"I wonder."
"Won"t they? If not, Ambo, you must suppose you"ve guessed them. What are they?"
Susan rather had me here. I had not guessed them, but wasn"t willing to admit even to myself that I could not if I tried. I puckered my brows, judicially.
"Well," I hesitated, "you may very naturally feel that "Dax" is too plump a bird in the hand to be sacrificed for Heywood"s slim bluebird in the bush. Any new publication"s a gamble, of course. On the other hand, Heywood isn"t the kind to leave his a.s.sociates high and dry. Even if the review should fail, he"ll stand by you somehow. He has a comfy fortune, you know; he could carry on the review as a personal hobby if he cares to, even if it never cleared a penny."
Susan smiled, gravely shaking her head: "Cold, dear; stone cold. I"m pretty mercenary these days, but I"m not quite so mercenary as that. Now that I"ve discovered I can make a living, I"m not nearly so interested in it; hardly at all. It"s the stupid side of life, always; I shouldn"t like it to make much difference to me now, when it comes to real decisions. I did want a nice home for Sister, though. As for me, any old room most anywhere will do. It will, Ambo; don"t laugh; I"m in earnest.
But what"s your second guess?" she added quickly.
"You"ve some writing you want to do--a book, maybe? You"re afraid the review will interfere?"
"Ah, now you"re a tiny bit warmer! I am afraid it will interfere, but in a much deeper way than that; interfere with _me_."
"I don"t quite follow that, do I!"
"Good gracious, no--since you ask. It"s simple enough, though--and pretty vague. Only it feels important--here." For an instant her hand just touched her breast. "I hate so to be roped in, Ambo, have things staked out for me--spiritually, I mean. Mr. Sampson"s a darling; I love him! But he"s a great believer in ropes and stakes and fences--even barbed wire. I"m beginning to see that the whole idea of his review is a scheme for mending political and moral and social fences, stopping up gaps in them made by irresponsible idealists--anarchists, revolutionary socialists--people like that. People like me, really!--There! Now you do look surprised."
I was; but I smiled.
"You"ve turned _Red_, Susan? How long since? Overnight?"
"Not red," answered Susan, with bravely forced gayety; "pinkish, say! I haven"t fixed on my special shade till I"m sure it becomes me."
"It"s certain to do that, dear."
She bobbed me a little bow across the cloth, much in the old happy style--alas, not quite. "But I never did like washed-out colors," she threw in for good measure.
"You _are_ irresponsible, then! Suppose Phil could hear you--or Jimmy.
Jimmy"d say your Greenwich Village friends were corrupting you. Perhaps they are?"
"Perhaps they are," echoed Susan, "but I think not. I"m afraid it goes farther back, Ambo. It"s left-over Birch Street; that"s what it is. So much of me"s that. All of me, I sometimes believe."
"Not quite. You"ll never escape Hillhouse, either, Susan. You"ve had both."
"Yes, I"ve had both," she echoed again, almost on a sigh, pushing her untasted _demi-ta.s.se_ from her.
Suddenly her elbows were planted on the cloth before her, her face--shadowed and too finely drawn--dropped between her hands, her eyes sought and held mine. They dizzied me, her eyes....
"Ambo," she said earnestly, "I suppose I"m a dreadful egotist, but more and more I"m feeling the real me isn"t a true child of this world! I love this world--and I hate it. I don"t know whether I love it most or hate it most. I bless it and d.a.m.n it every day of my life--in the same breath often. But sometimes I feel I hate it most--hate it for its cold dullness of head and heart! Why can"t we care more to make it worth living in, this beautiful, frightful world! What"s the matter with us?
Why are we what we are? Half angels--and half pigs or goats or saber-toothed tigers or snakes! Each and every one of us, by and large!
And oh, how we do distrust our three-quarters angels--while they"re living, anyway! Dreamers--mad visionaries--social rebels--outcasts!
Crucify them, crucify them! Time enough to worship them--ages of to-be-wasted time enough--when they"re dead!" She paused, still holding my eyes, and drawing in a slow breath, a breath that caught midway and was almost a sob; then her eyes left mine.
"There--that"s over. Saying things like that doesn"t help us a bit; it"s--silly.... And half the idealists _are_ mad, no doubt, and have plenty of pig and snake in them, too. I"ve simply coils and coils of unregenerate serpent in me--and worse. Oh, Ambo dear--but I"ve a dream in me beyond all that, and a great longing to help it come true! But it doesn"t--it won"t. I"m afraid it never will--here. Will it _there_, Ambo? Is there a _there_?... Have we got all of Sister that clean fire couldn"t take, shut up in that tiny vase?"
"We can hope not, at least," I replied.
"Hope isn"t enough," said Susan. "Why don"t you say you know we haven"t! I know we haven"t. I do know it. It"s the only thing I--_know_!"
A nervous waiter sidled up to us and softly slipped a small metal tray before me; it held my bill, carefully turned face downward.
"Anything more, sir?" he murmured.
"A liqueur?" I suggested to Susan. She sat upright in her chair again, with a slight impatient shake of the head.
I ordered a cigar and a _fine champagne_. The waiter, still nervously fearful of having approached us at a moment when he suspected some intimate question of the heart had grown critically tense, faded from us with the slightest, discreetest cough of rea.s.surance. He was not one, he would have us know, to obtrude material considerations when they were out of place.
"No; I can"t go with Mr. Sampson," Susan was saying; "and he"ll be hurt--he won"t be able to see why. But I"m not made to be an editor--of anything. Editors have to weigh other people"s words. I can"t even weigh my own. And I talk of nothing but myself. Ugh!"
"You"re tired out, overwrought," I stupidly began.
"Don"t tell me so!" cried Susan. "If I should believe you, I"d be lost."
"But," I blundered on, "it"s only common sense to let down a little, at such a time. If you"d only take a real rest----"
"There is no such thing," said Susan. "We just struggle on and on. It"s rather awful, isn"t it?" And presently, very quietly, as if to herself, she said over those words, surely among the saddest and loveliest ever written by mortal man:
_From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever G.o.ds may be_
_That no life lives forever, That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea._
"To sea," she repeated; "to sea.... As if the sea itself knew rest!--Now please pay your big fat bill from your nice fat pocketbook, Ambo; and take me home."
"If I only could!" was my despairing thought; and I astounded the coat-room boy, as I tipped him, by muttering aloud, "Oh, d.a.m.n Jimmy Kane!"
"Yes, sir--thank you, sir--I will, sir," grinned the coat-room boy.
On our way downtown in the taxi Susan withdrew until we reached her West Tenth Street door. "Good-night, Ambo," she then said; "don"t come with me; and thank you for everything--always." I crossed the pavement with her to the loutish brownstone front-stoop of the boarding house; there she turned to dismiss me.
"You didn"t ask my second reason for not going on the review, Ambo. You must know it though, sooner or later. I can"t _write_ any more--not well, I mean. Even my Dax paragraphs are falling off; Hadow Bury mentioned it yesterday. But nothing comes. I"m sterile, Ambo. I"m written out at twenty. Bless you. Good-night."
"Susan," I cried, "come back here at once!" But she just turned in the doorway to smile back at me, waved her hand, and was gone.
I was of two minds whether to follow her or stay. Then, "A whim," I thought; "the whim of a tired child. And I"ve often felt that way myself--all writers do. But she must take a vacation of some kind--she must!"
She did.
IX
I woke up the next morning, broad awake before seven o"clock, a full hour earlier than my habit. I woke to find myself greatly troubled by Susan"s parting words of the night before, and lay in bed for perhaps twenty minutes turning them over fretfully in my mind. Then I could stand it no longer and rose, bathed, dressed and ate my breakfast in self-exasperating haste, yet with no very clear idea of why I was hurrying or what was to follow. I had an appointment with my lawyer for eleven; I was to lunch with Heywood Sampson at one; after lunch--my immediate business in town being completed--I had purposed to return to New Haven.
Susan would be expecting me for my daily morning call at half-past nine.
That call was a fixed custom between us when I was stopping in New York.
It seldom lasted over twenty minutes and was really just an opportunity to say good-morning and arrange conveniently for any further plans for the day or evening. But it was now only a few minutes past eight. No matter, Susan was both a nighthawk and a lark, retiring always too late and rising too early--though it must be said she seemed to need little sleep; and I felt that I must see her at once and try somehow to encourage her about her work and bring her back to a more reasonable and normal point of view. "Overstrain," I kept mumbling to myself, idiotically enough, as I charged rather than walked down Fifth Avenue from my hotel: "Overstrain--overstrain...."
However, the brisk physical exertion of my walk gradually quieted my nerves, and as I turned west on Tenth Street I was beginning to feel a little ashamed of my unreasonable anxiety, was even beginning to poke a little fun at myself and preparing to amuse Susan if I could by a whimsical account of my morning brainstorm. I had now persuaded myself that I should find her quietly at work, as I so usually did, and quite prepared to talk things over more calmly. I meant this time to make a supreme effort, and really hoped to persuade her to do two sensible things: First, to accept Heywood Sampson"s offer; second, to give up all other work for the present, and get a complete rest and change of scene until her services were needed for the review. That would not be for six or eight weeks at the very least.