Redmond and Gulick--Etta--yes, Etta, too--all past and gone--forever gone----
"What are you thinking about?"
She shook her head and the spectral procession vanished into the glooms of memory"s vistas. "Thinking?--of yesterday. I don"t understand myself--how I shake off and forget what"s past.
Nothing seems real to me but the future."
"Not even the present?" said he with a smile.
"Not even the present," she answered with grave candor. "Nothing seems to touch me--the real me. It"s like--like looking out of the window of the train at the landscape running by. I"m a traveler pa.s.sing through. I wonder if it"ll always be that way.
I wonder if I"ll ever arrive where I"ll feel that I belong."
"I think so--and soon."
But she did not respond to his confident smile. "I--I hope so,"
she said with sad, wistful sweetness. "Then again--aren"t there some people who don"t belong anywhere--aren"t allowed to settle down and be happy, but have to keep going--on and on--until----"
"Until they pa.s.s out into the dark," he finished for her. "Yes."
He looked at her in a wondering uneasy way. "You do suggest that kind," said he. "But," smilingly, to hide his earnestness, "I"ll try to detain you."
"Please do," she said. "I don"t want to go on--alone."
He dropped into silence, puzzled and in a way awed by the mystery enveloping her--a mystery of aloofness and stoniness, of complete separation from the contact of the world--the mystery that incloses all whose real life is lived deep within themselves.
CHAPTER XXIV
LIKE days later, on the Eastern Express, they were not so confident as they had been over the St. Nicholas champagne. As confident about the remoter future, it was that annoying little stretch near at hand which gave them secret uneasiness. There had been nothing but dreaming and sentimentalizing in those four days--and that disquietingly suggested the soldier who with an impressive flourish highly resolves to give battle, then sheathes his sword and goes away to a revel. Also, like all idlers, they had spent money--far more money than total net cash resources of less than five hundred dollars warranted.
"We"ve spent an awful lot of money," said Susan.
She was quick to see the faint frown, the warning that she was on dangerous ground. Said he:
"Do you regret?"
"No, indeed--no!" cried she, eager to have that cloud vanish, but honest too.
She no more than he regretted a single moment of the dreaming and love-making, a single penny of the eighty and odd dollars that had enabled them fittingly to embower their romance, to twine myrtle in their hair and to provide Cupid"s torch-bowls with fragrant incense. Still--with the battle not begun, there gaped that deep, wide hollow in the war chest.
Spenser"s newspaper connection got them pa.s.ses over one of the cheaper lines to New York--and he tried to console himself by setting this down as a saving of forty dollars against the eighty dollars of the debit item. But he couldn"t altogether forget that they would have traveled on pa.s.ses, anyhow. He was not regretting that he had indulged in the extravagance of a stateroom--but he couldn"t deny that it was an extravagance.
However, he had only to look at her to feel that he had done altogether well in providing for her the best, and to believe that he could face with courage any fate so long as he had her at his side.
"Yes, I can face anything with you," he said. "What I feel for you is the real thing. The real thing, at last."
She had no disposition to inquire curiously into this. Her reply was a flash of a smile that was like a flash of glorious light upon the crest of a wave surging straight from her happy heart.
They were opposite each other at breakfast in the restaurant car. He delighted in her frank delight in the novelty of travel--swift and luxurious travel. He had never been East before, himself, but he had had experience of sleepers and diners; she had not, and every moment she was getting some new sensation. She especially enjoyed this sitting at breakfast with the express train rushing smoothly along through the mountains--the first mountains either had seen. At times they were so intensely happy that they laughed with tears in their eyes and touched hands across the table to get from physical contact the rea.s.surances of reality.
"How good to eat everything is!" she exclaimed. "You"ll think me very greedy, I"m afraid. But if you"d eaten the stuff I have since we dined on the rock!"
They were always going back to the rock, and neither wearied of recalling and reminding each other of the smallest details. It seemed to them that everything, even the least happening, at that sacred spot must be remembered, must be recorded indelibly in the book of their romance. "I"m glad we were happy together in such circ.u.mstances," she went on. "It was a test--wasn"t it, Rod?"
"If two people don"t love each other enough to be happy anywhere, they could be happy nowhere," declared he.
"So, we"ll not mind being very, very careful about spending money in New York," she ventured--for she was again bringing up the subject she had been privately revolving ever since they had formed the partnership. In her wanderings with Burlingham, in her sojourn in the tenements, she had learned a great deal about the care and spending of money--had developed that instinct for forehandedness which nature has implanted in all normal women along with the maternal instinct--and as a necessary supplement to it. This instinct is more or less futile in most women because they are more or less ignorant of the realities as to wise and foolish expenditure. But it is found in the most extravagant women no less than in the most absurdly and meanly stingy.
"Of course, we must be careful," a.s.sented Rod. "But I can"t let you be uncomfortable."
"Now, dear," she remonstrated, "you mustn"t treat me that way.
I"m better fitted for hardship than you. I"d mind it less."
He laughed; she looked so fine and delicate, with her transparent skin and her curves of figure, he felt that anything so nearly perfect could not but easily be spoiled. And there he showed how little he appreciated her iron strength, her almost exhaustless endurance. He fancied he was the stronger because he could have crushed her in his muscular arms. But exposures, privations, dissipations that would have done for a muscularly stronger man than he would have left no trace upon her after a few days of rest and sleep.
"It"s the truth," she insisted. "I could prove it, but I shan"t.
I don"t want to remember vividly. Rod, we _must_ live cheaply in New York until you sell a play and I have a place in some company."
"Yes," he conceded. "But, Susie, not too cheap. A cheap way of living makes a cheap man--gives a man a cheap outlook on life.
Besides, don"t forget--if the worst comes to the worst, I can always get a job on a newspaper."
She would not have let him see how uneasy this remark made her.
However, she could not permit it to pa.s.s without notice. Said she a little nervously:
"But you"ve made up your mind to devote yourself to plays--to stand or fall by that."
He remembered how he had thrilled her and himself with brave talk about the necessity of concentrating, of selecting a goal and moving relentlessly for it, letting nothing halt him or turn him aside. For his years Rod Spenser was as wise in the philosophy of success as Burlingham or Tom Brashear. But he had done that brave and wise talking before he loved her as he now did--before he realized how love can be in itself an achievement and a possession so great that other ambitions dwarf beside it.
True, away back in his facile, fickle mind, behind the region where self-excuse and somebody-else-always-to-blame reigned supreme, a something--the something that had set the marks of success so strongly upon his face--was whispering to him the real reason for his now revolving a New York newspaper job. Real reasons as distinguished from alleged reasons and imagined reasons, from the reasons self-deception invents and vanity gives out--real reasons are always interesting and worth noting.
What was Rod"s? Not his love for her; nothing so superior, so superhuman as that. No, it was weak and wobbly misgivings as to his own ability to get on independently, the misgivings that menace every man who has never worked for himself but has always drawn pay--the misgivings that paralyze most men and keep them wage or salary slaves all their lives. Rod was no better pleased at this sly, unwelcome revelation of his real self to himself than the next human being is in similar circ.u.mstances. The whispering was hastily suppressed; love for her, desire that she should be comfortable--those must be the real reasons. But he must be careful lest she, the sensitive, should begin to brood over a fear that she was already weakening him and would become a drag upon him--the fear that, he knew, would take shape in his own mind if things began to go badly. "You may be sure, dearest," he said, "I"ll do nothing that won"t help me on." He tapped his forehead with his finger. "This is a machine for making plays. Everything that"s put into it will be grist for it."
She was impressed but not convinced. He had made his point about concentration too clear to her intelligence. She persisted:
"But you said if you took a place on a newspaper it would make you fight less hard."
"I say a lot of things," he interrupted laughingly. "Don"t be frightened about me. What I"m most afraid of is that you"ll desert me. _That_ would be a real knock-out blow."
He said this smilingly; but she could not bear jokes on that one subject.
"What do you mean, Rod?"
"Now, don"t look so funereal, Susie. I simply meant that I hate to think of your going on the stage--or at anything else. I want you to help _me_. Selfish, isn"t it? But, dear heart, if I could feel that the plays were _ours_, that we were both concentrated on the one career--darling. To love each other, to work together--not separately but together--don"t you understand?"
Her expression showed that she understood, but was not at all in sympathy. "I"ve got to earn my living, Rod," she objected. "I shan"t care anything about what I"ll be doing. I"ll do it simply to keep from being a burden to you----"
"A burden, Susie! You! Why, you"re my wings that enable me to fly. It"s selfish, but I want all of you. Don"t you think, dear, that if it were possible, it would be better for you to make us a home and hold the fort while I go out to give battle to managers--and bind up my wounds when I come back--and send me out the next day well again? Don"t you think we ought to concentrate?"
The picture appealed to her. All she wanted in life now was his success. "But," she objected, "it"s useless to talk of that until we get on our feet--perfectly useless."
"It"s true," he admitted with a sigh.