"Of course you mustn"t give up, Oliver; you couldn"t," she said.
"You"re right, I couldn"t."
"If you can get steady reviewing, I believe you can manage," she resumed. "Living in Dinwiddie costs really so very little." Her voice thrilled suddenly. "It must be beautiful to have something that you feel about like this. Oh, I wish I were you, Oliver! I wish a thousand times I were you!"
Withdrawing his eyes from the sky at which he had been gazing, he turned to look at her as if her words had arrested him. "You"re a dear girl,"
he answered kindly, "and I think all the world of you." As he spoke he thought again what a fine thing it would be for the man who could fall in love with her. "It would be the best thing that could happen to any man to marry a woman like that," he reflected; "she"d keep him up to the mark and never let him grow soft. Yes, it would be all right if only one could manage to fall in love with her--but I couldn"t. She might as well be a rose-bush for all the pa.s.sion she"d ever arouse in me." Then his charming egoism a.s.serted itself, and he said caressingly: "I don"t believe I could stand Dinwiddie but for you, Susan."
She smiled back at him, but there was a limpid clearness in her look which made him feel that she had seen through him while he was thinking.
This clearness, with its utter freedom from affectation or sentimentality, embarra.s.sed him by its unlikeness to all the attributes he mentally cla.s.sified as feminine. To look straight seemed to him almost as unwomanly as to throw straight, and Susan would, doubtless, be quite capable of performing either of these difficult feats. He liked her fine brow under the short fringe, which he hated, and he liked the arched bridge of her nose and the generous curve of her mouth. Yet had he stopped to a.n.a.lyze her, he would probably have said that the woman spirit in her was expressed through character rather than through emotion--a manifestation disconcerting to one whose vision of her s.e.x was chiefly as the irresponsible creature of drama. The old shackles--even the shackles of that drama whose mistress and slave woman had been--were out of place on the spirit which was incarnated in Susan.
Amid the cramping customs of the period, she moved large, free, and simple, as though she walked already in the purer and more bracing air of the future.
"I wish I could help you," she said, stooping to pick up a newspaper from a pile on the floor. "Here, let me wrap that Spinoza. I"m afraid the back will come off if you aren"t careful."
"Of course a man has to work out his own career," he replied, as he handed over the volume. "I doubt, when it comes to that, if anybody can be of much help to another where his life"s work is concerned. The main thing, after all, is not to get in one"s way, not to cripple one"s energy. I"ve got to be free--that"s all there is about it. I"ve got to belong to myself every instant."
"And you know already just what you are going to do? About your writing, I mean."
"Absolutely. I"ve ideas enough to fill fifty ordinary lifetimes. I"m simply seething with them. Why, that box over there in the corner is full of plays that would start a national drama if the fool public had sense enough to see what they are about. The trouble is that they don"t want life on the stage; they want a kind of theatrical wedding-cake.
And, by Jove, they get it! Any dramatist who tries to force people to eat bread and meat when they are crying for sugar plums may as well prepare to starve until the public begins to suffer from acute indigestion. Then, if he isn"t dead--or, perhaps, if he is--his hour will come, and he will get his reward either here or in heaven."
"So you"ll go on just the same and wait until they"re ready for you?"
asked Susan, laughing from sheer pride in him. "You"ll never, never cheapen yourself, Oliver?" For the first time in her life she was face to face with an intellectual pa.s.sion, and she felt almost as if she herself were inspired.
"Never. I"ve made my choice. I"ll wait half a century if need be, but I"ll wait. I know, too, what I am talking about, for I could do the other thing as easily as I could eat my dinner. I"ve got the trick of it. I could make a fortune to-morrow if I were to lose my intellectual honesty and go in simply for the making of money. Why, I am a Treadwell, after all, just as you are, my dear cousin, and I could commercialize the stage, I haven"t a doubt, as successfully as your father has commercialized the railroad. It"s in the blood--the instinct, you know--and the only thing that has kept it down in me is that I sincerely--yes, I sincerely and enthusiastically believe that I am a genius. If I didn"t, do you think I"d stick at this starvation business another fortnight? That"s the whole story, every blessed word of it, and I"m telling you because I feel expansive to-night--I"m such a tremendous egoist, you know, and because--well, because you are Susan."
"I think I understand a little bit how you feel," replied Susan. "Of course, I"m not a genius, but I"ve thought sometimes that I should almost be willing to starve if only I might go to college."
Checking the words on his lips, he looked at her with sympathy. "It"s a shame you can"t, but I suppose Uncle Cyrus won"t hear of it."
"I haven"t asked him, but I am going to do it. I am so afraid of a refusal--and, of course, he"ll refuse--that I"ve lacked the courage to speak of it."
"Good G.o.d! Why is one generation left so absolutely at the mercy of the other?" he demanded, turning back to the strip of sky over the roof. "It makes a man rage to think of the lives that are spoiled for a whim.
Money, money--curse it!--it all comes to that in the end. Money makes us and destroys us."
"Do you remember what father said to you the other night--that you would come at last to what you called the property idea and be exactly like James and himself?"
"If I thought that, I"d go out and hang myself. I can understand a man selling his soul for drink, though I rarely touch a drop, or for women, though I"ve never bothered about them, but never, not even in the last extremity, for money."
A door creaked somewhere on the second floor and a minute afterwards the slow and hesitating feet of Mrs. Treadwell were heard ascending the stairs.
"Let her come in just a moment, Oliver," begged Susan, and her tone was full of the impatient, slightly arrogant affection with which she regarded her mother. There was little sympathy and less understanding between them, but on Susan"s side there was a feeling of protective tenderness which was almost maternal. This tenderness was all her own, while the touch of arrogance in her manner belonged to the universal inability of youth to make allowances for age.
"Oh, well," said Oliver indifferently; and going to the door, he opened it and stood waiting for Mrs. Treadwell to enter.
"I came up to ask if you wouldn"t eat something, dear?" she asked. "But I suppose Susan has brought you your supper?"
"He won"t touch a morsel, mother; it is useless to ask him. He is going away just as soon as we have finished packing."
"But where is he going? I didn"t know that he had any place to go to."
"Oh, a man can always find a place somewhere."
"How can you take it so lightly, Susan," protested Mrs. Treadwell, beginning to cry.
"That"s the only sensible way to take it, isn"t it, Oliver?" asked Susan, gaily.
"Don"t get into a fidget about me, Aunt Belinda," said Oliver, pushing the pile of newspapers out of her way, while she sat down nervously on the end of a packing-case and wiped her eyes on the fringe of her purple shawl. The impulsive kindness with which he had spoken to her a few hours before had vanished from his tone, and left in its place an accent of irritation. His sympathy, which was never a.s.sumed, resulted so entirely from his mood that it was practically independent of the person or situation which appeared to inspire it. There were moments when, because of a sensation of mental or physical well-being, he overflowed with a feeling of tenderness for the beggar at the crossing; and there were longer periods, following a sudden despondency, when the suffering of his closest friend aroused in him merely a sense of personal outrage.
So complete, indeed, was his absorption in himself, that even his philosophy was founded less upon an intellectual conception of the universe than it was upon an intense preoccupation with his own personality.
"But you don"t mean that you are going for good?--that you"ll never come back to see Susan and me again?" whimpered his aunt, while her sagging mouth trembled.
"You can"t expect me to come back after the things Uncle Cyrus has said to me."
A look so bitter that it was almost venomous crept into Mrs. Treadwell"s face. "He just did it to worry me, Oliver. He has done everything he could think of to worry me ever since he persuaded me to marry him. I sometimes believe," she added, gloating over the idea like a decayed remnant of the aristocratic spirit, "that he has always been jealous of me because I was born a Bolingbroke."
To Oliver, who had not like Susan grown accustomed through constant repet.i.tion to Mrs. Treadwell"s delusion, this appeared so fresh a view of Cyrus"s character, that it caught his interest even in the midst of his own absorbing perplexities. Until he saw Susan"s head shake ominously over her mother"s shoulder, it did not occur to him that his aunt, whom he supposed to be without imagination, had created this consoling belief out of her own mental vacancy.
"Oh, he wanted to worry me all right, there"s no doubt about that," he replied.
"He hasn"t spoken to me when he could help it for twenty years," pursued his aunt, who was so possessed by the idea of her own relation to her husband that she was incapable of dwelling upon any other.
"I wouldn"t talk about it, mother, if I were you," said Susan with resolute cheerfulness.
"I don"t know why I shouldn"t talk about it. It"s all I"ve got to talk about," returned Mrs. Treadwell peevishly; and she added with smothered resentment, "Even my children haven"t been any comfort to me since they were little. They"ve both turned against me because of the way their father treats me. James hardly ever has so much as a word to say to me."
"But I do, mother. How can you say such an unkind thing to me?"
"You never do the things that I want you to. You know I"d like you to go out and enjoy yourself and have attention as other girls do."
"You are disappointed because I"m not a belle like Abby Goode or Jinny Pendleton," said Susan with the patience that is born of a basic sense of humour. "But I couldn"t help that, could I?"
"Any girl in my day would have felt badly if she wasn"t admired,"
pursued Mrs. Treadwell with the venom of the embittered weak, "but I don"t believe you"d care a particle if a man never looked at you twice."
"If one never looked at me once, I don"t see why you should want me to be miserable about it," was Susan"s smiling rejoinder; "and if the girls in your day couldn"t be happy without admiration, they must have been silly creatures. I"ve a life of my own to live, and I"m not going to let my happiness depend on how many times a man looks at me." In the clear light of her ridicule, the spectre of spinsterhood, which was still an object of dread in the Dinwiddie of the eighties, dissolved into a shadow.
"Well, we"ve about finished, I believe," remarked Oliver, closing the case over which he was stooping, and devoutly thanking whatever beneficent Powers had not created him a woman. "I"ll send for these sometime to-morrow, Aunt Belinda."
"You"d just as well spend the night," urged Mrs. Treadwell stubbornly.
"He need never know of it."
"But I"d know of it--that"s the great thing--and I"d never forget it."
Rising unsteadily from the box, she stood with the ends of her purple shawl clutched tightly over her flat bosom. "Then you"ll wait just a minute. I"ve got something downstairs I"d like to give you," she said.
"Why, of course, but won"t you let me fetch it?"