offending boot in both daylight and candlelight before he was certain. When he was finally convinced that his suspicions were correct, he had called “Boots” from his cave near the kitchen and had thrashed him soundly with his cane.
It was not his fastidiousness which had been offended. It was something more profound, something which did not spring from cruelty, or at the last, from pure egotism. It was as if he dared not for a moment relinquish his control of things. Let his control slip for but an instant, even if it was only the delay in the bringing of his breakfast, and there would be a breech which might widen to let in the floods of destruction. Had any one of intuition told him that he was beset by a constant and mortal fear, he would have stared with incredulity, and with a smile.
He would have smiled even more if he had been told that his pursuit of Cicero had its roots in his fear. But there was a grimness in his expression as he pored over the book in the flickering lamplight of the room, which was empty except for himself and two or three other young men. He bent his pale and polished head over the pages; his eyes, almost as pale, were fixed unrelentingly on the words. His hand, that long and almost fleshless hand, wrote the slow translation on a sheet of paper. His intensity of purpose was inexorable. He exuded an air of frozen steeliness, as if this was a matter of life and death that he was pursuing. As indeed it was. A failure in translation might be the first breech in the iron wall.
His long and elegant profile, all thin sharp lines like a bitter cameo, had no expression upon it but motionless implacability. He thought of nothing else but the conquest of the passage. The events of the night before were waiting, like a neat pile of books, for his later study. But at this hour only Cicero mattered.
He felt, rather than heard or saw, the sudden disorderly tumult at the door, the caught breaths of his companions. His pale and slender brows knotted in renewed concentration. His hand moved steadily. He would not look up until he had completed this last sentence, no matter what the provocation.
Then, in the very midst of his absorption, he felt a hand seize his shoulder. It was a powerful and violent hand. He was whirled to his feet. The pen fell from his fingers, spluttered upon the exquisite neatness of the paper. It was the disruption of his preoccupation that made him blink and stagger in the grip of his assailant, and not fear.
He found himself looking into the wild and savage face of John Turnbull. He found himself being shaken as if he was a rag in John’s grip. He heard strange distant sounds coming from John’s contorted lips. But his mind, that strange and terrible mind, still, like a mad shining engine, pursued the last words of Cicero down the vanishing track of his absorption, even in the very midst of his sudden awareness of John’s presence and the tightening of his own body.
John had him by the throat. He towered over him, his face black and inhumanly changed by his fury and hatred. The lamps flickered as if a gale had surged into the classroom. In the doorway crowded a few of the curious and eagerly anticipatory. The other young men in the room had gotten to their feet, and were staring avidly.
Andrew had seen his bellicose father in a rage. Rage had often broken about that polished head, but he, himself, cool and invulnerable, had never been disturbed by it. So many had hated him, even when he had been a child. But never had he seen a face like this, and a nameless prickling went along his nerves like a trembling warning.
Nevertheless, fear in the physical sense had never assailed him. It did not assail him now. He felt, for a fleeting instant, only a malevolent amusement, followed by instant outrage and disgust. Had John threatened the malignan
t core of him, he would have been frightened. But John threatened only his body, and his final reaction was loathing that his enemy dared to touch his flesh.
“Let me go, you fool,” he said, in his quiet and toneless voice. But he did not struggle. To struggle would have been the fatal mortification which could have attacked his psychic vulnerability. He fixed his pale and gleaming eyes upon John’s countenance with an expression of supreme contempt and indifference.
It was this look which increased John’s fury and hatred to insane heights. Had Andrew trembled, had he exhibited terror, part of his vengeance would have been satisfied. To see that bloodless face, narrow and handsome, change and become fearful, to see those eyes shaken with personal fright, to feel that thin flesh quiver, to see that haughty mouth open on a cry, would have been more satisfying to John Turnbull than any crushing or bleeding of Andrew’s physical body. Then would have been alleviated his ancient sense of inferiority to Andrew Bollister; the fear expressed in the face of his enemy would have freed him from an old disease. Then would he have been delivered from past uneasy torment and misery. In his conquest of Andrew would have been deliverance for himself.
But even in his madness he knew that he could not conquer this immortal enemy. He might beat that frailer flesh into a pulp. But there was an invulnerability there, contemptuous and sardonic, which he could not conquer. It was an invulnerability which would remain disdainful of him, which, at the last, would reduce him to the old position of inferiority and impotence.
It was this, then, that made him burst into a wild and vicious oath, which made him, almost with despair, raise his knotted fist and plunge it into that faintly smiling face. He felt Andrew’s skin and flesh soften under his knuckles. He felt the sudden bending of Andrew’s knees. But he had the strangest and most maddening feeling that he really had not touched Andrew at all. He uttered a loud, cry, almost like a sob. Even when Andrew’s blood poured from his nose, John glared at it furiously as though he had been tricked.