Mr. Livingston stared at him. He wet lips as dry and cold as death.
“He would do that?” he whispered.
John averted his head. Unseen by Mr. Livingston, his hands clenched in his pockets. He felt a great sickness all through him.
“You and he are Englishmen,” said Mr. Livingston, struggling for speech. “You are brothers to Americans. You would betray all that your race—our race—has stood for in all these agonized generations?”
John rose. He could endure no more. “I have pointed out to you, Mr. Livingston, the inevitable results of your policy. My own feelings have nothing to do with it. You must make your own decisions.”
He waited. Mr. Livingston’s eyes, staring so feverishly at him, slowly dulled, until they looked like the glazed eyes of a dead man. His face appeared to dwindle, to become ancient and wrinkled. Some enormous and dreadful battle was raging within him, at some far and terrible distance.
“Ruin, with misguided honour, sir, or a realistic point of view with great profits,” said John. He leaned a little towards his employer, and his broad strong nostrils dilated. Mr. Livingston, who did not see him, was not aware that a man’s whole future life, his very soul, was dependent on his words yet unspoken.
He stirred in his seat. Very slowly, he lifted his hand and covered his face. There was something most terribly defenseless in the lines of that hand. In his sunken attitude, in his hidden face, was a whole world of men faced with loss with honour, or gain with dishonour.
He felt something slip under his other hand.
“The writ of permission to import,” said John, very softly.
Mr. Livingston dropped his hand. His livid face was twitching. He stared down at the paper and it seemed to him that the printed words were written in syllables of ominous and fateful fire.
“Even if you do not, others will,” said John. “You cannot hold back the tide. King Canute could not, either.”
But, thought Mr. Livingston, in his desperate and fatal turmoil, it is not significant that Canute could not hold back the engulfing waves. It was enough for his soul that he had tried. At the end, only the individual man’s soul mattered, even if he was defeated.
He looked at the paper. There lay ruin, or deliverance.
Honour or profits. His heart felt as if burning bands had encased it, and were crushing it.
Then he looked up at John, and even though he was young, John read the agony and despair in those old eyes. There was even pleading in them.
“You can do nothing against Wilkins,” said John.
There was a long silence in the office, while the old grandfather’s clock stuck five in the gathering winter dusk.
Then, as John watched with fixed and distended eyes, Mr. Livingston lifted the pen and signed the writ of permission. And it seemed to John that the whole air rustled and scratched with the pens of men signing away the future of America.
CHAPTER 26
John reread, frowning, the formidable legal letter received by him that morning from Gillespie, Gillespie & Gillespie:
“As we have a matter of extreme importance to communicate to you, we should regard it as a favour if you should call upon us this evening at six o’clock.”
John knew these solicitors by repute, a sombrely rich and austere firm engaging in nothing more reprehensibly illegal than estates, the wills of wealthy men and funds in trust for widows and children. After some puzzling, he came to the conclusion that this message concerned the estate of some prominent stock-holder in Everett Livingston & Company.
At six o’clock of this fine early April evening, he left his offices and called for his carriage. He stood on the steps of the warehouse, looking unseeingly at the blue sky glimpsed above the buildings. He could smell the salt odour of the sea. There was a wash of ruddy gold on the faces of the blank warehouses across the narrow street, and the upper dusty windows burned with a hot crimson. Even in these noisome and muddy streets the scent of spring was strong and fresh, and John became aware of it as one becomes aware of an old wound, half-forgotten.
This was his second spring in America, but the first one of which he had been conscious, and this only today. He had lived in a dull formless dream of pain, hatred, revenge and despair. The emotions, he thought, can blind a man to everything external, and create, in the midst of pleasantness and joy, a core of black and sightless agony. Now he looked about him as if he had just come to America, and was seeing it for the first time. Everything had a bright shine of unfamiliarity and strangeness. He had seen this street hundreds of times, the warehouses opposite, the sky and the passing faces. He had smelled the sea and felt its harsh strong breath on his cheek. Yet, in truth, he had seen and smelled nothing of all this before.
His sense of strangeness increased. For the first time he had partially emerged from himself. For one instant, as he looked at the patch of burning blue above him, his heart lurched and lifted with the old passion of spring. And then he was plunged again into a deeper and more poignant misery. Not for him again the freshness and joy of the new season. He had hated too much.
He hated, with a monstrous hatred, those who had spoiled life for him by making him hate them. No man who has hated, he thought, can ever be truly happy again. A slow seeping poison invades all his days, even when the original ulcer has been forgotten. There is an eternal disease in his blood, which does not confer immunity to fresh assaults, but increases his vulnerability to every foulness. It is not the hated, then, who are the victims. The hater is the victim of those he has hated.
Now that his awareness was like freed blood flowing through twisted and tortured veins, he felt that his skin had been flayed from him, that every nerve was exposed and throbbing. The narrow shadow of the cobbled street, the face of the illuminated warehouses opposite, the washed blue of the sky, the very gurgle of liberated water in the gutters, were all like pulsations of his own emotions. He wished, desperately, that he had never become aware again. He was filled with fear of fresh assaults. Better to have remained in a formless sick dream, than to have awakened to a strong and vital reality implicit with potential pain.
At last he became conscious that a private carriage had been standing at the corner, waiting. But it was not his own. As he stared at it, the coachman slapped the reins on the backs of the two fine black horses, and the carriage moved towards him. The carriage, too, was black, blindingly polished, the fittings of bright silver, the wheels twinkling as they caught the late rays of the last sun, the gleaming windows reflecting the light.
As he idly watched, wondering what had delayed his own carriage, this strange vehicle drew to stop in front of him. He saw the bonnet of a woman inside, and her lifted gloved hand and her pale intent face. He stared uncomprehendingly, then all at once a wild pang divided him and the ground seemed to move under his feet. He could not stir from the spot on which he stood, though he desperately desired it, and there was a loud roaring in his ears.
The window dropped, and the woman leaned her head through the aperture. “John,” she said, quietly. “Please. I must speak to you.”
He did not move. He looked at the face of his cousin, stern and composed as he remembered it, but older and stiller. She was dressed in dark gray, with sables about the throat. Her gray bonnet cast a pallid shadow over a face even more colourless. But her gray eyes were more brilliant than ever, larger, more strained, and her mouth glowed vividly in this sterile background.
As he stood there, not able to move, aware only of new anguish and new hatred, the coachman, in plum livery, leapt down from his seat and opened the carriage door. John found himself, without his own volition, approaching the carriage and entering it, while his cousin held her gray hoops aside for his passage. Then he was sitting beside her. The carriage moved on in a dream of cloud and shifting shadow.
The first pangs and upheavals subsiding, John became numb and unthinking. His dark face was set and rigid under the narrow brim of his tall hat. The carriage clop-clopped through the deserted cob
bled street, turned towards the sea, entered a small empty alley composed of the backs of great warehouses. Then, as if at a signal, it stopped. There was nothing now but the sound of the ocean. The alley was plunged in dun shadow.
During this short journey, Eugenia had sat beside her cousin, as silent and removed as himself. She, too, had looked straight ahead, her gloved hands in her lap, her head high, her face closed and quiet.
Now she turned to him, and in that still neutral voice he so poignantly remembered, she said: “I waited for you. I had to see you. There is so much to say.”
The rigidity that had encased John was broken. He turned to Eugenia, and his dark eyes glittered and jerked with his pain and hatred and misery.
“We have nothing to say to each other!” he said, in a pent and stifled voice. He put his hand on the handle of the door, and drew himself to the edge of the velvet seat. “Nothing at all. I don’t know why I came with you.”
Her gloved hand moved to his arm restrainingly. Now her face flushed and tightened. She spoke in the old tone of authority, but there was a pleading note in it also.
“John, you must listen. Do you think this is less painful for me? We are not children, John. There is much to say.”
He felt, all through him, the old sickness and desire and passion, the old love. This was Eugenia, her flesh, her presence, her faint fresh scent, her beloved gray eyes and calm haughty face. All at once he wanted to groan, to cry out. He wanted, with one supreme and desperate effort of will, to obliterate all that had gone before. He had a sick and feverish feeling that if his will were only strong enough, he would find himself back in London, in Eugenia’s carriage, and nothing of agony and horror and loathing between them, but only the old sweet quarrelsomeness, the old eager plans, the old vehemence battering at her steely will.
He looked down at her as she sat beside him, and he thought: I can’t endure this. Everything else was gone, and there was only Eugenia. There had never been anything else! How could he have forgotten?
The gray eyes, fixed so urgently upon him, saw all his thoughts. They softened. They filled with tears. She turned aside her head, and he saw her profile, delicate and chill, but inexpressibly moved and shaken.
“John,” she whispered. The frail muscles of her white throat stood out above the brown fur, and trembled.
“Genie,” he said. Involuntarily, his hand reached out and seized hers crushingly.
She struggled to regain that steely composure of hers. The tears were so thick in her eyes that she had to distend her lids to hold them, sternly. She swallowed. After a moment she spoke again, tonelessly:
“I am a mother now, John. I have a little boy. Anthony.”
She did not look at him. Her eyes were fixed on the opposite wall of the carriage. But she felt the grip on her hand loosen, slacken, fall away. The carriage was pervaded by a deathly coldness.
Then John spoke, and his voice seemed to come from a great distance:
“And I have a little girl. Lavinia.”
Then he laughed aloud, shortly, with a sound under the laughter that seemed quite terrible to Eugenia. She covered the hand John had held with her other hand. The fingers still ached and throbbed. She felt the shaking of John’s laughter, harsh and desolate and infinitely derisive and bitter, and a tremor ran over her body.
Then he took the handle of the door again, and slid to the edge of the seat. “Goodbye, Genie,” he said.
Terrified that he would leave her, she caught his arm desperately in both her hands. “No, John. I’ve got to talk to you. I came three thousand miles to you, John!”
Then, realizing the appalling indiscretion of her words, her hands fell from his arm. She lifted them to her face, and sat motionless.
There was a long silence in the carriage, while she knew he stared at her, slowly thinking of what she had said. At last she heard his voice, hushed and infuriated:
“How can you say that? How can you lie so?”
She dropped her hands. The pressure of her fingers had left red streaks on her white face. Her eyes burned with gray and feverish light. But she said coldly and contemptuously enough:
“You can speak of lying? You can pretend to be the injured one, John? After what you did to me? Have you forgotten what you did? Have you forgotten the shame you put upon me, the desertion, the misery? Why do you pretend to be so heroic, so wronged? It was you who left me, ran away from me, after disgracing and wounding me. I did not leave you. Whatever I have done is your doing.”
He stared at her grimly. But he knew that much of what she had said was true. She sat upright and shaking near him, and her eyes shot lances of contempt and anger upon him. He clenched his teeth together, and turned away. Finally, he said:
“I made you marry Bollister, certainly. You knew what an enemy he was to me. You knew he was—responsible—for what happened. Yet, you could marry him.”
She cried out, in a voice full of trembling indignation:
“How can you be so weak as to say this! If you had not been weak no one could have hurt you, John. But it is so like you to blame others for your own fault. If Andrew was your enemy, he could not have hurt you if you had not allowed him to. It was your weakness that opened the way to him. It was your own weakness that made you behave so abominably, without self-control or self-discipline. Yet, it is so easy for you to exonerate yourself, to make yourself appear the wronged one, the virtuous one who was betrayed by others!”
Two years ago, John’s stung fury, unreasoning and impelled only by the instinct of self-defense, would have lashed out at her, disregarding truth and logic. But he was a man now. He had thought much and endured even more. He could feel no sustained rage, after its first tearing assault. Suffering had opened the way to reason.
He looked at his cousin’s wet and haughtily contemptuous face. It was so small, so pale, imbued with such a delicate and unshaken strength. The lines of her mouth were hard; the exquisite distended nostrils seemed carved from marble.
He said, bitterly: “You are right, Genie. I was weak. I was stupid. I did a rotten thing to you. You are right to condemn me. But, I cannot understand you. Knowing what Bollister had done to me, through my own weakness, and what an enemy he was to me, I can’t comprehend why you married him.”
She was silent a moment. Her eyes did not leave his, though their sternness increased. She said unemotionally: “I have told you. He said he was coming to America. I married him, so I could be near you.”
There was no shame, no hesitation in her voice. She looked at him steadfastly, without a blush or a shrinking. He felt her hard and uncompromising courage, matter-of-fact, and without bravado. He regarded her incredulously. He had forgotten how relentless, how ruthless, Eugenia could be.
As if he could not trust himself to look at her, he averted his head.
“And now?” he said, almost inaudibly. “And now that you are here, Genie?”
She was silent. He thought, as he waited, still not looking at her, that she was suddenly frightened, suddenly filled with fear. But when he turned to her again, she was as quiet and steadfast as ever, gazing at him with a world of proud and inflexible meaning in her calm eyes.
She was stronger than he, and that is why he did not take her just then in his arms, and satisfy the anguished hunger in himself. It was he who trembled, and not Eugenia. It was he, in a kind of strange shame and reticence, that was embarrassed.
He stammered, out of the welter of his emotions: “Tell me, Eugenia: do you—do you care anything for him?”
In a tone as measured and controlled as always, she answered: “No. I do not dislike, or hate him. He has been a good husband to me, according to his lights. I have nothing to complain of. I have a little son, too.”
She spoke of her child with no emotion at all, as if neither her husband nor son mattered to her in the least, as if they were extraneous creatures with whom she had the most casual and indifferent of relationships.
The strangest emotions, rather than tho
ughts, swept over John. He could not analyse them. He could only gaze at this young hard creature, with her pale and beautiful face, her wide and faintly rosy mouth with its inflexible and remorseless lines, her unshaken and unreadable gray eyes, so brilliant and so unmoved. The reticence and delicacy inherent in almost every man, however gross, caused John to wince, to feel a slight coldness over all his flesh. Eugenia seemed incredible to him, unbelievable, and oddly unfamiliar. He thought confusedly: I never really knew her, never at all. The fear that all men of hot and generous impulses experience in the presence of calm and inexorable exigency and inhuman fixity of purpose invaded him now.
She said, still with firmness and calmness: “And you, John? Do you care for that—for your wife? And your child?”
Still confused and shaken by his emotions, John was silent for some long moments. Then, striving for her own detachment, and succeeding only in making his voice uneven and breathless, he said: “Lilybelle is only a circumstance to me. I hated her once. Detested her. She was repugnant to me. And now? I tolerate her. She—is nothing. She makes me comfortable. I have nothing in common with her.” He paused, and now his voice was softer: “I have a very dear little lass, Eugenia.”
Then, he felt a power in her, impassive, immovable. That power made him appear foolish and weak, too filled with human softness and irresolution. He turned to her. She was smiling a little, subtly, with a cold cruelty that paled and molded the lines of her mouth.
“All this has nothing to do with us, John,” she said. She laid her cool hand on his. He felt its delicacy and deceptive frailness,
“No,” he said, his heart plunging, “it has nothing to do with us.”
They looked for a long time in each other’s eyes. Then Eugenia’s smile became incredibly soft and tremulous. A faint rosy light spread over her face, and it was young and tender again. Her lips parted. Her breath came through them, hurried and urgent. The marble of her throat dissolved into warm and pulsing white flesh, and, as she leaned towards him, the beautiful lines of her young breast seemed to swell, to seek to burst the tight gray bodice that enclosed it. She lifted her hands imploringly. They trembled, the fingers becoming soft and eager.