The Return of the Prodigal Part 61

In her blind pity she laid her fingers on his trembling hand. She who used to drop his hand as if it had been flame, she should have known better than to touch him now.

He looked at her with hot hungry eyes. His brain in its feverish intensity took note of trifles--the tortuous pattern of the braid on her gown, the gold sleeve-links at her wrists, the specks of brine that glistened on her temples under the wind-woven strands of her black hair; it recorded these things and remembered them afterward.

And all the time the boat came nearer, and the slow, steady stroke of the oars measured his hour by minutes, till the sweat, sprung from the labor and pa.s.sion of his nerves, stood out in beads on his forehead.

He looked at her; and her beauty, the beauty born of her freedom and abounding life, the beauty he wors.h.i.+ped, was implacable; the divinity in it remained untouched by his desire.

"You needn't care," he said desperately. "I'm not asking you to care; I'm not asking you to give me your love, but only to take mine."

She smiled. "I'm not so dishonest as to borrow what I can't repay."

His voice was monotonous in its iteration. "I'm not talking about repayment; I'll risk that. I don't want you to borrow it. I want you to take it, keep it, spend it any way you like, and--throw it away when you can't do anything more with it."

"And never return it? Ah, my friend! we can't do these things."

She dropped into the deck-chair, exhausted with the discussion. Her brow was heavy with thought; she was still racking her brains to find some argument that would appease him.

"I loved you--yes. And in my own way I love you now, if you could only be content with my way."

"Haven't you told me that your way is not my way?"

"Yes; and I've done worse than that. I've been talking to you as if you had made me suffer tortures, as if you had brought me all the pain of existence instead of all the pleasure. If you only knew!

There's nothing I've been enjoying all these five years that I don't owe to you--to you and n.o.body else. You were very good to me even at the first; and afterward--well, I believe I love life as few women can love it, and it came to me through you. Do you think I can ever forget that? Forget what I owe you? You stood by me and showed me the way out; you stood by and opened the door of the world."

To stand by and open the door for her--it was all he was good for.

In other words, she had made use of him. Well, had he not proposed to make use of her? After all, in what did his view of her differ from the Colonel's, which he abominated? All along, from the very first, it had been the old theory of the woman for the man. Frida for the Colonel's use, for his (Durant's) amus.e.m.e.nt, and now for his possession. Under all its disguises it was only an exalted form of the tyranny of s.e.x. And Frida was making him see that there was another way of looking at it--that a woman, like nature, like life, may be an end in herself, to be loved for herself, not for what he could make out of her.

"I am a woman of the world, a worldly woman, if you like. I love the world better than anyone in it. And I'm a sort of pantheist, I suppose; I wors.h.i.+p the world. But you will always be a part of the world I love and wors.h.i.+p; I could not keep you out of it if I would."

The exultation in her tone provoked his laughter. "Heaven bless you--that's only a nice way of saying that I'm done for.

'He is made one with Nature; there is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird.'

You _have_ made a clean sweep of me and my personal immortality."

The splash of the oars sounded nearer. They could hear the voices of the crew; the boat, lightened of her first load, was returning with horrible rapidity, it came dancing toward them in its malignant glee; and they sat facing each other for the last time, tongue-tied.

They had paced the deck together again; one more turn for the last time.

Durant was silent. Her confession was still ringing in his ears; but it rang confusedly, it left his reason as unconvinced as his heart was unsatisfied.

She _had_ loved him, and not in her way, as she called it, but in his. And that was a mystery. He felt that if he could account for it he would have grasped the clue, the key of the position. Whatever she might say, these things were more than subtleties of the pure reason, they were matters of the heart. He was still building a hope beyond the ruins of hope.

"Frida," he said at last, "you are a wonderful woman, so I can believe that you loved me. But, seeing what I was and what you knew about me, I wonder why?"

Louder and nearer they heard the stroke of the oars measuring the minutes. Frida's eyes were fixed on the boat as she answered.

"Why? Ah, Maurice, how many times have I asked myself that question?

Why does any woman love any man? As far as I can see, in nine hundred cases out of a thousand woman is unhappy because she loves.

In the thousandth case she loves because she is unhappy."

The boat had arrived. The oars knocked against the yacht's side with a light shock. Durant's hour was at an end.

Frida held out her hand. He hardly touched it, hardly raised his eyes to her as she said "Good-bye." But on the last step of the gangway he turned and looked at her--the woman in a thousand.

She was not unhappy.

XVII

Frida had played high and yet she had won the game of life; that dangerous game which most women playing single-handed are bound to lose. She had won, but whether by apathy or care, by skill or divine chance, he could not tell. As to himself he was very certain; when he might have won her he did not care to win, now that he had lost her he would always care. That was just his way.

Alone in the little hotel that looked over the harbor, left to the tyrannous company of his own thoughts, he made a desperate effort to understand her, to accept her point of view, to be, as she was, comprehensive and generous and just.

He believed every word she had ever said to him, for she was truth itself; he believed her when she said that she had loved him, that she loved him still. Of course she loved him; but how?

They say that pa.s.sion in a pure woman is first lit at the light of the ideal, and burns downward from spirit to earth. But Frida's had shot up full-flamed from the dark, kindled at the hot heart of nature, thence it had taken to itself wings and flown to the ideal; and for its insatiable longing there was no ideal but the whole.

Other women before Frida had loved the world too well; but for them the world meant nothing but their own part and place in it. For Frida it meant nothing short of the divine cosmos. Impossible to fix her part and place in it; the woman was so merged with the object of her desire. He, Maurice Durant, was as she had said a part of that world, but he was not the whole; he was not even the half, that half which for most women is more than the whole. From the first he had been to her the symbol of a reality greater than himself; she loved not him, but the world in him. And thus her love, like his own art, had missed the touch of greatness. It was neither the joy nor the tragedy of her life, but its one illuminating episode; or, rather, it was the lyrical prologue to the grand drama of existence.

He did her justice. It was not that she was changeable or capricious, or that her love was weak; on the contrary, its very nature was to grow out of all bounds of s.e.x and mood and circ.u.mstance. Its progress had been from Maurice Durant outward; from Maurice, as the innermost kernel and heart of the world, to the dim verge, the uttermost margin of the world; and that by a million radiating paths. It was not that she left Maurice behind her, for all those million paths led back to him, the man was the center of her universe; but then the center is infinitely small compared with the circ.u.mference. He saw himself diminished to a mathematical point in this cosmopolitan's cosmos. For Frida he had ceased to have any objective existence, he was an intellectual quant.i.ty, what the Colonel would have called an abstraction. There was nothing for him to do but to accept the transcendent position.

Thus, through all the tension of his soul, his intellect still struggled for comprehension.

Meanwhile, from his window looking over the white-walled harbor, he could see the _Windward_ with all her sails spread, outward bound.

He watched her till there was nothing to be seen but her flying sails, till the sails were one white wing on a dim violet sea, till the white wing was a gray dot, indistinct on the margin of the world.

XVIII

He cared immensely. But not to come behind her in generosity and comprehension he owned that he had no right to complain because this remarkable woman loved the world better than one man, even if that man happened to be himself; in fact, while his heart revolted against it, his pure intellect admired her att.i.tude, for the world is a greater thing that any man in it.

Now and again letters reached him across seas and continents, letters with strange, outlandish postmarks, wonderful, graphic, triumphant letters, which showed him plainly, though unintentionally, that Frida Tancred was still on the winning side, that she could do without him.

Across seas and continents he watched her career with a sad and cynical sympathy, as a man naturally watches a woman who triumphs where he has failed.

Meanwhile he lived on her letters, long and expansive, or short and to the point. They proved a stimulating diet; they had so much of her full-blooded personality in them. His own grew shorter and shorter and more and more to the point, till at last he wrote: "Delightful. Only tell me when you've had enough of it."

The answer to that came bounding, as it were, from the other side of the Atlantic. "Not yet. I shall never have enough of it. I've only been 'seeing the world,' only traveling from point to point along an infinite surface, and there's no satisfaction in that. I'm not tired--not tired, Maurice, remember. I don't want to stop. I want to strike down--deeper. It doesn't matter what point you take, so long as you strike down. Just at present I'm off for India."

Her postscript said: "If you ever hear of me doing queer things, remember they were all in the day's pleasure or the day's work."

He remembered--that Frida was only thirty-five; which was young for Frida. And he said to himself, "It is all very well now, but what will she be in another three years? I will give her another three years. By that time she will be tired of the world, or the world will be tired of her, which comes to the same thing, and her heart (for she has a heart) will find her out. With Frida you never know.

I will wait and see."

He waited. The three years pa.s.sed; he saw nothing and he had ceased to hear. He concluded that Frida still loved the world.

As if in a pa.s.sionate resentment against the rival that had fascinated and won her, he had left off wandering and had buried himself in an obscure Cornish village, where he gave himself up to his work. He was not quite so successful as he had been; on the other hand, he cared less than ever about success. It was the end of the century, a century that had been forced by the contemplation of such realities as plague and famine, and war and rumors of war, to forego and forget the melancholy art of its decadence. And from other causes Durant had fallen into a state of extreme dissatisfaction with himself. Five years ago he had found himself, as they said; found himself out, _he_ said, when at the age of thirty-three he condemned himself and his art as more decadent than the decadents. Frida Tancred had shown insight when she reproached him with his inability to see anything that he could not paint, or to paint anything that he could not see.

She had shown him the vanity of the sensuous aspect, she had forced him to love the intangible, the unseen, till he had almost come to believe that it was all he loved. The woman lived for him in her divine form, as his imagination had first seen her, as an Idea, an eternal dream. It was as if he could see nothing and paint nothing else. And when a clever versatile artist of Durant's type flings himself away in a mad struggle to give form and color to the invisible it is not to be wondered at if the world is puzzled and fights shy of him.

Meanwhile the critic who had a right to his opinion said of him: "Now that he has thrown the reins on the back of his imagination it will carry him far. Ten years hence the world will realize that Maurice Durant is a great painter. But in those ten years he must work hard."