The Locusts' Years Part 20

"Will you listen to the story of my life, Mrs. Collingwood?" he said with more of sharpness in his tone than was characteristic of him.

Charlotte had little curiosity in anyone else's affairs; but she would have listened to anything at that moment to slip away from the discussion of her own. She nodded listlessly, and Kingsnorth began speaking in a very judicial tone.

"I was what is called in England well born, though my people were not rich. My father came of a very old and once distinguished family, but was the owner of an impoverished estate. My mother was equally well born, and possessed a small income of her own. You probably know that, in England, the eldest son is the family; n.o.body else really counts. In our family there were two girls, then my elder brother, the 'heir,' then myself, and another girl. I cannot remember the time when the rest of us were not all being pinched to keep things going for the heir. Tom was, on the whole, a pretty good fellow, but that sort of rearing would spoil the best nature that was ever born. He got into the way of thinking that the rest of us ought to sacrifice everything we had or could hope to have to his position. He was also a devilish good-looking fellow, easy-going and selfish, as was natural.

"My two elder sisters were promptly married off, on the whole pretty well. The difficulty came with Tom. He had to marry money, and he had not enough in himself or the place to make money come begging for him.

"Tom was in an expensive regiment. My dream of life was also the army, but the paternal pocketbook couldn't stand it, so I was put in a bank instead. I promptly fell head-over-ears in love with the banker's daughter.

"Her family was what we called 'new people'; but there was plenty of money, and if Elena wanted me, why she must have me. Therefore no objections were made to the engagement. I was in the seventh heaven of happiness. I do not deny that I was glad she had plenty of money; but I should have married her just the same if she had not had a cent.

"Elena paid a visit to my home in the early days of our betrothal, and--well, she threw me over deliberately for my elder brother. Looking back now, I can see some excuse for her. I was unimportant in my family, of course, and Tom was its centre. He looked handsome in his uniform, and he was the heir. The place had age and dignity, and she knew its value.

"I give Tom the credit of being ashamed and of feeling some remorse; but my father and mother planned--actually aided and abetted my betrayal. They wanted the money for the heir.

"I made a row, naturally, but it was fruitless. Elena wept and declared that she would have her own way. Tom looked ashamed, but his bringing up had made him const.i.tutionally selfish; and the parents on both sides joined to suppress me.

"The end was that I cleared out, blind with rage and pain, cursing Elena and my kin; and in the next three years in London I went to what is commonly known as the dogs.

"My self-pity is justifiable in my eyes to-day; but I made a fatal mistake. If I had had the right stuff in me, Elena couldn't have driven me to the dogs. I might have hugged my griefs and have grown embittered; but my worst mistake was the desire to 'drown sorrow'

with drink, with cards, with all the undesirable vices of men. If I had hugged sorrow and warmed it to my heart, I might have suffered more, but I should not have crumbled up morally like a gold ring in quicksilver.

"England has always a frontier war or two on her hands, and I got into one. A private, a 'gentleman ranker' has a magnificent opportunity to sink in the English army. Afterwards I drifted over here, and got into pearl-fis.h.i.+ng. I liked the life and its adventures (we had to fight a bit in the early days), and then when the Americans came, I fell in with Collingwood. We fancied each other on sight. Then we picked up Mac, and I lighted accidentally on this oyster bed, and we settled here.

"Throughout all these years I have kept up a desultory correspondence with my married sisters; but I have drifted out of their lives, and I realize that I represent to them only a possible legacy. It is my business to make some money, and one day to die and leave it to them; and meanwhile a few gifts from the Orient are not unacceptable.

"Well, to shorten this tale, I settled here and married my wife. You need not look so startled. She was my wife legally; bell, book, and candle were all there. I lived openly with her in my house till the morning when you landed on Maylubi. Then, after I had seen and talked with you, I went home and ordered her out. She loved me, and she obeyed me. Five months later she died." He stopped and wiped a cold perspiration from his brow.

"But how could you have kept it from me?" cried Charlotte. "Why did not Martin or Mrs. Maclaughlin tell me?"

"Mrs. Mac had her orders from Mac. She never disobeys him. Martin was simply a good friend."

"But he brought me here." She stopped, crimsoning with indignation.

"Precisely. He brought you here to a.s.sociate with me, a respectable married man, as he considered me. He has never understood my conduct. He doesn't understand why I preferred you to believe me a profligate instead of a decent married man. He has never understood why I should be willing to have my child pa.s.s for illegitimate. But you understand, Mrs. Collingwood."

"Yes, I understand." Then with sudden pa.s.sion she cried, "But it was not my fault. I was trained to it."

"As I was. But, if I had had one spark of manhood in me, I should have stood by the woman I had married, and should have taken my child to my heart in the face of the world. But I did not have the courage. I writhed and twisted to get out of facing the consequences of my own actions; and since then the weight of my own self-contempt has grown steadily heavier. Don't talk to me of reform," he added savagely as she started to speak. "There isn't any reform for such as I. I tell you the consciousness of my own moral cowardice is with me day and night. It never leaves me. And it's the unG.o.dly unfairness of it all that kills me by inches. I see other men about me, living lives not so very different from mine: Collingwood himself has been no saint. But because I've wanted better things, because I drank my cup, knowing that it was poor drink, it has not slaked my thirst, and it has parched the last drop of sweetness out of my life.

"Don't you go another foot along this trail; you began it when you married Collingwood. If you double and twist on your tracks again, you are lost. Hug pain, hug misery, martyr yourself, if you will, but don't try to indulge your own selfish will, and to square things by saying that you despise yourself. G.o.d in Heaven! Do you know what it is to despise yourself? You don't now; but you will some day." He wiped the perspiration that stood in great drops on his brow.

Charlotte, who had turned very white, sat nerveless and trembling like a leaf. All her pride was in arms that John Kingsnorth, degraded scion of a decent family, should be giving advice to her; and then she saw, with sudden horror, what a tremendous distance she had drifted with the current before John Kingsnorth's words could be true.

For they were true! She had married Martin Collingwood, blaming herself for the weakness that made human affection and the freedom from the responsibility of self-support loom larger than all the traditions of birth and breeding. She had wanted her romance as every other woman in the world does; and romance, as it comes to most women, had been denied her. She might have gone out and found one, as many a woman does, and might, in time, have taken her flirtations lightly. But she had been too timid and too proud to flirt. The doubt came to her that it would have been better to play lightly at romance than to purchase it at the sacrifice of the second essential factor that makes a true marriage. Then came another throb of terror. She saw herself bent wilfully again on her own way, doubling, twisting, as Kingsnorth phrased it, trying to escape her conscience by saying that she despised herself: but the fact stared her in the face that she was turning on all the principles that had justified romance. She had married Collingwood against her reason, justifying herself for being swayed by human feeling by reiterating the finality of the action. For better, for worse, she had said--but now that it was for worse, its finality had somehow disappeared. Where was her mind--her will--her conscience?

She sat for a long time in bitter silence, but roused herself as Kingsnorth, who had been furtively watching her, drew out his tobacco pouch and extracted from its depths a little ball of tissue paper. He unfolded it, and there appeared to her startled eyes a single pearl of unusual size and l.u.s.ter.

"What a beauty!" she cried, bending forward to look at it.

"Yes, it's beautiful enough," said Kingsnorth. "I've carried it about with me for three years. Even Collingwood has never seen it."

"I wish you had not--" she stopped, flus.h.i.+ng.

"I didn't show it to you to tempt you. It's my moral slough. There are times when I've felt that its h.e.l.l l.u.s.ter was my soul, and that I had nothing but the blackened sh.e.l.l in my body. It stood for the dearest emotions a man can have--for love and vengeance."

"You are horrible," she cried, shrinking from him.

"I am better than I used to be," replied Kingsnorth. "I found this bauble three years ago, before Martin and I went into business. I never intended to sell it. Do you know what I wanted it for? To buy her back, and to blacken the face of the man who stole her from me. Yes, shrink! G.o.d help me, I love that woman still with a love gone awry. Other women, yes, and better women, though they had not her grace and training, have loved me; but, in my heart of hearts, I have held them all cheap. It was she, the woman who jilted me before all the world, that I wanted. It was he, whose heart I wanted to wring. Poor cheap human nature! Twelve years I've roughed it in shacks and junks, a flannel s.h.i.+rt to my back, and pork and beans or rice and fish in my stomach; while he has sat beneath the oaks we played under in our childhood, and has slept in the panelled rooms of our home, and has held the woman he stole from me in his arms! Talk of family affection! There isn't such a thing. What am I to the mother who bore me? A derelict son, adrift in the South Seas, who is not to come home without some money. What am I to the sisters who played with me and fought with me over our nursery tea? A scape-grace brother, who, it is hoped, will keep out of the way, but who ought to make some money and leave it to their children. Money! I've toiled like a negro slave for money, but not for them--not for them! It was for her. I wanted to go back rich. She sold herself once; why not again? The pearl was not enough in itself to tempt. It was the bauble, the outward sign."

"You hoped--that?" She could not help glancing at his seamed, degenerate countenance.

"Never after you came. The look in your eyes told me what I had become. Since then I have lived--with myself." He smiled a wretched, drawn smile.

She pointed gingerly to the bauble. "Why don't you get rid of it? sell it?"

"Sell my soul? Did I not tell you my soul is steeped in it? No, bury it with me. Somehow I know I'll not last long. Take this word from me. If you know anything of me when death comes, see that this does not go to the women who betrayed me and pitied me not. Women are selfish creatures. They sun themselves on their own cat premises. They have no pity for the poor devils on the outside."

"Is it women alone? or isn't it men as well, who are pitiless? Or isn't it just life? Yet it isn't pitiless to all. There are those who dance through it on rose-strewn paths." She stopped, the sense of the great differences in individual lives overwhelming her.

Kingsnorth rose. "Well, that hasn't been my life or yours. I have seen that you suffer. But suffer! Don't change that look on your face. Better poignant suffering than moral decay. I tell you, you are facing it." He rose abruptly and walked away, leaving her like a figure carved in ivory, looking out on the waste of waters, that seemed the emblem of waste in her own life.

CHAPTER XVI

In the month that elapsed between her conversation with Kingsnorth and the time set by Collingwood for his return, Charlotte had time for an exhausting and (as it seemed to her) fruitless self-inquisition. She was alternately the prey of a hopeless apathy and of a consuming impatience, but in either mood there ran a strong undercurrent of rebellion against all the formative influences of her life. At times the future yawned before her like a bottomless gulf, into the darkness and loneliness of which she must inevitably sink helpless. Out of love as she was with her husband, the prospect of going back to her forlorn, loveless state was one she could not contemplate. To get up day after day, knowing that there was, in all this world, no human being who took more than a casual interest in her; to go to bed at night, knowing that, if ruin and disaster overtook the world, no human thought would turn to her, no voice cry to hers out of the darkness, no warm human hand reach for hers, seemed to her a fate infinitely worse than death. Yet she had lived just that life for twenty-eight years before she married Martin Collingwood to escape from it; and, though she had been most unhappy in it, she certainly had not regarded it as a tragedy. She remembered once having seen a young soldier come forth from the court-room after he had received a life sentence for shooting his corporal. The boy had lifted his hat with his manacled hands and had raised a white face to the touch of the cool morning wind. Something in the gesture had expressed his sense of helplessness in the grasp of that terrible thing we call the law. He was looking down the long vista of years at a living death ten thousand times worse than death, at a life from which every human ambition, every hope, every natural spring had been erased. His brother had followed behind him, a short distance of twenty or thirty feet, already the emblem of a separation that was to become complete. The brother was weeping as strong men do when their hearts are wrung; but, as she had looked at them, one so quiet, the other convulsed with grief, she had recognized that, to the second man, life held comfort and healing still. In the long years to come, new interests would take the place of the old tie; a wife and babes would fill that life; healthy toil allied to honorable ambition would make the years seem to fly; and the memory of a convict brother would drop out of life, only to be recalled tenderly at those seasons when a universal festival brings back the old days and makes the rotting thread of memory seem new and strong once more. But what of the other? Nothing new would come to him, nothing to strive for, nothing to look forward to, nothing to live upon but memories that would be very, very bitter. There would be toil and food and rest, and renewed toil, and the awful knowledge that long before he ceased to live he had ceased to be even to those who had been his nearest and dearest.

Well, she had lived it once. She could live it again. As with the soldier there would be toil and food and rest, and renewed toil. But the heart cries loudly for more than these things in life, until that heart is chastened into meekness. Would she ever be meek, she wondered sadly. If she could have accepted her fate with submission and sadness only, she would have felt herself indeed treated with mercy by the unseen fates. But there was no element of submission in her mood. As often as she contemplated the future, and said to herself that these things must be, had to be, so often the wild will rose within her to say that they must not be. She lay often for hours at a time face downward on her bed, not a muscle moving, not a sound escaping her tense lips; but her pa.s.sivity was the physical expression of an impotence that left her prostrate before the overwhelming fates.

Often there recurred to her mind a conversation which had taken place between her and a fellow nurse, a young, joyous, magnetic creature for whom she had formed a friends.h.i.+p more nearly approximating intimacy than any other that had come into her life. It was in the last days of her engagement, and she had spoken of a fear of what unhappiness love might bring into her life. The other had looked at her with amazement. "Love!" she said. "I can imagine it bringing a lot of joy, but why unhappiness?"

"Why unhappiness?" Charlotte asked in vain for the reason; but the fact stood stronger than any "why's," that there had been, in all her life, some fundamental outrage of human sentiment. It had existed in that strange paternal att.i.tude of her father's; it had lived on in that perfunctory kindness of the nuns who had found her an antipathetic and incomprehensible child; and it had grown and intensified in the curious, prying interest developed in those who had governed her later years. That any such a condition could exist by a series of fortuitous events was out of the question. There had to be cause running through it all. Yet search her heart and mind as she would, she found there no wells of bitterness or evil thought or envy or malice to justify relations so peculiar as had finally established themselves between her and human society.

The solution of the question came to her suddenly, when, on a particularly dreary day, she had been trying to discipline herself and to keep her thoughts from running on her own troubles. She had spent two hours trying to read the story, written by a great modern author, of three precocious school-boys. She had been a great admirer of the author, and, up to that time, had found fascination in his pages; but the three boys were little to her taste. As she mused sadly, a flash of insight came, and another; and, little by little, she saw clearly what had so long puzzled her.

The precocious child is abnormal, and inspires in his fellow men that blind instinct to worry and torment which runs all through the animal world. She had been a precocious child, made uncanny by perceptions of the hidden currents and causes of life at a time when she should have been gurgling over its toys. As she recalled her sensitiveness to impressions, her powers of reading what was pa.s.sing in others'

minds, and the singular growth of self-concealment and self-control that had grown out of them, it seemed to her that her keen brain had been her lifelong curse. Little by little, she went back to her convent days and tried to put herself in the place of the good sisters who had taught her. How distressing it must have been to them to feel the dumb interrogation that was always so strong under outward obedience! If she could have been unconscious of her father's mental state and could have made a happy child's claim upon his affections, would he not in time have come to love her? If, when she was a lonely orphan, living on her cousin's sufferance, she had been able to reveal to her relatives the suffering that she really underwent in the strange ostracism which she had built up for herself, would not pity have conquered their selfishness? She drew a long, pained sigh, as she thought of what a difference might have been made in her life by a little less brain and a little more moral courage.

She was lying in her steamer chair on the veranda of her house at the time; and by her side, on a taboret, stood a gla.s.s of water. She picked it up and smiled over it. It was full of microbes (dead, of course, for Americans drink no unboiled water in the Philippines), and she knew it, and cared little, for she could not see them. But had she possessed an eye with the magnifying power of a strong microscope, she could not have tasted the water for the sight of the dead organisms would have made it unpalatable. She began to wonder what would be the effect on society, if there were let loose upon it a body of persons with microscopic eyes. They would shrink and exclaim and turn faint at dishes that the epicure delights in. How they would upset dinners and spoil little suppers and picnic luncheons! How eagerly would their society be avoided, and how soon their name become anathema!

But though physically the microscopic eye does not yet exist, the mental and spiritual microscopic eye does exist, and it has about the same distressing effect upon its human brethren who do not possess it as the other sort might have. She had had the microscopic eye--nothing could blind her to facts--and her starts and shrinkings had made her antipathetic to most of the persons with whom she had come in contact. It had remained for Martin, the indomitably ignorant, to be blind to her mental att.i.tude, to a.s.sume her a normal woman of the world in which he found her. What of grat.i.tude did she not owe him?

The thought p.r.i.c.ked her to her feet, set her to restless pacings of the floor. Whatever of grat.i.tude she owed him, she was preparing ingrat.i.tude in the course she was still bent upon pursuing. Never had she appreciated the stubborn inheritance of her own will till she measured herself against it in this struggle. Whatever the conscience and the intelligence might say, her will said "No"