"But of course I understand you now," said the young man instantly, in the strangest mild voice.
"Then, if you will--please me--let"s say no more about it."
To that stanch speech he made no reply: perhaps he did not hear it.
Winter dusk had crept quickly into the pretty sitting-room. The tall figure motionless by the little desk grew perceptibly dimmer.
That understanding Charles spoke of had come upon him by successive shocks, each violent in its way. His had been the mere mad sense of a world too suddenly swung upside down, of the individual himself left standing brilliantly on his head. That had been just at first; and then perception had slid into him like a lance, and his feet had struck the solid ground with a staggering jolt. It was as if, at a word, all the supporting fabrications of his mind had turned to thin air, and out he fell headlong, at last, upon the real and the true. And this real and this true was Mary Wing, nothing else, standing where she had always stood; Mary, his best old friend, whom he had given his back to, belabored with harsh words, while she struggled at the crossroads of her life--to this. Now contrition, now humbleness had shaken the young authority, a poignant conviction of his failure, in understanding and in friendship. And then she spoke again, making it all quite perfect with simple words that he himself, in a dream, might have shaped and put into her mouth. _I wasn"t willing to leave mother._ And after that, it seemed that nothing about himself could possibly matter in the least.
"You know," he said, quite naturally, out of the small silence, "I think it"s beautiful that a girl like you can feel this way--a girl with your abilities--your usefulness and splendid success--and now this magnificent oppor--"
"Don"t!--please don"t! I hadn"t meant to speak of it at all. I--we won"t discuss it, please."
She spoke hastily, pushing back the papers she had been pretending to arrange, starting to rise. But that word or that movement seemed to galvanize the still Charles into the suddenest life.
"_Discuss it!_" he cried, in a new voice. "Why, we"re going to have the greatest discussion you ever heard!"
For perhaps the strangest part of this destructive upheaval was that it seemed to leave every idea he had ever had about this Career completely reversed. One word from Mary Wing about not leaving her mother, and nothing seemed to matter but that she, in her fine recklessness, should not be allowed to sacrifice her triumph and her life.
"No!--please! It"s settled now. And it only makes--"
But her friend, the authority, had flung himself into the chair beside her, like an excited boy, and he seized her wrist on the desk-leaf in an arresting grip.
"No, it isn"t settled till it"s settled right!--don"t you know that? Is this your letter to Ames here? Let me tear it up for you now! Refuse the appointment! Why, Miss _Mary_! You can"t think of such a thing! You!--a worker with a mission--and this your great call!--your big opportunity--your _duty_! Yes, your--"
She interrupted his flowing modernisms to say, quite patiently: "You"re hurting my wrist."
"Yes, and I"m going on hurting it till I see that letter torn up! Now, Miss Mary!--listen to me--for once--I beg! You won"t suppose I don"t understand--now--what made you sit down to do this, and I--I needn"t say I admire you immensely for feeling so. But--don"t you see--if life"s hard, it"s not your doing, and if it"s hardest on mothers, you can"t change the conditions by a hair"s-breadth, no matter what you do....
Why, if you were going to marry Donald, and go off to Wyoming, the break here would be just as bad, but you"d never think it wasn"t right--you"d know that these were the terms and conditions of life. Oh, you know all that as well as I! You know the duty isn"t from children to parents--no, I swear, it"s from parents to children, every time. And your mother"ll be the first to say so--you know that, too! You know, when you tell her you"re thinking of doing this, she"ll go down on her knees to beg you to take your youth--and your life--and be free--"
He was deflected by one of Mary"s normal level gazes, turned upon him.
She said steadily:--
"How long have you been feeling this way?"
"Ten years! And then--for about five minutes."
"I had understood somehow--I don"t know how exactly--that you always thought I should stay here."
The young man felt a flush spreading upward toward his hair, but would not lower his eyes.
"Perhaps I did have some such feeling--in a sort of--personal, illogical way. But if it"s the last word I ever speak--you"ve destroyed the last shred of it."
He rose abruptly, without intention. Nothing in the world was clearer to him than that he and his reactions mattered little to her now; yet the desire mounted in him to explain how it was never the thing itself, but always the feeling about it, that had seemed so important to him.
However, the school-teacher, with a little definitive gesture of the arm he had released, spoke first:--
"Well, never mind! Don"t argue with me, please. It"s as over and done with as something last year--"
But Charles, upon his unimagined task of persuading Mary to act as the Egoettes act, cried out: "No!--no! Argue! Why, d"you think I"ll stand by and hold my tongue, while you sacrifice the great chance of your life, your particular dream--for a mere notion of _duty_! I say, and I"ve always said, that freedom--and the right to do your work--belong to you, if to anybody in the world! You"ve--"
"Do you really suppose I"ve lain awake all these nights without learning what my own mind is?"
Having stopped him effectually with this dry thrust, she went on in another manner, not controversial at all, rather like one speaking to herself.
"And as for my freedom--that"s not involved at all.... I was thinking just now that maybe this is just what freedom--responsible freedom--really is--means. It"s having the ability and the desire and the fair chance to do a thing--_and then not do it_."
And then Charles Garrott knew, quite suddenly and finally, that this, indeed, was no talk in a book, but the realest thing in the world; that this incredible had really happened: that Mary Wing, the "hard"
Career-Maker, was tossing her Career away....
He stood quite silenced, while she spoke her last decisive word.
"So you see you have a wrong idea of--what I"m doing, altogether. I appreciate your--being so interested--I value it, you know that," said Mary Wing in a controlled voice, hard even. "But I can"t leave you thinking that I"m simply sacrificing myself--to my mother, for instance.
It isn"t that way at all. Of course, I"m no more to mother than mother is to me. It"s not a sacrifice.... Or, rather--I"m in the position that people are always in--more or less. Either way, I"ve got to sacrifice--and this is the way I choose. But it"s getting very dark. I must light the lamps."
She rose as she spoke, and having risen, bent again, to snap on, superfluously, her little desk-light. And as she so stood and bent, the large hand of Charles Garrott reached out suddenly, and began to pat her shoulder.
She seemed but a slip of a girl, no more, that he, Charles, could have tossed upon his shoulder, and so walked out upon a journey. But here, in a wink, she had shot up so tall upon his horizon that he himself, beside her, seemed to possess no significance at all. She might be right, she might be wrong: but, to him, the authority, this crashing negation of the Ego was the flung banner of a splendid trustworthiness, a fitness to lead her own life, indeed, such as should not be questioned henceforward. Never had this woman"s independence of him spoken out to him with so clarion a voice as now. And still, over and through her unemotional firmness, the sense of what a giving-up was here swelled in him almost overwhelmingly. It was the brilliant prize of ten years"
checkered struggle that his old friend to-day so stoically threw away.
Here was a refusal which would touch every corner of her life to its farthest reaches....
So Charles Garrott"s warring sensations, his humility and his pride in her, had instinctively expressed themselves in the awkward mute gesture of his sympathies.
By chance, it was Mary"s more distant shoulder that his novel impulse had prompted him to pat and go on patting: so, from the accident of their positions, an eye-witness might have been with difficulty convinced that this man"s arm was not actually about the slim figure of his friend. But a jury, without doubt, would have accepted the friend"s att.i.tude, her entire indifference to what was going on, as fair proof that this was purely a modern proceeding, and no caress. To ask why he did this clearly did not enter Mary"s head. Had she been a man, indeed, or he her father, she could hardly have seemed more unaffected by Charles Garrott"s unexampled ministrations.
With what speech he meant to accompany and justify his pattings, Charles had not stopped to think. He had, in fact, himself just become conscious of them, when Mary, straightening up, said suddenly in her normal voice:--
"There"s the telephone ringing. Excuse me a minute."
She gave him a brief look in pa.s.sing, which may have been intended as some sort of courteous acknowledgment of the pattings after all. And then she disappeared into the hall, putting an end to talk: inopportunely he felt; leaving him with, a vague sense of inartistic incompletion....
The young man stood still in the silent sitting-room, in a duskiness just punctuated by the small green glow of the desk-lamp.
One of those many minds of his, which are at once a writer"s genius and his curse,--that completely detached, cool overmind which never sleeps, never ceases to scrutinize and appraise,--was quite conscious that Mary had held him off with a hand firmer than his own. There was a tremendous lot that he really needed to say, it seemed, in sheer admiration, sheer feeling; and, the truth was, she didn"t wish to have him say it. No; her strength, though so far finer and more sensitive than the strength of the Egoette, was, indeed, not "soft." She would not sentimentalize even her own suicidal renouncing. As for weeping--he himself had seemed rather nearer tears than his iron-hearted friend....
But the intense thought of the central mind, of the net Charles, had never wavered from its great stark fact, that Mary Wing was going to stay at home--and be a school-teacher.... And why had he, who thought himself as observant as another authority, been staggered so by the revelation? Had not he himself divined just this subtler quality in her long ago, when he found and named her as the best type of modern woman?... But no, even in "Bondwomen," he had had reservations, it seemed; open doubts in the write-ups.
And now, Charles the author, in his turn, abruptly collided with a strange discovery. He stood rigid, startled.... This strength and this surrender, this power to act, this power to feel, this freedom fine enough to accept the responsibilities of freedom, and to have no part with that hollow Self-a.s.sertion which traded round the world in freedom"s name: what was all this but the rounded half of that true Line which, in the Studio, had so long eluded him? What had he wished to say about freedom so much as just this? And why need he search in his fancy now for his wholly Admirable Heroine?...
Mary Wing appeared suddenly in the door. Unmoving, the young man stood and gazed at her; and so vivid had his imaginings become that his stare was touched with no greeting, no recognition even. And then, even in the dusk, he seemed to see that she, his Heroine in the flesh, brought back a face more troubled than she had taken out, eyes colored with a fresh anxiety.
He spoke rather confusedly: "What was it? Is anything the matter?"
"Dr. Flower"s very ill," she answered hurriedly. "He"s had a stroke, or something. I"m afraid it"s very serious. I must go there at once."
All the small fret of the earlier afternoon, every thought and a.s.sociation with which he had walked into this room just now had receded so fast and far that re-connection, all in a moment, was not easy.
Charles, staring, seemed to say: "And who, if you please, is Dr.
Flower?" And then his mind replied with a flashing picture of Angela"s father, as he had last seen him, sitting forlorn among his cigar-stubs: and at once he touched reality again.
"Ah! I"m sorry!" said he; and then: "You must let me go with you."