It was all so easily managed—we had to think of the girls, of course—no one seeing our registered names side by side, Mrs. Thomas Bettersworth, New York, and Helmeth Garrett, Chilicojote, Mexico, would have thought of connecting them. Helmeth attended to all his business correspondence as though he were still in London, and nobody expected to hear from me in any case.
It is strange how little history there is to happiness. We had come together past incredible struggles, anxieties, triumphs, defeats; we had been buffeted5 and stricken, and now suddenly we were stilled. If at any time the ghosts of the uneasy past rose upon us, we kissed and they were laid. So long as we kept in touch, there ran a river of fire between our blessed isolation6 and the world. And for the first time we looked upon the world free of the obligations of our being in it. We looked, and exchanged our separate knowledges as precious treasure. My exploration of life had been from within—I knew what Raphael was thinking about when he painted that fine blue vein8 on his Madonna's wrist. But Helmeth had looked on the movement of history; what he saw in Italy was the path of armies, lines of aqueducts, old Roman roads to and from mines. Everything began or ended for him in a mine, in Gaul or Austria or Ophir; dynasties were marked for him by change in the ownership of mines. So he drew me the white roads out of Italy as one draws fibre from a palm, and strung on them the world's great adventures. There were hours also when we let all this great fabric9 of art and history float from us, sure that by the vitalizing thread of understanding which ran between us like a new, live sense, we could pull it back again ... but we loved ... we loved.
Nothing that happened to us there, came with a more revealing touch than the attitude in which I caught myself, looking out for and being surprised at not discovering in myself any qualms10 of conscience. All that I had known of such relations in other people, had made itself known by a subtle, penetrating11, fetid savour, against which some instinct, as sure as a hound, threw up its head and bayed the tainted12 air.
But in my own affair, the first compulsion that irked me was the necessity I was under of not telling anybody. I wasn't conscious at any time of any feeling that wouldn't have gone suitably with the outward form of marriage; there were times even when I failed to see why one should take exception to the neglect of such form. I was remade every pulse and fibre of me, my beloved's ... and so obviously, that the necessity of tagging my estate with a ceremony struck me as an impertinence. Marriage I think must be a fact, capable of going on independently of the prayer book and the county clerk. Whatever you may think, no god could have escaped the certainty of my being duly married.
There were days though, just at first, when I suffered the need of completing my condition by an outward bond. I knew very well where the custom of wedding rings came from; I should have worn anklets and armlets as well, if only they could have been taken as the advertisement of my belonging wholly to my man. Depend upon it, the subjugation13 of woman will be found finally to rest in the attempt visibly to establish, what the woman herself concurs14 in, the inward conviction of possession.
How much of what was in my own mind, was also in Helmeth's, I do not know, but because I had brought upon myself the condition of not being married, I failed to speak of what I found regrettable in it. What did come out for me satisfyingly, was the man's sheer content in his mate, the response, and our pride in it, of his blood and body to my presence, and the new relish15 it created in him for the processes of living, for his pipe and his meals, and his work. He had brought some estimates to figure out; evenings at work on these, he would call me to him and sit with his left arm thrown lightly about my chair, the pencil going as though my presence were an added fillip to activity. He took on weight in that holiday, and his mouth relaxed to a more youthful curve.
We spent the last three weeks of it at a quiet hotel on the point of land that divides Lake Como from Lecco, opposite Cadenabbia. Times yet I will wake out of dreaming, to find the pulse of the city transmuted16 into the steady lisping of that silver fretted18 lake. We had come to a phase like that in our relation, deep and full and shining. We spent hours sitting on the parapet in the sun, looking at it. I would sit on the stone ledge7 and Helmeth would stretch himself, with his pipe, along the ground.
"Helmeth," I said on such a morning, "do you know this is the first time I ever rested?" He gave a little gurgle of content; the sun turned on the sails of the fishing-boats and flashed us sympathy. "I'm afraid," I admitted, "I'm never going to want to do anything else."
"Oh, I'm going to want to. This is good enough, but it wouldn't be half so good if I couldn't take it along with me and do things with it—great things." He threw his arm across my knees with one of those quick, intimate caresses19, flooding me full of the delighted sense of how completely I belonged to him. "I feel," he said, "as if I had been going about with one arm or one hand, and now I've got a full set of them. Wait until I show you!"
"When you talk of doing, Helmeth—that means leaving me."
"That's for you to say, Olive." That was as near as he had come yet to reminding me that it was I who had chosen this instead of a relation which would have implied my going with him wherever his work led him, and that the choice was still open to me. The night after the storm he had written me:
"There is nothing that troubles me about to-night except the fear that you may regret it, that you might ever come to have a doubt of how I feel about it. I want you to feel that whatever you choose is right to me, and though I hope for nothing so much as to make you my wife, I shall not urge you beyond what you feel that you can do without urging."
It was a generous letter, and no doubt it had its weight in persuading me to trust the situation, in the face of that instinct which saves women, even from passions that seem their own justification20. If he had counted on the naturalness of love to set up its own public obligation, he had not been far wrong with me. If it had been practicable, I should have walked out with him any day those first weeks to be married. But marriage is a very complicated business in Italy. In a measure I had satisfied my fret17 for the visible tie, with a ring which he had bought me in Florence, which, as the stones flashed in the sun, turned me back on the thought I had when first he set it on my hand.
"Helmeth, do you suppose that we are pushed on to make laws and observances about marriage because the bond that comes into being then has a consistency21 and validity beyond what we feel about it?"
"Oh, beyond what we feel about it, yes." He sat up then a little away from me, as he often did when he drew upon experiences lying beyond the points at which his life had been touched by mine, and began skipping little stones into the water. "Yes, I'm sure that what you feel about a thing that happens to you is not always the test of what it does to you. Sometimes I think feelings haven't much to do with our experiences except to get us into them." He left off skipping stones and began to pile them into a little heap. "I was thinking of Laura," he concluded. It was not often that he spoke22 to me of his wife.
"I can't remember that I had a great deal of feeling about her; I was too busy, I suppose, getting on with my engineering; but she had a grip on me. She had a grip. Look here, my dear, I ought to tell you this, you're the wonder of the earth for me, and I know very well that my wife's world was a very little one; it was bounded by the church on one side and by conventions on all the others. But somehow I don't want to get too far away from it, and I don't want the girls to get too far." He swung about to look squarely up at me. "This that you've given me, it's heaven; it's a thing for a man to die for and die happy; but there's the other too." He laughed a little awkwardly; he caught my feet in one of his strong hands. "Have I made you understand?"
"I understand that kind of life. It's like a clean, scrubbed room. I know. I was brought up in it. There have been times when I have been desperate because I couldn't go back and live there. But I ought to tell you, Helmeth, I can't find my way back."
"You! Why should you? You were made to live in Kings' houses. But I wanted to be sure you weren't going to be disappointed if I haven't the manners that always belong to palaces. I've been in camps where a scrubbed room looked mighty23 good to me." He stretched himself and rolled over on the ground, lying with his back to the sun, soaking in it in simple, animal content. Little white flecks24 showed on the lake, the sails of the fisher-boats tilted25 slowly and composed themselves anew with the line of the shore and the flowing hills. Directly opposite, the walls of Cadenabbia showed white amid the green, like a little streak26 of Arcady.
"We've never been," I reminded him.
"I thought you wanted to leave it so you could always think of its being as romantic as it looks, without making sure that it isn't." That was the reason I had given him, but the truth was that Cadenabbia was on one of those tourist routes where, supposing anybody we knew to be wandering about Europe, we would be sure to run into them. This morning, however, I was seized with an irresistible27 desire to visit it.
"But supposing it isn't as interesting as it looks," I submitted, "if I go there with you I shall never know it. And think how disappointed I should be if I should ever come there without you and find that it is the one place we ought to have seen."
There was a little motor launch plying28 between the shores of the lake, and an hour before tea time we crossed in it. We spent the hour in the garden of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, and then along the parapet we strolled in search of tea. It was the height of the tourist season and the gay groups moving in the streets between the quaint29 low houses, gave it a holiday air. We heard them calling one to the other, exchanging appreciations30 and information. All at once we heard them calling us.
"Garrett, Garrett!" a party in the act of settling at a tea table in the garden of one of the hotels, dissolved and reorganized about us as the centre. There was laughter and garbled31 greetings and handshaking. Presently Helmeth began to introduce me. They were a party of Californians, all more or less acquainted and importunate32; we were swept back by them to the table and tea. There were two married couples and one unmarried woman of about my age, and a boy of sixteen. I could see by the way she appropriated him, that his acquaintance with Miss Stanley had been of the degree that might have ripened33 into marriage, and that Miss Stanley had not wholly made up her mind that it wouldn't. She was one of those unmarried women who contrive34 by a multiplicity and vivacity35 of interests to deny what is explicitly36 advertised by their anxiety to have you understand that they consider themselves much better off just as they are. I could see her taking in all the details of my appearance, to find the key to what Mr. Garrett might presumably like in me, and striking out in her manner to him a quick sketch37 of me, bettered in the direction of what she believed it most to be. The other women, if they had been brought up in Taylorville, would have resembled Pauline Mills; that they didn't I could see was difference of geography. They were all full of gay talk and reminiscence of a mutual38 life in the West, on a footing that left me rather more than room to play the part, which I had cast for myself with celerity, of being a casual acquaintance of his, picked up at a hotel. He had introduced me to them as Mrs. Bettersworth, and whether they would have known me or not by my stage name, I took care they shouldn't have the opportunity.
Nothing would do but he must stay to dinner; I guessed that there was that degree of acquaintance between them which would have made it unfriendly of him to refuse. I could see Miss Stanley prick39 up at his manner of leaving the decision to me, and realized that whatever we might have agreed upon, there would be no keeping our relation from being at least a matter of curiosity to the women, the elder of whom had promptly40 included me in the invitation.
I invented a mythical41 travelling companion across the lake whom I must join, and managed to make my being in Mr. Garrett's company appear so casual that I came near to overdoing42 it by exciting his concern.
"What's the matter; don't you like them?" He wished to know as he saw me to the landing.
"Ever so," I insisted promptly, "but they wouldn't like me after a while. You behave as if we had been married five years."
"Oh, well, haven't we?" He looked back and his brow gathered a little. "For two cents I'd tell them." But after all there was nothing he could do but see me comfortably off and go back to them. He told me afterward43 that Mr. Harwood, the elder of the two gentlemen, had been useful to him in business.
It must have been close on to midnight when he waked me, sitting on the edge of my bed. He must have gone to his own room very softly, meaning not to disturb me; now I heard him calling my name in a whisper and his hand seeking for my face.
I reached up and drew his down to me.
"Oh, my dear——" I was startled at what I found there. "Beloved, why are you crying?" I could feel him shake with sudden uncontrollable emotion. I kept his head on my breast and comforted him.
"When did you come in?"
"An hour ago—you were asleep." The commonplace question seemed to quiet him.
"Was it something went wrong at the dinner?"
"Wrong, yes ... but not there, not there. It's all wrong, it has been wrong from the beginning."
"Dear heart, tell me."
"Olive, marry me; say you'll marry me!" There was urgency in his whisper, there was pain in it. "Say it; say it!"
"I'll marry you. I've been waiting for you to ask."
"Oh, my dear, when I have begged you so...."
"Tell me," I urged....
"There isn't anything to tell, only ... we walked along the parapet and were very happy together. They're a good sort. I've known them for years. And we found a peasant woman selling lace, good lace, the women said, and cheap ... Harwood bought some for his wife ... and Stanley bought his sister some. Harwood went back, pretending he'd forgotten something, and bought a piece his wife wanted and thought she couldn't afford. And I couldn't buy you any ... not openly. I wanted Miss Stanley to select some handkerchiefs that I said were for the girls and she said girls shouldn't wear that kind. Oh, Olive, don't you understand?"
"I understand; you shall go back to-morrow and buy me some."
"But it won't be the same ... and afterward ... after dinner we sat in the garden and Harwood sat with his arm round his wife's chair. And you were over here ... hiding! Oh, Olive, I want my wife, I want her ... in the light, before everybody. I want her." I was crying now.
"It's all wrong," he insisted, "it's been wrong from the beginning. We belong together, before everybody." He kept repeating that phrase over and over. "All the years that we've been apart ... and now just to have it in a hole in a corner!"
"No, no, my dear!" I protested. "Before God ... it's been before God!" We sobbed44 together. By and by Love came and comforted us.
I suppose if it had been possible to go out and be married immediately we should have married the next morning; but in Italy there are observances—it would have taken three weeks at least and hardly less in Switzerland. In two weeks our vacation came to an end. Helmeth set out by the shortest route for Mexico and I interposed a week's shopping between me and Mrs. Franklin Shane to whom I had pledged myself for a week at her country house. In November I was to meet Helmeth Garrett in New York, "and settle things" he had stipulated45. Somehow I could not bring myself to think of my relation to him as involving cataclysmal changes. I wouldn't say to myself that I intended to marry him, and I couldn't say that I wouldn't.
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1
passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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2
enchanted
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| adj. 被施魔法的，陶醉的，入迷的 动词enchant的过去式和过去分词 | |
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3
conspicuous
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| adj.明眼的，惹人注目的；炫耀的，摆阔气的 | |
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4
gondola
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| n.威尼斯的平底轻舟；飞船的吊船 | |
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5
buffeted
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| 反复敲打( buffet的过去式和过去分词 )； 连续猛击； 打来打去； 推来搡去 | |
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6
isolation
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| n.隔离，孤立，分解，分离 | |
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7
ledge
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| n.壁架，架状突出物；岩架，岩礁 | |
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8
vein
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| n.血管，静脉；叶脉，纹理；情绪；vt.使成脉络 | |
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9
fabric
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| n.织物，织品，布；构造，结构，组织 | |
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10
qualms
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| n.不安；内疚 | |
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11
penetrating
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| adj.（声音）响亮的，尖锐的adj.（气味）刺激的adj.（思想）敏锐的，有洞察力的 | |
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12
tainted
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| adj.腐坏的；污染的；沾污的；感染的v.使变质( taint的过去式和过去分词 )；使污染；败坏；被污染，腐坏，败坏 | |
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13
subjugation
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| n.镇压，平息，征服 | |
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14
concurs
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| 同意（concur的第三人称单数形式） | |
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15
relish
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| n.滋味，享受，爱好，调味品；vt.加调味料，享受，品味；vi.有滋味 | |
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16
transmuted
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| v.使变形，使变质，把…变成…( transmute的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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17
fret
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| v.(使)烦恼；(使)焦急；(使)腐蚀，(使)磨损 | |
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18
fretted
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| 焦躁的，附有弦马的，腐蚀的 | |
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19
caresses
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| 爱抚，抚摸( caress的名词复数 ) | |
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20
justification
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| n.正当的理由；辩解的理由 | |
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21
consistency
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| n.一贯性，前后一致，稳定性；(液体的)浓度 | |
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22
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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23
mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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24
flecks
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| n.斑点，小点( fleck的名词复数 )；癍 | |
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25
tilted
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| v. 倾斜的 | |
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26
streak
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| n.条理，斑纹，倾向，少许，痕迹；v.加条纹，变成条纹，奔驰，快速移动 | |
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27
irresistible
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| adj.非常诱人的，无法拒绝的，无法抗拒的 | |
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28
plying
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| v.使用（工具）( ply的现在分词 )；经常供应（食物、饮料）；固定往来；经营生意 | |
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29
quaint
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| adj.古雅的，离奇有趣的，奇怪的 | |
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30
appreciations
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| n.欣赏( appreciation的名词复数 )；感激；评定；（尤指土地或财产的）增值 | |
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31
garbled
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| adj.（指信息）混乱的，引起误解的v.对（事实）歪曲，对（文章等）断章取义，窜改( garble的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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32
importunate
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| adj.强求的；纠缠不休的 | |
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33
ripened
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| v.成熟，使熟( ripen的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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34
contrive
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| vt.谋划，策划；设法做到；设计，想出 | |
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35
vivacity
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| n.快活，活泼，精神充沛 | |
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36
explicitly
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| ad.明确地，显然地 | |
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37
sketch
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| n.草图；梗概；素描；v.素描；概述 | |
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38
mutual
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| adj.相互的，彼此的；共同的，共有的 | |
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39
prick
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| v.刺伤，刺痛，刺孔；n.刺伤，刺痛 | |
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40
promptly
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| adv.及时地，敏捷地 | |
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41
mythical
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| adj.神话的；虚构的；想像的 | |
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42
overdoing
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| v.做得过分( overdo的现在分词 )；太夸张；把…煮得太久；（工作等）过度 | |
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43
afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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44
sobbed
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| 哭泣，啜泣( sob的过去式和过去分词 )； 哭诉，呜咽地说 | |
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45
stipulated
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| vt.& vi.规定；约定adj.[法]合同规定的 | |
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