"Yet you keep on reaching, don"t you?"
"Yes--and no. I always wish I could. There are times, Claire, when I don"t want to be a realist, don"t want to face life as it is, when it seems too tawdry to be valuable just as it is; then I reach out into the night and cry, "Let me be the maddest of dreamers, the wildest of idealists, a knight of fancy seeking the illusive dream!""
Claire laughed aloud as she said, "And don"t you know, dear man, that that is just what you do become at times?"
"I know it. That"s the joke of it. All the while I mock myself for being a romancing idiot!"
"What a state of mind!" she exclaimed.
"It isn"t pleasant. Then, worse than that, when I attain my star, I spoil it with too much scrutiny."
She started. "What do you mean?"
"Just that. I make a mess of it."
"Still I don"t understand."
He thought for a moment, then said sadly: "Take the cherub I carved there"--he nodded in the direction of the house--"I was wild with creative fervor when I did that. I put into it a thousand little thoughts that flashed with imaginative fire. I dreamed things, felt things that should have made a masterpiece beyond all masterpieces, and at last the thing was finished. Still under the heat of enthusiasm, I felt of it, tested it, and found it good. Well, a week later, when the imaginative flame was gone, I went back and looked at it again. It was poor, cold, imperfect, not at all what it should have been. I dreamed a star and made a block of poor wooden imagery."
"But you underestimate your work. To me the cherub is still a star."
He laughed. "It is what others see of good in my work that makes me hope that sooner or later I will do the thing that will stand eternally a star of the first magnitude."
"And you will, Lawrence," she said earnestly.
"Perhaps." He was pensive. "Perhaps not. That is where the rest of life enters in. I want many things; they seem necessary if I am to attain my eternal star. I am afraid I shall never get them!"
"Have you tried?"
"No, I haven"t the courage. If they should be beyond my grasp, if obtaining them, they should prove to be wrong and not the real things I need, after all, what then?"
"I don"t know." She waited to watch a little colored cloud float by, and then continued: "Isn"t the real interest in life the game you play?"
"I suppose it is, but it"s hard on other people."
"Why--and how?"
"Suppose," Lawrence said slowly, "you were the one thing I thought I needed."
Claire leaned toward him, her lips apart, her heart beating wildly.
"Suppose I were sure of it, and set about to make you part of my life, well, if I succeeded and then"--he smiled sadly--"found that you were not the necessity, not the answer to my need, what of you? It would be an inferno for you, and none the less equally terrible for me! We couldn"t help it. Under such circ.u.mstances you would be right in saying that I had been unfair. I don"t know, certainly you would be right in charging your possible unhappiness to me."
"Under your supposition, Lawrence," she answered evenly, "if you obtained my love, wouldn"t it then be my game, my risk in the great gamble for deeper life? Wouldn"t it be my mistake for having thought you were what I needed?"
"What if you still thought you needed me after I was sure that I did not need you?"
She shrugged her shoulders. "I am too fond of life and too eager to know its possibilities to let that hurt me long. Possibly I should weep, be cynical, maybe even do something desperate, but at last I would come up smiling, calm in the faith that my life was deeper, richer for the experience, and that yours was, too. Or if it proved that yours was not, I should be amused at the shallowness of the Claire that was, for having been so simple a dunce as to imagine that you were worth while. I should thank you for teaching the present Claire to forsake that shallow one, and should find you a rung on my ladder of life!"
He laughed merrily. "You are strong in your faith, Claire."
"Yes. This winter and you have made me strong," she answered.
"I have made you strong in it?"
"Yes. Last summer, when you dragged me out of the surf, I was full of a number of ideas I no longer possess."
"But what have I done?"
"You have lived stridently all your life."
"Perhaps so. What of it?"
"I see that is the thing most worth doing."
"What will your husband say to such a doctrine?"
"I don"t know. I am not going back to him. We are not the same people we were a year ago, and he would no more love the present Claire than I should love the present Howard."
The sky deepened from pink to crimson, but Claire"s eyes were staring blankly on the ground.
"Claire, what do you think is essential to great work?"
"I don"t know. To keep at it most likely." She was digging with a little stick in the gra.s.s.
"Perhaps you"re right," he agreed. "But sometimes I think it is a lot of other things; romantic wandering over the earth, a deep and lasting love, any number of such external factors."
"You don"t call love external, do you?"
"I mean a permanent love," he laughed.
"Oh, well, perhaps those are necessary, certainly they would be a help to you, they would be to any one. But, after all, even a woman isn"t absolutely essential to a man in order that he create great art."
"I think she is," Lawrence insisted.
"Very well, perhaps she is, but"--Claire laughed skeptically--"I know that she is not the all in all, the alpha and omega, the "that without which nothing," that she is so often told she is by seeking males."
"No," he agreed slowly, "in rare cases of great love that may be true, but in most cases it isn"t."
"It is more likely that what you, the abstract male, really mean is that you must have some woman as wife and housekeeper."
"Perhaps that is so, although even that needs qualifying."
"I know," she said, "but why not be frank about it both ways; that is precisely her situation as well as his. There ought to be less sentimental rubbish and more plain sense about all of it. Women would suffer less from shattered illusions, they would grow accustomed to reality, and be considerably less idiotic in their romantic caperings."
"I admit it," Lawrence said, smiling; "and yet"--he paused--"I want to be the maddest of romanticists, I want to say those things to the woman I love, I want to think them about her, I want to feel them all, all those dear, false romantic deceptions. I do, in fact, even though my brain agrees with you."
"So should I, and I would." Then she added softly under her breath, "I do."