Part 47 (1/2)
Unfastening her coat, which she had kept on, she laid it on the sofa at her back, and then put up her hands to take out her hatpins.
”I must pack my things,” she said suddenly. ”Will you engage my berth back to Dinwiddie for to-night?”
He nodded without speaking, and she added hastily, ”I shan't go down again before starting. But there is no need that you should go to the train with me.”
At this he turned back from the door where he had waited with his hand on the k.n.o.b. ”Won't you let me do even that?” he asked, and his voice sounded so like Harry's that a sob broke from her lips. The point was so small a one--all points seemed to her so small--that her will died down and she yielded without protest. What did it matter--what did anything matter to her now?
”I'll send up your luncheon,” he added almost gratefully. ”You will be ill if you don't eat something.”
”No, please don't. I am not hungry,” she answered, and then he went out softly, as though he were leaving a sick-room, and left her alone with her anguish--and her packing.
Without turning in her chair, without taking off her hat, from which she had drawn the pins, she sat there like a woman in whom the spirit has been suddenly stricken. Beyond the window the perfect day, with its haunting reminder of the spring, was lengthening slowly into afternoon, and through the slant sunbeams the same gay crowd pa.s.sed in streams on the pavements. On the roof of one of the opposite houses a flag was flying, and it seemed to her that the sight of that flag waving under the blue sky was bound up forever with the intolerable pain in her heart. And with that strange pa.s.sivity of the nerves which nature mercifully sends to those who have learned submission to suffering, to those whose strength is the strength, not of resistance, but of endurance, she felt that as long as she sat there, relaxed and motionless, she had in a way withdrawn herself from the struggle to live. If she might only stay like this forever, without moving, without thinking, without feeling, while she died slowly, inch by inch, spirit and body.
A knock came at the door, and as she moved to answer it, she felt that life returned in a slow throbbing agony, as if her blood were forced back again into veins from which it had ebbed. When the tray was placed on the table beside her, she looked up with a mild, impersonal curiosity at the waiter, as the dead might look back from their freedom and detachment on the unreal figures of the living. ”I wonder what he thinks about it all?” she thought vaguely, as she searched in her bag for his tip. ”I wonder if he sees how absurd and unnecessary all the things are that he does day after day, year after year, like the rest of us? I wonder if he ever revolts with this unspeakable weariness from waiting on other people and watching them eat?” But the waiter, with his long sallow face, his inscrutable eyes, and his general air of having petrified under the surface, was as enigmatical as life.
After he had gone out, she rose from her untasted luncheon, and going into her bedroom, took the black brocaded gown off the hanger and stuffed the sleeves with tissue paper as carefully as if the world had not crumbled around her. Then she packed away her wrapper and her bedroom slippers and shook out and folded the dresses she had not worn.
For a time she worked on mechanically, hardly conscious of what she was doing, hardly conscious even that she was alive. Then slowly, softly, like a gentle rain, her tears fell into the trunk, on each separate garment as she smoothed it and laid it away.
At half-past eight o'clock she was waiting with her hat and coat on when Oliver came in, followed by the porter who was to take down her bags.
She knew that he had brought the man in order to avoid all possibility of an emotional scene; and she could have smiled, had her spirit been less wan and stricken, at this sign of a moral cowardice which was so characteristic. It was his way, she understood now, though she did not put the thought into words, to take what he wanted, escaping at the same time the price which nature exacts of those who have not learned to relinquish. Out of the strange colourless stillness which surrounded her, some old words of Susan's floated back to her as if they were spoken aloud: ”A Treadwell will always get the thing he wants most in the end.” But while he stabbed her, he would look away in order that he might be spared the memory of her face.
Without a word, she followed her bags from the room without a word she entered the elevator, which was waiting, and without a word she took her place in the taxicab standing beside the curbstone. There was no rebellion in her thoughts, merely a dulled consciousness of pain, like the consciousness of one who is partially under an anaesthetic. The fighting courage, the violence of revolt, had no part in her soul, which had been taught to suffer and to renounce with dignity, not with heroics. Her submission was the submission of a flower that bends to a storm.
As she sat there in silence, with her eyes on the brilliant street, where the signs of his play stared back at her under the flaring lights, she began to think with automatic precision, as though her brain were moved by some mechanical power over which she had no control. Little things crowded into her mind--the face of the doll she had bought for Lucy's stepchild that morning, the words on one of the electric signs on the top of a building they were pa.s.sing, the leopard skin coat worn by a woman on the pavement. And these little things seemed to her at the moment to be more real, more vital, than her broken heart and the knowledge that she was parting from Oliver. The agony of the night and the morning appeared to have pa.s.sed away like a physical pang, leaving only this deadness of sensation and the strange, almost unearthly clearness of external objects. ”It is not new. It has been coming on for years,” she thought. ”He said that, and it is true. It is so old that it has been here forever, and I seem to have been suffering it all my life--since the day I was born, and before the day I was born. It seems older than I am. Oliver is going from me. He has always been going from me--always since the beginning,” she repeated slowly, as if she were trying to learn a lesson by heart. But so remote and shadowy did the words appear, that she found herself thinking the next instant, ”I must have forgotten my smelling-salts. The bottle was lying on the bureau, and I can't remember putting it into my bag.” The image of this little gla.s.s bottle, with the gold top, which she had left behind was distinct in her memory; but when she tried to think of the parting from Oliver and of all that she was suffering, everything became shadowy and unreal again.
At the station she stood beside the porter while he paid the driver, and then entering the doorway, they walked hurriedly, so hurriedly that she felt as if she were losing her breath, in the direction of the gate and the waiting train. And with each step, as they pa.s.sed down the long platform, which seemed to stretch into eternity, she was thinking: ”In a minute it will be over. If I don't say something now, it will be too late. If I don't stop him now, it will be over forever--everything will be over forever.”
Beside the night coach, in the presence of the conductor and the porter, who stood blandly waiting to help her into the train, she stopped suddenly, as though she could not go any farther, as though the strength which had supported her until now had given way and she were going to fall. Through her mind there flashed the thought that even now she might hold him if she were to make a scene, that if she were to go into hysterics he would not leave her, that if she were to throw away her pride and her self-respect and her dignity, she might recover by violence the outer sh.e.l.l at least of her happiness. How could he break away from her if she were only to weep and to cling to him? Then, while the idea was still in her mind, she knew that to a nature such as hers violence was impossible. It took pa.s.sion to war with pa.s.sion, and in this she was lacking. Though she were wounded to the death, she could not revolt, could not shriek out in her agony, could not break through that gentle yet invincible reticence which she had won from the past.
Down the long platform a child came running with cries of pleasure, followed by a man with a red beard, who carried a suitcase. As they approached the train, Virginia entered the coach, and walked rapidly down the aisle to where the porter was waiting beside her seat.
For the first time since they had reached the station Oliver spoke. ”I am sorry I couldn't get the drawing-room for you,” he said. ”I am afraid you will be crowded”; and this anxiety about her comfort, when he was ruining her life, did not strike either of them, at the moment, as ridiculous.
”It does not matter,” she answered; and he put out his hand.
”Good-bye, Virginia,” he said, with a catch in his voice.
”Good-bye,” she responded quietly, and would have given her soul for the power to shriek aloud, to overcome this indomitable instinct which was stronger than her personal self.
Turning away, he pa.s.sed between the seats to the door of the coach, and a minute later she saw his figure hurrying back along the platform down which they had come together a few minutes ago.
CHAPTER VI
THE FUTURE
A chill rain was falling when Virginia got out of the train the next morning, and the raw-boned nags. .h.i.tched to the ancient ”hacks” in the street appeared even more dejected and forlorn than she had remembered them. Then one of the noisy negro drivers seized her bag, and a little later she was rolling up the long hill in the direction of her home.
Dinwiddie was the same; nothing had altered there since she had left it--and yet what a difference! The same shops were unclosing their shutters; the same crippled negro beggar was taking his place at the corner of the market; the same maids were sweeping the sidewalks with the same brooms; the same clerk bowed to her from the drug store where she bought her medicines; and yet something--the only thing which had ever interested her in these people and this place--had pa.s.sed out of them. Just as in New York yesterday, when she had watched the sunrise, so it seemed to her now that the spirit of reality had faded out of the world. What remained was merely a mirage in which phantoms in the guise of persons made a pretence of being alive.