Part 48 (1/2)

”And the people who live here?--What of them?”

”I like them because they are so near to the ground,” she answered, ”they've no surface of culture, or personality, or convention to bother one--they've no surface, indeed, of any kind.”

”Well, it's all very interesting,” he remarked, smiling, ”but, in common decency, don't you think you might have sent me word?”

”I never thought of you an instant,” she replied.

”You never thought of me in your life,” he retorted, ”and yet when I say I'm better worth your thinking of than Kemper--G.o.d knows I don't pretend to boast.”

A weaker man would have hesitated over the name, but he had seen at the first glance that the way to save her was not by softness, and his lips, after he had uttered the word, closed tightly like the lips of a surgeon who applies the knife.

”Don't speak to me of him!” she cried out sharply, ”I had forgotten!”

Her eyes hung upon his in a returning agony, and it was through this agony alone that he hoped to bring back her consciousness of life.

”This is not the way to forget,” he answered, ”you are not a coward, yet you have chosen the cowardly means. There can he no forgetfulness until you are strong enough to admit the truth to your own heart--to say 'there is no mistake that is final, no wrong done that has power to crush me.'”

”But there is no truth in my heart,” she answered, with sudden energy, ”it is all a lie--I am a lie all over, and it makes no difference because I have ceased to care. I used to think that people only died when they were put in coffins, but I know now that you can be dead and yet move and walk about and even laugh and pretend to be like all the rest--some of whom are dead also. And I didn't die slowly,” she added, with a vague impersonal interest, which impressed him as almost delirious in its detachment, ”I wasn't killed in a year, but in a minute. One instant I was quite alive--as alive as you are now--and the next I was as dead as if I had been buried centuries ago.”

”And who is to blame for this?” he demanded, white to the lips.

”Oh, it wasn't he--it was life,” she went on calmly, ”he couldn't help it, nor could I--n.o.body can help anything. Do you understand that?” she asked, with the searching mental clearness which seemed always lying behind her dazed consciousness, ”that we're all drawn by wires like puppets, and the strongest wire pulls us in the direction in which we are meant to go? It's curious that I should never have known this before because it has become perfectly plain to me now--there is no soul, no aspiration, no motive for good or evil, for we're every one worked by wires while we are pretending to move ourselves.”

”All right, but it's my turn at the wire now,” responded Adams, smiling.

At his words she broke out into little hard dry sobs, which had in them none of the softness of tears. ”n.o.body is to blame for anything,” she repeated, still striving, in a dazed way, to be just to Kemper.

Even more than her face and her voice, this pathetic groping of her reason, moved him into a pa.s.sion of sympathy; and while he looked at her, he resisted an impulse to gather her, in spite of her coldness, against his breast.

”What is it, Laura, that has made you suffer like this?” he asked.

But his words made no impression upon her, perhaps because they could not penetrate the outer husk of deadness which enveloped her.

”Do you know what it is to feel ashamed?” she demanded suddenly, ”to feel ashamed, not in a pa.s.sing quiver, but in a settled state every instant that you live? Do you know what it is to have every sensation of your body merged into this one feeling of shame--to be ashamed with your eyes and hands and feet as well as with your mind and heart and soul? I could have stood anything but this,” she added, pressing closer against the window.

An exclamation which was almost one of anger burst from him, and going to where she stood, he laid his hand upon her arm as if in the effort to recall her reason by physical force. But with his first touch his grasp lost its energy and grew gentle, for her anguish appeared to him, as he held her, to be only the instinctive crying out of a child that is hurt.

His hold slipped from her arm, and taking her hands, he bent over and kissed them until they lay quiet in his own.

”Laura, do you trust my love for you?” he asked.

”I trust you, yes,” she answered, ”but not love--it is only one of the wires by which we are moved.”

”Trust anything you please about me, so long as you trust--that is all I ask,” he let her hands fall from his and looked into her face. ”Promise me that you will be here waiting when I return.”

”There's no place for me to go--I shall be here,” she answered.

Her eyes followed him with a pathetic child-like fear while he crossed the room and went out leaving her alone.