The Brimming Cup
CHAPTER XIX
MR. WELLES LIGHTS THE FUSE
July 2.
That early morning talk with Mr. Welles had left Marise
trembling with helpless sorrow and exasperation. She sat on the
bench where he had left her, and felt the nervous tears stinging
her eyes. When she looked up and saw Vincent Marsh was standing
there, extremely pale, as visibly shaken as she, as visibly little
in control of himself, she burst out, "So you too know. He has just
told me that he is really going. The very date is set. His cousin
has a room in her boarding house engaged for him. He's going to
work as a clerk to pay for the extra expenses of the life there.
Oh!" She struck her hand on the back of the bench.
Vincent Marsh sat down beside her, his eyes on hers. He said in
a curious, low voice, rough and husky, "I wish you would do
something for me. I wish you would think with all your might,
deeply, just why you are so opposed to his doing what evidently
seems to him a very saintly and heroic action; and then tell me why
it is."
Marise felt this as a challenge. He was always challenging
everything. This time she was more than ready. "I don't need any
time to think of reasons!" she cried. "It's obvious to anyone with
any sense for the reality of human values, who isn't fooled by
threadbare old words. It's one of those wasteful, futile,
exasperating tricks people play on themselves in the name of
'duty.' He's throwing away something real and true, something that
could add to the richness of human life, he's throwing away the
happiness that comes of living as suits his nature, and so creating
a harmony that enriches everybody who touches him. And what's he
doing it for? To satisfy a morbid need for self-sacrifice. He's
going to do harm, in all probability, mix up a situation already
complicated beyond solution, and why is he? So that he can indulge
himself in the perverse pleasure of the rasp of a hair-shirt. He
doesn't really use his intelligence to think, to keep a true sense
of proportions; he takes an outworn and false old ideal of
self-sacrifice, and uses it not to do anybody any real good, but to
put a martyr's crown on his head."
She became conscious that her words were having a singular
effect upon Vincent. A dark flush had come over all his face. His
gaze on her was extraordinary in its intentness, in its eagerness,
in its fierceness. She stopped suddenly, as though he had broken in
on what she was saying.
He did not stir from his place, but to her he seemed to tower
taller. Into his dark, intent face came an exultant look of power
and authority which fell on her like a hot wind. With a loud
knocking of her heart she knew. Before he spoke, she knew what he
would say. And he saw that.
He opened those burning lips and said in the same low voice,
rough with its intensity, "You see what you have done. You have
spoken for me. You have said at last what I have been silently and
desperately calling out to you. You know what has happened. You
have said it, it is obvious to anyone with any sense of human
values. Make an end! Make an end! Come away from a position where
only an outworn old ideal holds you to futility and waste. Come
away where you will really live and know the fullness of life. Come
away from that false notion of duty which makes you do for the
children what you know is not best for them, only because it is the
traditional thing to do, only because it gives you a martyr's crown
to wear. I don't say anything now, as I would to any other woman in
the world, as I would have said to you weeks ago before I knew all
that you are . . . I don't say anything about the imbecility of
keeping such a woman as you are here in this narrow, drab hole,
this sordid prison . . . you born, if ever a human being was, to
rich and warm and harmonious living! It is your birthright. Let me
give it to you. All that, even that, a whole world of beauty and
fullness waiting for you to create it to glorious being, all that
is nothing compared to what has come to pass between us, you and
me; compared to that other world of impassioned living existence
that is waiting for you. Come away from the man who is nothing more
to you than the house you live in . . . nothing but a habit."
She started at this, moving out of the stony immobility in which
she gazed at him, listened to him. She did not know that she had
moved, was incapable of willing to do so. It had been a mere reflex
start as though she had been struck. But at the sight of it, the
flame in his eyes leaped up. "No, no, no!" he cried with an
insistent triumph, "he is nothing more to you than a habit. And you
are nothing more to him. You were right, on that evening when you
shrank away from the sight of the place in Italy where in your
ignorant youth you made the mistake of trying to join your life to
his. There is not a breath you draw, not a turn of your head or
body . . . I know them all . . . that does not prove that he is
nothing to you now. I have seen you take a handkerchief from his
pocket as you would take it from a bureau-drawer. I have seen him
set you on one side, to pass through a door, as he would set a
chair on one side. You don't even see him any more when you look at
him, and he doesn't see you. Whatever there may have been between
you, if there was ever anything real, it is dead now, dead and
buried . . . and you the most living woman who ever wore flesh and
blood! And I am a living man! You know, I don't need to say it, you
know what happens when our looks meet. Our looks only! Life flares
up like a torch in both of us. You know if I but brush against your
skirt, how I cannot speak! You know how when our hands touch, every
drop of blood in our two bodies burns! You are a grown woman. You
know life as well as I do. You know what this means. You are no
longer even a part of his life. You are all of mine. Look at me
now."
He flung out his hands, shaking uncontrollably. "Do you see how
I show this, say this anywhere, tell this to you here, now, where
anyone could hear me? I am not ashamed of it. It is not a thing to
hide. It is a thing to glory in. It is the only honestly living
thing in all our miserable human life, the passion of a man and a
woman for each other. It is the only thing that moves us out of our
cowardly lethargy of dead-and-alive egotism. The thing that is
really base and false is to pretend that what is dead is still
alive. Your marriage is dead. Your children do not need you as you
pretend. Let yourself go in this flood that is sweeping us along. I
had never thought to know it. I could fall down and worship you
because you have shown it to me. But I will show it to you, that
and the significance of what you will be when you are no longer
smothered and starved. In all this scrawling ant-heap of humanity,
there are only a handful of human beings who ever really live. And
we will be among them. All the rest are nothing, less than nothing,
to be stamped down if they impede you. They have no other destiny.
But we have! Everything comes down to that in the end. That is the
only truth. That . . . and you and I!"
In the distance, someone called Marise's name. He thought she
made a move, and said, leaning towards her, the heat of his body
burning through to her arm where he touched her, "No, no, none of
those trivial, foolish interruptions that tie you hand and foot,
can tie us any longer. They have no real strength. They can't stand
for an instant against something alive. All that rattles in your
ears, that keeps you from knowing what you really are . . ."
Someone was hurrying down the walk towards them, hidden by the
hedge. Marise could not have turned her head if her life had hung
on the action.
Vincent looked straight at her, straight and deep and strong
into her eyes, and for an instant his burning lips were pressed on
hers. The contact was terrible, momentous.
When he went on speaking, without haste, unafraid although the
hurrying steps were almost there, she could scarcely hear his
voice, although it was urgent and puissant as the impact of his
eyes. "You can't get away from this now. It is here. It has been
said. It lives between us, and you are not strong enough, no power
on earth is strong enough, to put it down."
And then the outer world broke in on them, swept between them
with an outcry. Someone was there, someone who drew short sobbing
breaths, who caught at her and clung to her. It was Cousin Hetty's
old Agnes . . . why in the world was she here? . . . and she was
saying in a loud voice as though she had no control of it, "Oh, oh!
Come quick! Come quick!"
Marise stood up, carrying the old woman with her. She was
entirely certain now that she was in a nightmare, from which she
would presently awake, wet with cold sweat.
"Come! Come!" cried the old woman, beating her hands on Marise's
arm. "Perhaps it ain't too late. Perhaps you can do something."
"What has happened?" asked Marise, making her voice sharp and
imperative to pierce the other's agitation.
"I don't know. I don't know," sobbed Agnes. "She didn't come
down for breakfast. I went up to see . . . oh, go quick! Go
quick!"
She went down, half on the bench, half on the ground.
Marise and Marsh stood for an instant, petrified.
There was only the smallest part of Marise's consciousness which
was alive to this. Most of it lay numbed and bewildered, still
hearing, like a roll of thunder, the voice of Vincent Marsh.
Then she turned. "Look out for her, will you," she said briefly.
"No, don't come with me. I'll go by the back road. It's the
quickest, but it's too narrow for a car. You drive to Ashley and
bring the doctor in your car."
She ran down the path and around the house to the road, not
feeling the blinding heat of the sun. She ran along the dusty road,
a few steps from the house before the turn into the narrow lane.
She felt nothing at all but a great need for haste.
As she ran, putting all her strength into her running, there
were moments when she forgot why she was hurrying, where she was
going, what had happened; but she did not slacken her pace. She was
on the narrow back road now, in the dense shade of the pines below
the Eagle Rocks. In five minutes she would be at Cousin Hetty's.
That was where she was going.
She was running more slowly now over the rough, uneven, stony
road, and she was aware, more than of anything else, of a pain in
her chest where she could not draw a long breath. It seemed to her
that she must be now wholly in the bad dream, for she had the
nightmare sensation of running with all her strength and not
advancing at all. The somber, thick-set pines seemed to be
implacably in the same place, no matter how she tried to pass them,
to leave them behind, to hurry on. Everything else in the silent,
breathless, midsummer forest was rooted immovably deep in the
earth. She alone was killing herself with haste, and yet futilely .
. . not able to get forward, not able to . . .
And then, fit to turn her brain, the forest drew aside and
showed her another nightmare figure, a man, far away to her right,
running down the steep incline that sloped up to the Rocks. A man
running as she had been wishing she could run, a powerful, roughly
dressed man, rapt in a passion of headlong flight, that cast him
down the rough slope, over the rocks, through the brambles, as
though his flight were part of an endless fall.
Marise stopped stock-still, shocked out of every sensation but
the age-old woman's instinct of fear and concealment.
The man plunged forward, not seeing her where she stood on the
road across which he now burst, flinging himself out of the pines
on one side and into the thicket of undergrowth on the other.
Far from him as she was, Marise could hear, through the forest
hush, the terrible sound of his breathing as he ran, as he
stumbled, as he struggled to his feet, fighting crazily with the
thick undergrowth. Those loud hoarse gasps . . . it was as though
he were being choked to death by a hand on his throat.
He was gone, down the slope towards the valley road. The leaves
closed together behind him. The forest was impenetrably silent
again. Marise knew who he was, then, recognized him for 'Gene
Powers beyond any doubt.
She felt a strange mixture of pity and scorn and envy. To be so
primitive as that . . . to think, even for an instant's madness,
that you could run away on your own two poor human feet from
whatever life brought to you!
She herself was hurrying forward again. What was she going to?
What had she left behind? The passage of the other runner had not
taken a single moment's time. She was now at the path which led to
Cousin Hetty's side-door.
She darted along this, and found herself in the yard before the
door, open as Agnes had left it when she rushed out for help.
A tea-kettle on the kitchen-stove sang in a low murmur. The
clock ticked loudly, wagging its pendulum back and forth. The cat,
stretched at full length on the floor in a yellow square of
sunlight, lifted a drowsy head and looked at her. There was a smell
of freshly made coffee in the air. As she stood there for an
instant till the whirling in her head should stop, a stick of wood
in the fire broke and fell together.
Marise went through into the dining-room where the table laid
for breakfast stood in a quiet expectancy. The old house, well-kept
and well-loved, wore a tranquil expression of permanence and
security.
But out in the dusky hail, the white stairs stood palely
motioning up. There Marise felt a singular heavy coolness in the
stagnant air. She went up the stairs, leaning on the balustrade,
and found herself facing an open door.
Beyond it, in a shuttered and shaded room, stood a still white
bed. And on the bed, still and white and distant, lay something
dead. It was not Cousin Hetty. That austere, cold face, proud and
stern, was not Cousin Hetty's. It was her grandmother's, her
father's, her uncle's face, whom Cousin Hetty had never at all
resembled. It was the family shell which Cousin Hetty had for a
time inhabited.
Marise came forward and crossed the threshold. Immediately she
was aware of a palpable change in the atmosphere. The room was
densely filled with silence, which folded her about coldly. She
sank down on a chair. She sat motionless, looking at what lay there
so quiet, at the unimaginable emptiness and remoteness of that
human countenance.
This was the end. She had come to the end of her running and her
haste and her effort to help. All the paltry agitations and
sorrows, the strains and defeats and poor joys, they were all
hurrying forward to meet this end.
All the scruples, and sacrifices, and tearing asunder of human
desires to make them fit words that were called ideals, all
amounted to this same nothingness in the end.
What was Cousin Hetty's life now, with its tiny inhibitions, its
little passivities? The same nothingness it would have been, had
she grasped boldly at life's realities and taken whatever she
wanted.
And all Cousin Hetty's mother's sacrifices for her, her mother's
hopes for her, the slow transfusion of her mother's life to hers;
that was all dead now, had been of no avail against this
nothingness. Some day Elly would lie like that, and all that she
had done for Elly, or could do for her, would be only a pinch of
ashes. If she, if Cousin Hetty, if Cousin Hetty's mother, if Elly,
if all of them, took hotly whatever the hours had to give, they
could not more certainly be brought to nothingness and oblivion in
the end. . . .
Those dreams of her . . . being one with a great current,
sweeping forward . . . what pitiful delusions! . . . There was
nothing that swept forward. There were only futile storms of froth
and excitement that whirled you about to no end, one after another.
One died down and left you becalmed and stagnant, and another rose.
And that would die down in its turn. Until at the end, shipwreck,
and a sinking to this darkly silent abyss.