One of the stewards2 of the big Atlantic liner pushed his way among the passengers to a young lady who was leaning alone against the taffrail. “Mrs. Vance Weston?”
The lady had been lost in the effort to absorb, with drawn-up unseeing eyes, a final pyramidal vision of the New York she was leaving — a place already so unreal to her that her short-sighted gaze was unable to register even vaguely3 its towering signals of farewell. She turned back.
“Mrs. Vance Weston?”
“No — ” she began; then, correcting herself with a half-embarrassed smile: “Yes.”
Stupid — incredibly! But it was the first time the name had been given to her. And it was not true; she was not yet Mrs. Vance Weston, but Halo Tarrant, the still undivorced wife of Lewis Tarrant. She did not know when she would be free, and some absurd old leaven4 of Lorburn Puritanism (on her mother’s side she was a Lorburn of Paul’s Landing) made her dislike to masquerade under a name to which she had no right. Yet before her own conscience and her lover’s she was already irrevocably what she called herself: his wife; supposing one could apply the term irrevocable to any tie in modern life without provoking Olympian laughter. She herself would once have been the first to share in that laughter; but she had to think of her own situation as binding5 her irrevocably, or else to assume that life, in its deepest essence, was as brittle6 as the glass globe which the monkeys shatter in the bitter scene of Faust’s visit to the witch. If she were not Vance Weston’s for always the future was already a handful of splinters.
The steward1, handing her a telegram, and a letter inscribed7 “urgent,” had hurried away on his distribution of correspondence. On the envelope of the letter she read the name of her lawyer; and as he was not given to superfluous8 writing, and as telegrams were too frequent to be of consequence, she opened the letter first. “Dear Mrs. Tarrant,” she read, “I am sending this by hand to the steamer in the hope of reaching you in time to persuade you not to sail. I have just heard, from a safe source, that your husband knows of your plans, and is not disposed to consent to your divorcing him if you persist in leaving the country in the circumstances of which you have advised me.” (She smiled at this draping of the facts.) “Indeed, I suspect he may refuse to take divorce proceedings9 himself, simply in order to prevent your remarrying. I should have tried to see you at once if I were not leaving for Albany on professional business; but I earnestly beg you, if my messenger reaches you before you are actually off . . .”
Halo Tarrant lifted her eyes from the letter. No; she was not actually off. The decks were still in the final confusion of goodbyes; friends and relatives were lingering among the passengers till the landing gong should hurry them ashore10. There was time to dash down to her cabin, collect her possessions, and descend11 the gangplank with the other visitors, leaving a note of explanation for the companion she was abandoning. For his sake as well as her own, ought she not to do it? What she knew of her husband made her ready enough to believe that a headlong impulse of reprisals12 might make him sacrifice his fixed13 purpose, his hope of happiness, a future deliberately14 willed and designed by himself, to the satisfaction of hurting and humiliating her. He was almost capable of wishing that she WOULD go away with Vance Weston; the mere15 pleasure of thwarting16 her would be keen enough to repay him. He was a man who grew fat on resentment17 as others did on happiness . . . For an instant her old life rose before her. This was the man she had lived with for ten years; he had always been what he was now, and she had always known it. The thought frightened her even now — she had to admit that he could still frighten her. But the admission stiffened18 her will. Did he really imagine that any threat of his could still affect her? That she would give up a year, perhaps two years, of happiness, of life — life at last! — and sit in conventual solitude19 till the divorce, conducted with old~fashioned discretion20 and deliberation, permitted him to posture21 before his little world as the husband who has chivalrously22 “allowed” an unworthy but unblamed wife to gain her liberty? How quaint23 and out-of-date it all sounded! What did she care if she divorced him or he divorced her — what, even, if he chose to wreak24 his malice25 on her by preventing any recourse to divorce? Her life had struck root in the soul-depths, while his uneasily fluttered on the surface; and that put her beyond all reach of malice. She read the letter twice over, slowly; then with a smiling deliberation she tore it up, and sent the fragments over the taffrail.
As she did so, she felt a faint vibration26 through the immense bulk to which her fate was committed. It was too late now — really too late. The gong had sounded; the steamer was moving. For better or worse, she had chosen; and she was glad she had done so deliberately.
“We’re off!” she heard at her side, in a voice of passionate27 excitement. She turned and laid her hand on Vance Weston’s; their eyes met, laughing. “Now at last you’ll have your fill of the sea,” she said.
He shook his head. “Only a week . . .”
“Ten days to Gibraltar.”
“What’s that you’ve got?”
With a little start she looked down at her hand. “Oh, only a telegram. The steward brought it. I forgot . . .”
“Forgot what?”
“Everything that has to do with that dead world.” She made a gesture of dismissal toward the dwindling28 cliffs of masonry29. “The steward called me Mrs. Vance Weston,” she added, smiling.
He responded to her smile. “Well, you’ll have to get used to that.”
They both laughed again, for the mere joy of sipping30 their laughter out of the one cup; then she said: “I suppose I ought to open it . . .”
“Oh, why? Now we’re off, why not drop it into the sea as a tribute to old Liberty over there? We owe her a tribute, don’t we?” he said; and she thought, with a little thrill of feminine submission31: “How strong and decided32 he seems! He tells me what to do — he takes everything for granted. I’m the weak inexperienced one, after all.” She ran her finger carelessly under the flap of the telegram.
Now that they were off, as he said, it did not much matter whether she opened her telegrams or threw them to the waves. What possibility was there in her adventure that she had not already foreseen, agonized33 over and finally put out of mind as inevitable34 or irrelevant35? With that last letter she had tossed her past overboard. Smiling, brooding, still thinking only of himself and her, enclosed in the impenetrable world of their love, she opened the telegram under their joint36 gaze.
They read: “Happiness is a work of art. Handle with care.” The message was unsigned, but no signature was necessary. “Poor old Frenny!” Her first impulse was to smile at the idea that any one, and most of all an embittered37 old bachelor like her friend George Frenside, should think it possible to advise her as to the nature or management of happiness. Her eyes met Vance’s, and she saw that they were grave.
“I suppose he remembered something in his own life,” Vance said.
“I suppose so.” It made her shiver a little to think that some day she too might be remembering — THIS. At the moment, happiness seemed to have nothing to do with memory, to be an isolating38 medium dividing her from the past as completely, as arbitrarily, as this huge ship had detached her little world of passengers from the shores of earth. Suddenly Halo recalled having said to Frenside, in the course of one of their endless speculative39 talks: “Being contented40 is so jolly that I sometimes think I couldn’t have stood being happy”; and his grim answer: “It’s a destructive experience.”
Poor Frenside! Poor herself! For she had not known then what happiness was, any more (she supposed) than he did. Destructive? When the mounting flood of life was rumouring in her ears like the sea? As well call spring destructive, or birth, or any of the processes of renewal41 that forever mantle42 the ancient earth with promise.
“I wonder what it feels like to remember,” she said obscurely. Vance’s smile met hers. “How extraordinary!” she thought. “Nothing that I say to him will need explaining . . .” It gave her a miraculous43 winged sense, as though she were free of the bonds of gravitation. “Oh, Vance, this — it’s like flying!” He nodded, and they stood silent, watching the silvery agitation44 of the waters as the flank of the steamer divided them. Up and down the deck people were scattering45, disappearing. Rows of empty deck-chairs stood behind the lovers. The passengers had gone to look up their cabins, hunt for missing luggage, claim letters, parcels, seats in the dining-saloon. Vance Weston and Halo Tarrant seemed to have the ship to themselves.
It was a day of early September. Wind-clouds, shifting about in the upper sky, tinged46 the unsteady glittering water with tones of silver, lead and rust-colour, hollowed to depths of sullen47 green as the steamer pressed forward to the open. The lovers were no longer gazing back on the fading pinnacles48 of New York; hand clasped over hand, they looked out to where the sea spread before them in limitless freedom.
They had chosen a slow steamer, on an unfashionable line, partly from economy, partly because of Halo’s wish to avoid acquaintances; and their choice had been rewarded. They knew no one on board. Halo Tarrant, in the disturbed and crowded days before her departure, had looked forward with impatience49 to the quiet of a long sea-voyage. Her life, of late, had been so full of unprofitable agitation that she yearned50 to set her soul’s house in order. Before entering on a new existence she wanted to find herself again, to situate herself in the new environment into which she had been so strangely flung. A few months ago she had been living under the roof of Lewis Tarrant, bound to him by ties the more unbreakable because they did not concern her private feelings. She had regarded it as her fate to be a good wife and a devoted51 companion to her husband for the rest of their joint lives; it had never occurred to her that he would wish a change. But she had left out of account the uneasy vanity which exacted more, always more, which would not be put off with anything less than her whole self, her complete belief, the uncritical surrender of her will and judgment52. When her husband found she was not giving him this (or only feigning53 to give it) he sought satisfaction elsewhere. If his wife did not believe in him, his attitude implied, other women did — women whom this act of faith endued54 with all the qualities he had hoped to find in Halo. To be “understood”, for Lewis Tarrant, was an active, a perpetually functioning state. The persons nearest him must devote all their days and nights, thoughts, impulses, inclinations55, to the arduous56 business of understanding him. Halo began to see that as her powers of self-dedication decreased her importance to her husband decreased with them. She became first less necessary, then (in consequence) less interesting, finally almost an incumbrance. The discovery surprised her. She had once thought that Tarrant, even if he ceased to love her, would continue to need her. She saw now that this belief was inspired by the resolve to make the best of their association, to keep it going at all costs. When she found she had been replaced by more ardent57 incense-burners the discovery frightened her. She felt a great emptiness about her, saw herself freezing into old age unsustained by self-imposed duties. For she could not leave her husband — she regarded herself as bound by the old debt on which their marriage had been based. Tarrant had rescued her parents from bankruptcy58, had secured their improvident59 old age against material cares. That deed once done would never be undone60; she knew he would go on supporting them; his very vanity compelled him to persist in being generous when he had once decreed that he ought to be. He never gave up an attitude once adopted as a part of his picture of himself.
But then — what of her? She tried not to think of her loneliness; but there it was, perpetually confronting her. She was unwanted, yet she could not go. She had to patch together the fragments of the wrecked61 situation, and try to use them as a shelter.
And then, what would have seemed likely enough had it not been the key to her difficulty, had after all come to pass. An infirm old cousin died, and her will made Halo Tarrant a free woman. At first she did not measure the extent of her freedom. She thought only: “Now I can provide for my people; they need not depend on Lewis — ” but it had not yet dawned on her that her liberation might come too. She still believed that Tarrant’s determination to keep whatever had once belonged to him would be stronger than any other feeling. “He’ll take the other woman — but he’ll want to keep me,” she reasoned; and began to wonder how she could avoid making her plea for freedom seem to coincide with her material release. To appear to think that her debt could be thus cancelled was to turn their whole past into a matter of business — and it had begun by being something else. She could not have married anybody who happened to have paid her parents’ debts; that Tarrant had done so seemed at the time merely an added cause for admiration62, a justification63 of her faith in him. She knew now that from the beginning her faith had needed such support . . . And then, before she could ask for her freedom, he had anticipated her by asking for his; and, so abruptly64 that she was still bewildered by the suddenness of the change, she found herself a new woman in a new world . . .
All this she had meant to think over, setting her past in order before she put it away from her and took up the threads of the future. But suddenly she found herself confronted by a new fact which reduced past and future to shadows. For the first time in her life she was living in the present. Hitherto, as she now saw, her real existence, her whole inner life, had been either plunged65 in the wonders that art, poetry, history, had built into her dreams, or else reaching forward to a future she longed for yet dreaded66. She had thought she could perhaps not bear to be happy; and now she was happy, and all the rest was nothing. She was like someone stepping into hot sunlight from a darkened room; she blinked, and saw no details. And to look at the future was like staring into the sun. She was blinded, and her eyes turned to the steady golden noon about her. Ah, perhaps it was true — perhaps she did not know how to bear happiness. It took her by the inmost fibres, burned through her like a fever, was going to give her no rest, no peace, no time to steady and tame it in her dancing soul.
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steward
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| n.乘务员，服务员；看管人；膳食管理员 | |
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stewards
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| （轮船、飞机等的）乘务员( steward的名词复数 )； （俱乐部、旅馆、工会等的）管理员； （大型活动的）组织者； （私人家中的）管家 | |
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vaguely
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| adv.含糊地，暖昧地 | |
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leaven
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| v.使发酵；n.酵母；影响 | |
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binding
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| 有约束力的，有效的，应遵守的 | |
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brittle
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| adj.易碎的；脆弱的；冷淡的；(声音)尖利的 | |
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inscribed
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| v.写，刻( inscribe的过去式和过去分词 )；内接 | |
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superfluous
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| adj.过多的，过剩的，多余的 | |
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proceedings
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| n.进程，过程，议程；诉讼(程序)；公报 | |
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ashore
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| adv.在(向)岸上，上岸 | |
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descend
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| vt./vi.传下来，下来，下降 | |
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reprisals
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| n.报复（行为）( reprisal的名词复数 ) | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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deliberately
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| adv.审慎地；蓄意地；故意地 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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thwarting
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| 阻挠( thwart的现在分词 )； 使受挫折； 挫败； 横过 | |
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resentment
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| n.怨愤，忿恨 | |
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stiffened
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| 加强的 | |
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solitude
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| n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方 | |
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discretion
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| n.谨慎；随意处理 | |
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posture
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| n.姿势，姿态，心态，态度；v.作出某种姿势 | |
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chivalrously
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| adv.象骑士一样地 | |
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quaint
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| adj.古雅的，离奇有趣的，奇怪的 | |
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wreak
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| v.发泄；报复 | |
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malice
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| n.恶意，怨恨，蓄意；[律]预谋 | |
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vibration
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| n.颤动，振动；摆动 | |
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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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dwindling
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| adj.逐渐减少的v.逐渐变少或变小( dwindle的现在分词 ) | |
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masonry
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| n.砖土建筑；砖石 | |
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sipping
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| v.小口喝，呷，抿( sip的现在分词 ) | |
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submission
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| n.服从，投降；温顺，谦虚；提出 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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agonized
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| v.使（极度）痛苦，折磨( agonize的过去式和过去分词 )；苦斗；苦苦思索；感到极度痛苦 | |
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inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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irrelevant
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| adj.不恰当的，无关系的，不相干的 | |
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joint
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| adj.联合的，共同的；n.关节，接合处；v.连接，贴合 | |
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embittered
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| v.使怨恨，激怒( embitter的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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isolating
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| adj.孤立的，绝缘的v.使隔离( isolate的现在分词 )；将…剔出（以便看清和单独处理）；使（某物质、细胞等）分离；使离析 | |
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speculative
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| adj.思索性的，暝想性的，推理的 | |
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contented
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| adj.满意的，安心的，知足的 | |
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renewal
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| adj.(契约)延期，续订，更新，复活，重来 | |
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mantle
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| n.斗篷，覆罩之物，罩子；v.罩住，覆盖，脸红 | |
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miraculous
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| adj.像奇迹一样的，不可思议的 | |
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agitation
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| n.搅动；搅拌；鼓动，煽动 | |
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scattering
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| n.[物]散射；散乱，分散；在媒介质中的散播adj.散乱的；分散在不同范围的；广泛扩散的；（选票）数量分散的v.散射(scatter的ing形式)；散布；驱散 | |
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tinged
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| v.（使）发丁丁声( ting的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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sullen
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| adj.愠怒的，闷闷不乐的，(天气等)阴沉的 | |
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pinnacles
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| 顶峰( pinnacle的名词复数 )； 顶点； 尖顶； 小尖塔 | |
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impatience
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| n.不耐烦，急躁 | |
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yearned
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| 渴望，切盼，向往( yearn的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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feigning
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| 假装，伪装( feign的现在分词 )； 捏造（借口、理由等） | |
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endued
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| v.授予，赋予（特性、才能等）( endue的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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inclinations
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| 倾向( inclination的名词复数 )； 倾斜； 爱好； 斜坡 | |
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arduous
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| adj.艰苦的，费力的，陡峭的 | |
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ardent
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，强烈的，烈性的 | |
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bankruptcy
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| n.破产；无偿付能力 | |
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improvident
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| adj.不顾将来的，不节俭的，无远见的 | |
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undone
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| a.未做完的，未完成的 | |
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wrecked
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| adj.失事的，遇难的 | |
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admiration
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| n.钦佩，赞美，羡慕 | |
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justification
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| n.正当的理由；辩解的理由 | |
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abruptly
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| adv.突然地，出其不意地 | |
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plunged
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| v.颠簸( plunge的过去式和过去分词 )；暴跌；骤降；突降 | |
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dreaded
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| adj.令人畏惧的；害怕的v.害怕，恐惧，担心( dread的过去式和过去分词) | |
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