I
It was on this park bench that he had sat a summer night five years ago and with all the shrewdness and prophecy at his command decided that life without Helen would be a senseless, a miserable, and an unlovely thing. He sat now and looked at the elaborate mystery of trees in the night, and at the lanes that hid themselves behind the lilac bushes along the broken edge of the lagoon. Here and there on a distant bench, striping the moonlight with its laths, sat solitaries like himself, their figures folded into vague semblances of the figure 4. There were couples, too, men and women sitting close together, their embraces hidden by the dark, each imagining that life without the other would be a senseless, a miserable, and an unlovely thing.
Bennett smiled disparagingly at nothing in particular unless it was at his thoughts or the world.
"Five years ago I fancied I couldn't live without her. And now I no longer love her and I doubt if she actually loves me. I haven't loved her for the last three years. I doubt, hang it, whether I ever loved her at all. And yet, good Lord, I sat on this same silly bench five years ago, determined to kill myself if she didn’t give me the radiant privilege of living with her for the rest of my life."
Ah, the dolorous irony of life! Hach day a mockery of yesterday's dreams!
Bennett lighted his pipe with the theatrical calm of a philosopher in the throes of inferior tragedy.
"The snows of yesteryear"—motif, though a theme somewhat old, was yet suitable for sapient speculation. Indeed, what else was there in life worthy the meditation of a philosopher? The roseate lies that had bloomed in the depths of his heart, the passionate masquerade that had tricked the processes of his reason, the delicate guillotine of the years that changed men into cadavers and all things into memories—a bit hackneyed to be sure, such contemplations, a trifle rococo for the mental operations of one whose name had become a synonym for vast and profound unfoldings of the spirit—yes, sorrow had a way of intruding its platitudes, where only genius trod. There was no escaping the wan pathos of the fact that five years ago he had—
He had allowed his pipe to go out.
Undoubtedly the thing wasn't drawing well. The habit of truth, so necessary to a philosopher, informed him, however, that the pipe was drawing as well as it ever had. Why not confront the fact of the matter? The thing had gone out for the sheerly natural reason that he had forgotten to smoke it after lighting it. The little pyramid of flame held his eye as he rekindled the tobacco.
For a moment he studied, with an impersonal air, the trembling of his hand and arm. Yes; he was a bit nervous, The thoughts that he had been thinking had come so naturally to him that he had, for the instant, overlooked their overwhelming revolutionary character. It had just dawned on him that he was thinking of separating from Helen. Strange he should be able to think about it for almost a half hour so coolly and calmly and then suddenly feel that the idea had entered his mind for the first time only an instant ago. Was he, as a matter of fact, actually thinking this thing, actually deciding to do what he was thinking of doing, or merely playing with the thought of it, boasting piquantly to himself?
With a gentle flourish of his hand Bennett unsuccessfully endeavored to extinguish the match in his fingers; raising his eyebrows he blew at the flame slowly and solicitously. He remained puffing enigmatically upen his pipe—enigmatically in the manner of a man sparring with himself for time to face the truth. Well, he might as well stand up and walk about a bit. It was somewhat chilly. Bennett smiled. He passed his long hand over his lean face. Why these inane subterfuges? He loathed walking and it was a splendid night for doing just what he was doing—sitting quite motionless on a park bench. Sitting quite motionless and thinking this thing out to the end, once and for all. He raised his eyes and started at the sweep of darkness above him. As he stared his thought drifted again into the past with the gentle persistence of a man who prefers the idle caress of sorrows to the more strenuous attentions of logic and decisions.
Yes, if someone had told him five years ago as he sat in this very place that there would come a time, while he was still young and possessed of his health, that he would look upon Helen as the most boring and unnecessary asset in his life, he would have snorted as at the vaporings of a darkened mind. Was he then still young? Thirty-five. The whole nub of the situation lay in the fact that he no longer loved this particular person whom he had once loved and . . . selah! Oh, most obvious of all retrospections—he had observed her once through the obfuscating mists of desire. She had appeared to him then . . . But why go over it, why harry himself with such useless pryings into tombs?
Gently his thought again escaped his will, and busied itself dolorously with the contemplation of things of the past.
How deceived he had been first of all in her mind, in her character! Well, he had learned with some bitterness that bobbed hair does not necessarily argue a lengthened spiritual reach. What a radical little spitfire he had, in his insane blindness, fancied her! A little cherubic head bristling with frantic notions of life. A passionate seraph stuttering gloriously of revolt. My, yes. Revolting against this and against that, jumping up and down on the bourgeoisie, the poor intellectually-trampled-to-death bourgeoisie.
"Life is something bigger than all this . . . all this snatching greedily at trifles. Life is a . . . a dancing star, a glorious pageant. Oh, it's so tragic to see men and women piling themselves with conventions until there is nothing left for them but to stagger through . . . stumble through with their eyes to the ground. Life is an adventure of the emotions . . ."
And so it is, so it is. He smiled suddenly at this verbatim echo of the past. Life was, perhaps, all that she had, in her ignorance, proclaimed it to be. It had, at any event, greater possibilities than spending the rest of one’s days virtually closeted with a fussy, ill-mannered, irritating little shrew. Again Bennett's thought extricated itself from the present and floated into memories. She had undoubtedly had talent—the precocious and incomplete talent of the intellectual woman. Her painting had not been so bad, at first. At least it had been better than the meaningless daubs which littered the house now.
The sound of some one walking down the graveled path which led by his bench caused Bennett to raise his eyes. A man and woman were approaching, arm and arm, heads inclined together. With a tolerant smile Bennett watched them pass. As they disappeared in the dark he was off again on elaborate theorizings on the sex instinct—the fantastic rigmarole of phrase and sigh and self-deception that accompanies the simple function of mating.
What a deceit, the whole of it! What a merciless ruse of nature! Thus they had walked, he and Helen, thus embraced with heads thus inclined. And they had come to the edge of the lagoon and remained spellbound before the dark and languid water. And they had solemnly taken each other by the hand and with an asinine profundity called upon a mysterious thing they referred to as God to witness then and there the union of their souls and their lives. No blithering priest to mumble words at them, no asthmatic organ to gurgle its Mendelssohn benediction, no half-witted friends to pelt them with rice and shoes. Just a fine, simple communion of radical souls, a frank and natural mating of spirits attuned. That had been their wedding.
Bennett thumped the ashes out of his pipe and laughed softly. His thought had suddenly slid out of the warm and enervating ruts of memory. He arose and shook down his trousers. He wasn't married. Delightful and indisputable fact. Holding hands over the lagoon on a summer night and panting some gibberish about souls and the higher life, fine and noble as it had appeared, did not in the sordid eyes of the law constitute matrimony.
With decided steps Bennett made his way out of the park. Why the pother and the doubt about it? He had mated with Helen as man and woman and not, in her own words, as one social unit with another. He was, by the terms of their own curious ceremony, free to depart when his finely attuned spirit cracked a bit under the strain. Well and good. He would depart. The finely attuned blamed foolishness had cracked. And if she saw fit to make a fuss, as she undoubtedly would, he would lead her solemnly down to the lagoon and holding her firmly by the hand call upon the selfsame Deity who had witnessed their union to witness now its severance. And finis! The thing would be accomplished in a logically idiotic manner.
In the manner of a true philosopher he had considered everything but the obvious in seeking a way out of his dilemma. The street was quiet and empty. Eight blocks to his home, but he would walk them, much as he loathed walking. There was come to him an exultation. He desired to indulge it. The thought of being freed from the senseless chatter of the woman even now awaiting him, of being rid of her persistent demands and shrewish cajolings had about it a magical quality. It transformed for him every color of his future. Life was an adventure of the emotions—when lived properly. Egad, he would feel like a new man, like a creature reborn.
Already he felt an influx of vigor. His body seemed mysteriously straightened his thought virulently alive. There was no mistaking it—the creature was a blanket on his mind, a darkness to his eye, a weight upon every sensitive fibre in him. They had had their happiness. They had exhausted for each other all each had to give. Why prolong the anticlimax into the insufferable monotony of a lifelong partnership? He wasn't, after all, an ordinary man. He had his work, his genius. Good Lord, if she couldn't see the common sense of the thing he'd drag her down to the lagoon and mumble the gibberish of five years ago and do the thinking for both of them. It would, undoubtedly, make a woman of her and give her a chance. Not that there was anything in her. But it would give her her chance to pose again as the lofty-minded radical, to parade once more her institutional chatter about free womanhood and fine living.
There was a light in the window. Bennett crossed the street and approached it firmly. She would listen politely enough. She would think the whole matter merely another argument. Well, it wouldn't take her long to wake up to the facts. He would be blunt. There was no use in wasting either rhetoric or epigram. The thing called for fine clean cuts.
He entered the room and observed with an ironical smile that she was reading thoughtfully and slowly "The Theory of the Leisure Class."
She raised her eyes as he walked in silence to a large chair opposite her. Her face, under the lamp-light, was firm and youthful. Her black hair, bobbed beneath her ears, added, as always, a roguish air to her appearance. Smiling back at her, Bennett went slowly about the business of refilling and lighting his pipe.
"Have a nice walk?" she asked at length. "You were gone long enough."
Yes, the slave had exceeded his furlough—an hour each evening.
"No, I didn't walk much. I went down to the park and sat around a bit."
"You might have done your sitting around here with me."
So he might. Exquisite privilege. He smiled at her again and, elearing his throat portentously, requested:
"Put the book aside, please. I've something rather important to talk about."
She hesitated, with the air of one preparing for elaborate argument, slowly inserted a bookmark between the pages and placed the book on the window seat.
"What is it, George?"
He hesitated an instant.
"Before I begin," he said, "I want you to promise that you'll wait till I'm done before you say anything. I want you to understand that I'm not arguing but simply stating certain facts, certain things that are as inevitable as . . . as doom."
She looked at him fixedly. He returned her stare without wavering.
"Do you promise?"
"Yes."
Did she know already? A curious mildness had come into her voice.
"Very well, Helen. I've decided that you and I have come to the end of our rope. I mean, that all things considered, the best thing we can do is to separate. I've been thinking of it for six months—if not longer. Our lives have degenerated into a monotonous exchange of unimportant trifles. We bore each other. Our intimacy has lost its charm. In short, we no longer care for each other. I couldn't say this sort of thing to any woman but you. That is, I mean, you will be able to understand, if you don't understand already and haven't understood for the last year. When we mar—when we came together it was with the high purpose of living a . . . an exalted companionship. I don’t have to point out to you that our companionship in the last two years has been neither high nor exalted. Do I?"
He paused, somewhat taken back by her continued silence.
She had sunk into her chair and was staring at him with head lowered and eyes raised.
"Are you agreed, Helen? Do you see what I mean? It's hard, I know. But things change. Everything changes. What we had today we have not tomorrow. I mean, our love that once seemed so . . . so eternal was, like everything else in life, fleeting. If we would be true to that love . . . true to the fine things in ourselves, we must part. If only not to mar further that which has been . . . "
He paused again, somewhat bewildered. Try as he might, he couldn't keep the gloat out of his voice. And he had no desire to gloat. He wished to be fair and decent. He stammered for a moment. There was a way of putting the thing calmly and sanely without resorting to this empty-sounding rhetoric.
"Helen," he demanded, "what . . . what do you think? Anything I might add would be only repetition. Had I felt that you loved as you once did, that it was still the same for you I would never have spoken. But I've seen the change in you. A change as complete as that in me."
His hands were trembling insanely as they rested on his legs. Bewildered by her unbroken silence he plunged on desperately.
"Habit—that's all there is left between us. The habit of being together, of seeing each other, touching each other, depending upon each other. Is that something worthy? Is that on a par with your ideals? Tell me."
He arose from his chair and walked over and stood beside her. Her eyes did not follow him. They remained staring at where he had sat.
"Helen," he said softly, "come. I'm serious about this. It's for both our good. Don't you see? There's nothing to hinder us, you know. We've tried . . . and we've failed."
Why drag that in—the trying and failing? It had a dangerous ring to it. He bit his lip.
"Come," he commanded again, this time with an increased tenderness, "tell me. Am I right?"
He became silent and waited. She would begin now. He had tricked her. He had lured her away, used her and now wanted to throw her aside like an old glove. That was her reward for trusting him, marrying him upon his honor rather than submitting to the artifices of convention.
In his mind as he waited whirled her arguments—the inevitable arguments of womankind. He smiled firmly. At least she would see herself as she actually was in these words. She would see herself for the ordinary, stupid and conventional parasite that was her soul.
"Come, Helen, I'm waiting."
The woman beside him arose slowly to her feet. Her face had become drawn. It looked almost old, and curiously beautiful, in the lamplight.
"It's hard, Helen, I know. But . . . it's for the best. We mustn't falter because of . . . of . . ."
She interrupted him with a gesture.
Placing a hand on his shoulder, she raised her eyes and stared into his face. Her eyes were luminous with tears.
"Don't," she said.
Dropping her hand from his shoulder she walked slowly out of the room toward their bedroom.
"Don't what?"
Bennett turned and pursued her with the question:
"Do you mean you don't want me to leave, Helen? Wait. Listen a moment. Don't you understand? If you mean that, say so, and we'll . . . we'll talk it over . . ."
He was addressing an empty room. An irritation seized him.
"Tf that's all you have to say," he cried angrily, "why, the matter is closed. There's only one thing for us. And that's ending it. Each going his way. Do you hear?"
He waited for several minutes. No sound came from the adjoining room. Perhaps she was weeping. He strained his ears for a sound of it. Silence. A coldness passed through him. He remembered suddenly that his razor blades were in the room. She might . . . might do something.
"Helen," he called.
He walked quickly after her. The bedroom was dark. Thrown across the bed, he could make out her figure. He approached and touched her on the shoulder.
"Please, Helen, we have to settle this. No hysterics. You're too big a woman to have hysterics . . . on such an occasion."
He tugged firmly at the shoulder.
A wan voice answered him.
"What do you want of me? Go away."
He sat down carefully on the bed.
"Not like this, Helen. If you'll only listen."
"I've listened. Please. Don't repeat it."
He hesitated. A strange bewilderment had overtaken his thought. He desired to know what she thought. It would be impossible to leave without knowing this.
"Are you agreed," he stammered. "If so . . . come. We'll go down to . . . to the lagoon and, and . . ."
He stopped. She was crying. With her face buried in the coverlet she had started sobbing, her body shaking, her fingers clutching wild at the spread.
Why the devil had he mentioned the lagoon! It had undoubtedly set her off. It was at the lagoon they had stood a summer night five years ago, holding each other by the hand, vowing to the silence and the dark.
"Helen, please! Don't cry. You'll only make it worse . . ."
His hand patted her shoulder timidly. A heartbroken little sentence drifted from the depths of the bed.
"I've been such a fool, oh, such a fool!"
"No, you haven't. You've been . . . been splendid. It's only something we can't help . . . either of us. It's the way things work out. Beyond our control. Beyond our vision. Come, now, don’t cry. We'll talk about it."
"Such a fool. Oh, God!"
"What do you mean, Helen?"
The increased sounds of her sobbing were his only answer. He sat in the dark of the room waiting. Withing him something mysterious, something inexplicable welled slowly to the surface. It passed into his throat, into his eyes, warming his body and confusing his thought.
"Helen," he murmured, "don't think that. We loved each other . . . once."
Yes, they had loved once. Once she had been for him everything that was desirable. To see her walking on the street was to behold all the beauty of life. To feel her arms upon him was to know all the happiness of the world. What transports, what exultations! They were still in the room, come now to stare with wan eyes at him. Their memories were still keen in his heart. Dead things that had, nevertheless, souls.
His hand slipped under her shoulder.
"Helen," he whispered.
Tears stopped him. An odd, unexpected grief had come over him. Tears moistened his face. At the feeling of them the last bit of his reserve dissolved. Tears fell upon his hand, his tears. He leaned over and caressed the soft hair of the woman’s head. He pressed his tear-wetted cheek against her temple. They remained weeping together for several moments. Then a hand crept into his. Her voice, broken and far away, murmured:
"Don't cry, George. It . . . it can't be helped. If your . . . your love is dead . . ."
The hand in his slipped gently, weakly out of his grasp. He felt a violent laceration as its finger tips fell from his palm.
"It was so beautiful . . . so wonderful. But go, please . . . I can't stand this . . ."
His hand, creeping over her face, stopped her.
Everything was gone, broken. This was the miserable end of their romance. Lying in the dark, derelicts, two creatures defeated by the immutable turns of fate. This the horrible finale to their years together. . . . His arms suddenly encircled her.
"Good-bye . . . dearest. If it will help . . . you . . . Good-bye."
"No!"
He held her wildly to him. A rush of memory was upon him. Little gestures of hers, little long-forgotten sentences, the tone of her voice in the days of the past, the laugh of her, the incidents of their home, intimate trifles—these crowded into his heart, ached in his thought. He embraced her more desperately, feeling dimly that he was bringing back to him things that had almost escaped him. A thousand memories of her were in his arms. He kissed her and felt upon his lips the rekindled warmth of the summer night at the lagoon, of nights that had followed and all things that had been.
"Helen," he murmured, "I can't. I was wrong."
He flung himself away from her and lay alone on the bed sobbing, his shoulders dancing in the darkness.
II
It was late morning when he awoke. A sense of adventure at once fell upon him. He turned his eyes and beheld Helen, fully dressed, sitting beside the window staring out upon the bright street.
He noticed that her face was white and that melancholy was in her eyes. Hearing him awake, she looked at him, a faint smile curving her lips. At the sight of her an enervation overpowered him. The memories of the night raced through his thought. She loved him—wildly, foolishly. He returned her smile with an effort at genial well being.
She shook her head.
"You look foolish, smiling like that," she said wearily.
He beckoned her to the bed. He took her hand and raising it to his lips, kissed it.
"Don't, George. I'm afraid. I couldn't sleep. I've been sitting there—thinking. After all—perhaps you're right. It isn't fair to you."
She turned her eyes full and clouded with tears upon him. He sat up gayly, and with a hilarious note in his voice, cried,
"Make way. The philosopher rises for his bath."
"I'm afraid, George."
Bennett contemplated her, amusement in his eyes.
"Silly,"? he cried. "After all our remarkable discussion last night."
"I know, but . . . you'll feel that way again when you're tired and overworked as you were and . . . and . . . oh, George, it can never be the same."
"Bah!"? exclaimed the mysteriously elate philosopher. "I've been thinking, too—massive, simple thoughts. Come, I've an announcement to make."
He was out of bed and fumbling in the closet for a dressing gown.
"This," he cried, reappearing, "is our wedding day, coming, as it should in all philosophically regulated homes, close upon the honeymoon."
He laughed at the sally. Helen contemplated him intently.
"Don't look as if you were frightened out of your wits, young lady."
Sinking with melodramatic mockery to his knee he extended his arm, one hand over his pajama jacket pocket, and cried,
"Will you be mine, fair one? I cannot live without you!"
"George, don't be silly. It isn't nice."
He arose and with a sudden serious humility placed his hands on her shoulders and added,
"I mean it."
III
It was evening when they returned. They entered the house walking slowly. A number of sallies were on Bennett’s lips. But the occasion seemed to have acquired suddenly a preposterous solemnity. A few minutes later they were seated as they had been the night before when he had started to . . .
Bennett sighed. Helen looked up, her face flushed, her eyes sparkling.
"Wouldn't you like to take your walk, George? Now that we're stupidly married you needn't forego all the joys of unconventionality."
"Oh, no, I'd rather stay here. With you," he added, somewhat hurriedly.
"Don't be silly, George. Go for your walk."
He arose with alacrity. He wanted to be alone, to think. He had been thinking most of the day, but somehow the process had been unsatisfactory. He stooped over and kissed his wife.
"I'll be back soon," he said.
She laughed.
"You're funny," she cried. "Why, there'll be no living with you now that you're a respectably married man."
He thought as he passed out of the house that there was a vaguely unnatural note in her laugh. He walked on down the familiar stretch of street toward the park.
"A bit of a gloat," he murmured to himself.
He entered the park, searching out the bench he had occupied the night before. For long moments he sat staring vacantly at the sweep of darkness overhead. Bits of the ceremony recurred to him, the fat, red-faced judge, the vastly amused clerk. He frowned. The idiots! Why do people laugh at weddings? His eyes returned to the graveled path. A man and woman were walking arm in arm down the stretch toward the lagoon. He stared after them in a curious melancholy daze. As they vanished he jumped to his feet, an exclamation on his lips,
"Heavens—it's time I was going home!"