One of Ours & Alexander's Bridge. Уилла Кэсер
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here we are, turning out of the Square. You are not angry with me, Hilda? Thank you for this walk, my dear. Go in and get dry things on at once. You’ll be having a great night tomorrow.”
She put out her hand. “Thank you, Mac, for everything. Good-night.”
MacConnell trudged off through the fog, and she went slowly upstairs. Her slippers and dressing gown were waiting for her before the fire. “I shall certainly see him in New York. He will see by the papers that we are coming. Perhaps he knows it already,” Hilda kept thinking as she undressed. “Perhaps he will be at the dock. No, scarcely that; but I may meet him in the street even before he comes to see me.” Marie placed the tea-table by the fire and brought Hilda her letters. She looked them over, and started as she came to one in a handwriting that she did not often see; Alexander had written to her only twice before, and he did not allow her to write to him at all. “Thank you, Marie. You may go now.”
Hilda sat down by the table with the letter in her hand, still unopened. She looked at it intently, turned it over, and felt its thickness with her fingers. She believed that she sometimes had a kind of second-sight about letters, and could tell before she read them whether they brought good or evil tidings. She put this one down on the table in front of her while she poured her tea. At last, with a little shiver of expectancy, she tore open the envelope and read:—
Boston, February —
MY DEAR HILDA:—
It is after twelve o’clock. Every one else is in bed and I am sitting alone in my study. I have been happier in this room than anywhere else in the world. Happiness like that makes one insolent. I used to think these four walls could stand against anything. And now I scarcely know myself here. Now I know that no one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person. Two people, when they love each other, grow alike in their tastes and habits and pride, but their moral natures (whatever we may mean by that canting expression) are never welded. The base one goes on being base, and the noble one noble, to the end.
The last week has been a bad one; I have been realizing how things used to be with me. Sometimes I get used to being dead inside, but lately it has been as if a window beside me had suddenly opened, and as if all the smells of spring blew in to me. There is a garden out there, with stars overhead, where I used to walk at night when I had a single purpose and a single heart. I can remember how I used to feel there, how beautiful everything about me was, and what life and power and freedom I felt in myself. When the window opens I know exactly how it would feel to be out there. But that garden is closed to me. How is it, I ask myself, that everything can be so different with me when nothing here has changed? I am in my own house, in my own study, in the midst of all these quiet streets where my friends live. They are all safe and at peace with themselves. But I am never at peace. I feel always on the edge of danger and change.
I keep remembering locoed horses I used to see on the range when I was a boy. They changed like that. We used to catch them and put them up in the corral, and they developed great cunning. They would pretend to eat their oats like the other horses, but we knew they were always scheming to get back at the loco.
It seems that a man is meant to live only one life in this world. When he tries to live a second, he develops another nature. I feel as if a second man had been grafted into me. At first he seemed only a pleasure-loving simpleton, of whose company I was rather ashamed, and whom I used to hide under my coat when I walked the Embankment, in London. But now he is strong and sullen, and he is fighting for his life at the cost of mine. That is his one activity: to grow strong. No creature ever wanted so much to live. Eventually, I suppose, he will absorb me altogether. Believe me, you will hate me then.
And what have you to do, Hilda, with this ugly story? Nothing at all. The little boy drank of the prettiest brook in the forest and he became a stag. I write all this because I can never tell it to you, and because it seems as if I could not keep silent any longer. And because I suffer, Hilda. If any one I loved suffered like this, I’d want to know it. Help me, Hilda!
B.A.
Chapter 9
On the last Saturday in April, the New York “Times” published an account of the strike complications which were delaying Alexander’s New Jersey bridge, and stated that the engineer himself was in town and at his office on West Tenth Street.
On Sunday, the day after this notice appeared, Alexander worked all day at his Tenth Street rooms. His business often called him to New York, and he had kept an apartment there for years, subletting it when he went abroad for any length of time. Besides his sleeping-room and bath, there was a large room, formerly a painter’s studio, which he used as a study and office. It was furnished with the cast-off possessions of his bachelor days and with odd things which he sheltered for friends of his who followed itinerant and more or less artistic callings. Over the fireplace there was a large old-fashioned gilt mirror. Alexander’s big work-table stood in front of one of the three windows, and above the couch hung the one picture in the room, a big canvas of charming color and spirit, a study of the Luxembourg Gardens in early spring, painted in his youth by a man who had since become a portrait-painter of international renown. He had done it for Alexander when they were students together in Paris.
Sunday was a cold, raw day and a fine rain fell continuously. When Alexander came back from dinner he put more wood on his fire, made himself comfortable, and settled down at his desk, where he began checking over estimate sheets. It was after nine o’clock and he was lighting a second pipe, when he thought he heard a sound at his door. He started and listened, holding the burning match in his hand; again he heard the same sound, like a firm, light tap. He rose and crossed the room quickly. When he threw open the door he recognized the figure that shrank back into the bare, dimly lit hallway. He stood for a moment in awkward constraint, his pipe in his hand.
“Come in,” he said to Hilda at last, and closed the door behind her. He pointed to a chair by the fire and went back to his worktable. “Won’t you sit down?”
He was standing behind the table, turning over a pile of blueprints nervously. The yellow light from the student’s lamp fell on his hands and the purple sleeves of his velvet smoking-jacket, but his flushed face and big, hard head were in the shadow. There was something about him that made Hilda wish herself at her hotel again, in the street below, anywhere but where she was.
“Of course I know, Bartley,” she said at last, “that after this you won’t owe me the least consideration. But we sail on Tuesday. I saw that interview in the paper yesterday, telling where you were, and I thought I had to see you. That’s all. Good-night; I’m going now.” She turned and her hand closed on the door-knob.
Alexander hurried toward her and took her gently by the arm. “Sit down, Hilda; you’re wet through. Let me take off your coat — and your boots; they’re oozing water.” He knelt down and began to unlace her shoes, while Hilda shrank into the chair. “Here, put your feet on this stool. You don’t mean to say you walked down — and without overshoes!”
Hilda hid her face in her hands. “I was afraid to take a cab. Can’t you see, Bartley, that I’m terribly frightened? I’ve been through this a hundred times today. Don’t be any more angry than you can help. I was all right until I knew you were in town. If you’d sent me a note, or telephoned me, or anything! But you won’t let me write to you, and I had to see you after that letter, that terrible letter you wrote me when you got home.”
Alexander faced her, resting his arm on the mantel behind him, and began to brush the sleeve of his jacket. “Is this the way you mean to answer it, Hilda?” he asked unsteadily.
She was afraid to look up at him. “Didn’t — didn’t you mean even to say goodby to me, Bartley? Did you mean just to — quit me?” she asked. “I came to tell you that I’m willing to do as you asked me. But it’s no use talking about that now. Give me my things, please.” She put her hand out toward the fender.
Alexander sat down on the arm