His question threw her into reflection.
"Why, no," she answered, at length, "I never thought----I see what you mean. Four or five years ago, when I was going to socialist lectures, my sense of all this--inequality, injustice was intellectual. I didn"t get indignant over it, as I do now when I think of it."
"And why do you get indignant now?"
"You mean," she asked, "that I have no right to be indignant, since I do nothing to attempt to better conditions?--"
"Not at all," Hodder disavowed. "Perhaps my question is too personal, but I didn"t intend it to be. I was merely wondering whether any event or series of events had transformed a mere knowledge of these conditions into feeling."
"Oh!" she exclaimed, but not in offence. Once more she relapsed into thought. And as he watched her, in silence, the colour that flowed and ebbed in her cheeks registered the coming and going of memories; of incidents in her life hidden from him, arousing in the man the torture of jealousy. But his faculties, keenly alert, grasped the entire field; marked once more the empirical trait in her that he loved her unflinching willingness to submit herself to an experiment.
"I suppose so," she replied at length, her thoughts naturally a.s.suming speech. "Yes, I can see that it is so. Yet my experience has not been with these conditions with which Mr. Bentley, with which you have been brought in contact, but with the other side--with luxury. Oh, I am sick of luxury! I love it, I am not at all sure that I could do without it, but I hate it, too, I rebel against it. You can"t understand that."
"I think I can," he answered her.
"When I see the creatures it makes," she cried, "I hate it. My profession has brought me in such close contact with it that I rebelled at last, and came out here very suddenly, just to get away from it in the ma.s.s. To renew my youth, if I could. The gardens were only an excuse. I had come to a point where I wanted to be quiet, to be alone, to think, and I knew my father would be going away. So much of my girlhood was spent in that Park that I know every corner of it, and I--obeyed the impulse. I wanted to test it."
"Yes," he said, absorbed.
"I might have gone to the mountains or the sea, but some one would have come and found me, and I should have been bound again--on the wheel.
I shouldn"t have had the strength to resist. But here--have you ever felt," she demanded, "that you craved a particular locality at a certain time?"
He followed her still.
"That is how I felt. These a.s.sociations, that Park, the thought of my girlhood, of my mother, who understood me as no one else has since, a.s.sumed a certain value. New York became unbearable. It is just there, in the very centre of our modern civilization, that one sees the crudest pa.s.sions. Oh, I have often wondered whether a man, however disillusioned, could see New York as a woman sees it when the glamour is gone. We are the natural prey of the conqueror still. We dream of independence--"
She broke off abruptly.
This confession, with the sudden glimpse it gave him of the fires within her that would not die down, but burned now more fiercely than ever, sent the blood to his head. His face, his temples, were hot with the fierceness of his joy in his conviction that she had revealed herself to him. Why she had done so, he could not say... This was the woman whom the world thought composed; who had triumphed over its opposition, compelled it to bow before her; who presented to it that self-possessed, unified personality by which he had been struck at their first meeting.
Yet, paradoxically, the personality remained,--was more elusive than before. A thousand revelations, he felt, would not disclose it.
He was no nearer to solving it now.. Yet the fires burned! She, too, like himself, was aflame and unsatisfied! She, too, had tasted success, and had revolted!
"But I don"t get anywhere," she said wearily. "At times I feel this ferment, this anger that things are as they are, only to realize what helpless anger it is. Why not take the world as it appears and live and feel, instead of beating against the currents?"
"But isn"t that inconsistent with what you said awhile ago as to a new civilization?" Hodder asked.
"Oh, that Utopia has no reality for me. I think it has, at moments, but it fades. And I don"t pretend to be consistent. Mr. Bentley lives in a world of his own; I envy him with all my heart, I love and admire him, he cheers and soothes me when I am with him. But I can"t see--whatever he sees. I am only aware of a remorseless universe grinding out its destinies. We Anglo-Saxons are fond of deceiving ourselves about life, of dressing it up in beautiful colours, of making believe that it actually contains happiness. All our fiction reflects this--that is why I never cared to read English or American novels. The Continental school, the Russians, the Frenchmen, refuse to be deluded. They are honest."
"Realism, naturalism," he mused, recalling a course in philosophy, "one would expect the Russian, in the conditions under which he lives, possessing an artistic temperament combined with a paralysis of the initiative and a sense of fate, to write in that way. And the Frenchmen, Renan, Zola, and the others who have followed, are equally deterministic, but viewing the human body as a highly organized machine with which we may amuse ourselves by registering its sensations. These literatures are true in so far as they reflect the characteristics of the nations from which they spring. That is not to say that the philosophies of which they are the expressions are true. Nor is it to admit that such a literature is characteristic of the spirit of America, and can be applied without change to our life and atmosphere. We have yet, I believe, to develop our own literature; which will come gradually as we find ourselves."
"Find ourselves?" she repeated.
"Yes. Isn"t that what we are trying to do? We are not determinists or fatalists, and to condemn us to such a philosophy would be to destroy us. We live on hope. In spite of our apparent materialism, we are idealists. And is it not possible to regard nature as governed by laws--remorseless, if you like the word--and yet believe, with Kant and Goethe, that there is an inner realm? You yourself struggle--you cling to ideals."
"Ideals!" she echoed. "Ideals are useless unless one is able to see, to feel something beyond this ruthless mechanism by which we are surrounded and hemmed in, to have some perception of another scheme. Why struggle, unless we struggle for something definite? Oh, I don"t mean heavenly rewards. Nothing could be more insipid and senseless than the orthodox view of the hereafter. I am talking about a scheme of life here and now."
"So am I," answered Hodder. "But may there not be a meaning in this very desire we have to struggle against the order of things as it appears to us?"
"A meaning?"
"A little while ago you spoke of your indignation at the inequalities and injustices of the world, and when I asked you if you had always felt this, you replied that this feeling had grown upon you. My question is this: whether that indignation would be present at all if it were not meant to be turned into action."
"You believe that an influence is at work, an influence that impels us against our reason?"
"I should like to think so," he said. "Why should so many persons be experiencing such a feeling to-day, persons who, like yourself, are the beneficiaries of our present system of privilege? Why should you, who have every reason to be satisfied, materially, with things as they are, be troubling yourself with thoughts of others who are less-fortunate?
And why should we have the spectacle, today, of men and women all over this country in social work, in science and medicine and politics, striving to better conditions while most of them might be much more comfortable and luxurious letting well enough alone?"
"But it"s human to care," she objected.
"Ah--human!" he said, and was silent. "What do we mean by human, unless it is the distinguishing mark of something within us that the natural world doesn"t possess? Unless it is the desire and willingness to strive for a larger interest than the individual interest, work and suffer for others? And you spoke of making people happier. What do you mean by happiness? Not merely the possession of material comforts, surely.
I grant you that those who are overworked and underfed, who are burning with the consciousness of wrongs, who have no outlook ahead, are essentially hopeless and miserable. But by "happiness" you, mean something more than the complacency and contentment which clothing and food might bring, and the removal of the economic fear,--and even the restoration of self-respect."
"That their lives should be fuller!" she exclaimed.
"That drudgery and despair should be replaced by interest and hope," he went on, "slavery by freedom. In other words, that the whole att.i.tude toward life should be changed, that life should appear a bright thing rather than a dark thing, that labour should be willing vicarious instead of forced and personal. Otherwise, any happiness worth having is out of the question."
She was listening now with parted lips, apparently unconscious of the fixity of her gaze.
"You mean it is a choice between that or nothing," she said, in a low voice. "That there is no use in lifting people out of the treadmill--and removing the terror of poverty unless you can give them something more--than I have got."
"And something more--than I have got,"--he was suddenly moved to reply...
Presently, while the silence still held between them, the door opened and startled them into reality. Mr. Bentley came in.
The old gentleman gave no sign, as they rose to meet him, of a sense of tension in the atmosphere he had entered--yet each felt--somehow, that he knew. The tension was released. The same thought occurred to both as they beheld the peaceful welcome shining in his face, "Here is what we are seeking. Why try to define it?"
"To think that I have been gossiping with Mrs. Meyer, while you were waiting for me!" he said. "She keeps the little florist"s shop at the corner of Tower Street, and she gave me these. I little guessed what good use I should have for them, my dear."
He held out to her three fragrant, crimson roses that matched the responsive colour in her cheeks as she thanked him and pinned them on her gown. He regarded her an instant.
"But I"m sure Mr. Hodder has entertained you," Mr. Bentley turned, and laid his hand on the rector"s shoulder.
"Most successfully," said Alison, cutting short his protest. And she smiled at Hodder, faintly.
CHAPTER XVI. AMID THE ENCIRCLING GLOOM
I
Hodder, in spite of a pressing invitation to remain for supper, had left them together. He turned his face westward, in the opposite direction from the parish house, still under the spell of that moment of communion which had lasted--he knew not how long, a moment of silent revelation to them both. She, too, was storm-tossed! She, too, who had fared forth so gallantly into life, had conquered only to be beaten down--to lose her way.
This discovery strained the very fibres of his being. So close he had been to her--so close that each had felt, simultaneously, complete comprehension of the other, comprehension that defied words, overbore disagreements. He knew that she had felt it. He walked on at first in a bewildered ecstasy, careless of aught else save that in a moment they two had reached out in the darkness and touched hands. Never had his experience known such communion, never had a woman meant what this woman meant, and yet he could not define that meaning. What need of religion, of faith in an unseen order when this existed? To have this woman in the midst of chaos would be enough!
Faith in an unseen order! As he walked, his mind returned to the argument by which he had sought to combat her doubts--and his own.