"Did he tell you? Tell you how close he came? Tell you that I was in love with him?"
"My dear Gora, I fancy that if he were capable of that you would not be capable of loving him. I certainly should not." There was a slight movement in her throat as if she were swallowing the rest of the truth whole. She had adhered to it where she could but Gora"s face must be saved. "Your name was not mentioned. I asked him no questions about his past. I am not the heroine of a novel, old style. He told me that he loved me, that he had never loved any other woman, never asked any other woman to marry him. That was enough for me. I had no place in my mind for you or any one else. Perhaps you don"t know--how could you--that years ago, when he was in California, he asked me to marry him."
"Calf love! If you had not been here now--"
"He would have gone to California as soon as he could get away. He had made up his mind to that before he came to Paris."
"What!"
Gora"s arms dropped to her sides and she stared at the floor. Then she laughed, "O G.o.d, what irony! I talked of you more or Jess as was natural ... and he remembered ... we had recalled the past vividly enough.... Why couldn"t one of those instincts in which we are supposed to be prolific have warned me?.... Much fiction is like life!
... Any heroine I could have created would have had it ... had more sense.... I have botched the thing from beginning to end."
She raised her head and stared at Alexina with somber eyes; the insane light had died out of them. They took in every detail of that enhanced beauty, of that inner flame, white hot, that made Alexina glow like a transparent lamp.
She also recalled that she had watched her pack her bags ... that pervenche velvet gown ... Alexina had described the quaint old salon.... Her imagination, flashed out that first interview with Gathbroke with a tormenting conjuring of detail....
"Yon are one of the favorites of life," she admitted in her bitter despair. "You have been given everything--"
"I drew Mortimer," Alexina reminded her.
"True. But you dusted him out of your life with an ease and a thoroughness that has never been surpa.s.sed. Think what you might have drawn. No, you are lucky, lucky! The prixes of life are for your sort.
I am one of the overlooked or the deliberately neglected. Not a fairy stood at my cradle. All things have come to you unsought. Beauty.
Birth. Position. Sufficient wealth. Power over men and women. An enchanting personality. All the social graces. You have had ups and downs merely because after all you are a mortal; and as a matter of contrast--to heighten your powers of appreciation. No doubt the worst is over for you. I have had to take life by the throat and wring out of her what little I have. That is what makes life so hopeless, so terrible. No genius for social reform will ever eliminate the inequality of personality, of the inner inheritance. Nature meant for her own sport that a few should live and the rest should die while still alive."
"Gora, I don"t want to sound like the well-meaning friends who tell a mother when she loses her child that it is better off, but I can"t help reminding you that a very large and able-bodied fairy presided at your cradle. You have a great gift that I"d give my two eyes for; and you know perfectly well--or you will soon--that you will get over this and forget that Gathbroke ever existed, while you are creating men to suit yourself." Her incisive mind drove straight to the truth. "You will write better than ever. Possibly the reason that you have not reached the great public is because your work lacks humanity, sympathy. You never lived before. You were all intellect. Now you have had a terrific upheaval and you seem to have experienced about everything, including the impulse to murder. Most writers would appear to live uneventful lives judging from their extremely dull biographies. But they must have had the most tremendous inner adventures and soul-racking experiences--the big ones--or they couldn"t have written as they did.... This must be the more true in regard to women."
Gora continued to stare at her. The words sank in. Her clear intellect appreciated the truth of them but they afforded her no consolation. All emotion had died out of her. She felt beaten, helpless.
She was obliged to look up as she watched Alexina"s subtly transfigured face, fascinated. It made her feel even her physical insignificance; the more as she had lost the flesh that had given her short stature a certain majesty.
"Oh, life is unjust, unjust." She no longer spoke with bitterness, merely as one forced to state an inescapable fact. "Injustice! The root of all misfortune."
"Life is a hard school but where she has strong characters to work on she turns out masterpieces. You will be one of them, Gora. And I fancy that women born with great gifts were meant to stand alone and to be trained in that hard school. It is only when women of your sort have a pa.s.sing attack of the love germ that they imagine they could go through life as a half instead of a whole. When you are in the full tide of your powers with the public for a lover I fancy you will look back upon this episode with grat.i.tude, if you remember it at all."
"Perhaps. But that, is a long way off! I have just been told that the order of fiction with which my mind is packed at present is not wanted.
It has been contemptuously rejected by the American public as "war stuff.""
"Good heaven! That _is_ a misfortune!"
For a moment Alexina was aghast. Here was the real tragedy. She almost prayed for inspiration, for it lay with her to readjust Gora to life.
To no one else would Gora ever give her confidence.
"I don"t believe for a moment," she said, "that the intelligent public will ever reject a great novel or story dealing with the war. The masterly treatment of any subject, the new point of view, the swift compelling breathless drama that is your peculiar gift, must triumph over any mood of the moment. Moreover, when you are back in California you will see these last four years in a tremendous perspective. And no contrast under heaven could be so great. You probably won"t hear the war mentioned once a month. No doubt much that crowds your mind now will cease to interest the productive tract of your brain and you will write a book with the war as a mere background for your new and infinitely more complete knowledge of human psychology. No novel of any consequence for years to come will be written without some relationship to the war. Stories long enough to be printed in book form perhaps, but not the novel: which is a memoir of contemporary life in the form of fiction. No writer with as great a gift as yours could have anything but a great destiny. Go back to California and bang your typewriter and find it out for yourself."
For the first time something like a smile flitted over Gora"s drawn face. "Perhaps. I hope you are right. I don"t think I could ever really lose faith in that star." She was thinking: Oh, yes! I"ll go back to California as quickly as I can get there--as a wounded animal crawls back to its lair.
She would have encircled the globe three times to get to it. _Her state_. To her it was what family and friends and home and children were to another. It was literally the only friend she had in the world.
She would have flown to it if she could, sure of its beneficence.
"I shall go as soon as I can get pa.s.sage," she said. "And you?"
"I must go too unless I can get a divorce here. I shall know that in a few days."
"Well, we travel on different steamers if you do go! I shall stop off at Truckee and go to Lake Tahoe. It will be a long while before I go to any place that reminds me of you. I no longer want to kill you but I want to forget you. Good-by."
CHAPTER XV
When she reached the foot of the hill she turned and looked back.
Alexina was standing in one of the jagged window cas.e.m.e.nts of the church. The bright warm sun was overhead in a cloudless sky. Its liquid careless rays flooded the ruin. Alexina"s tall white figure, the soft blue of her hat forming a halo about her face, was bathed in its light; a radiant vision in that shattered town whose very stones cried out against the injustice of life.
Alexina, who was feeling like anything but a madonna in a stained gla.s.s window, waved a questing hand.
"The fortunate of earth!" thought Gora.
She set her lips grimly and walked across the valley with a steady stride. At least she could be one of the strong.
THE END