we had to go back to the subject of course, it couldn't be left hanging in the air like that. it was a day or two later at hampton court, where we had gone for no reason really, except that it seemed a more commensurate background for what was going on in us, the identification in each by the other, of the springs of immortal passion. we had roved through all the rooms, recharged for us with the exceptional experience, and come out at last on the river bank where there was quite a holiday air among the houseboats.
behind us we could hear the soft slither of the fountain in the sunk garden; the warm sun streaming on us through the filmy air, the flutter of curtains in the houseboats above the little pots of geraniums, the voices of young people laughing and calling across, began to steal across my mind with a sense of the extraordinary richness of life. here was all the stuff of which i had built up my earliest dreams of the shining destiny ... young people growing up about me ... room to stretch my capacity to the uttermost ... the orderly social procedure. for the moment i believed that i might turn back on that path my feet had failed in, and find in it all that i had missed. i recalled that there were always children in my dream. for the instant they were back ... little heads and faces ... all the eyes on me ... soft curls, like wisps of gossamer. i suppose there must be such little unclaimed souls forever hovering and flitting, little winged things, to love's mighty candle. what should there be in the touch of a man's hand on a woman's that they should come crowding to it like homing doves?
there was a maid going by with her charge, one of those glowing fair-haired english children who supply us with the images by which we prefigure the angelic choirs. helmeth held out his hand to the boy, and with that swift spark that passes between the young and those by whom they are beloved, he toddled forward and laid hold of the inviting finger.
if i had had more experience of the pang that shot through me then, i should have known it for jealousy. it drove me on toward what, until now, i had avoided.
"tell me about your girls, helmeth." he felt in the pocket of his coat.
"if you would care to see them——" he was so pleased and shy, i suppose he must have understood better than i how it was with me. "they are with an aunt in los angeles; it was handier for me to see them when i ran up from mexico. they are rather decent kiddies. you'll see them when they come to new york this winter."
"shall you be in new york?" it struck coldly on me that he should speak of plans that seemed to be going on regardless of the extraordinary interruption of our love.
"until i get this mexican scheme on its feet i shall be going back and forth."
"they look like their mother," i suggested. i was looking still at the small, rather pale photographs he had handed me.
"because they look so little like me?"
"you forget i saw her once, in chicago."
"i remember. you know, i think i went there that time because i heard you were playing there." he was silent a moment, pitching bits of sod into the river. "there is something that manages these things. if i had met you then we couldn't have been like this. and we might never have met again."
when he said "like this," he had touched my knee with his hand with that possessive intimacy with which a man may touch his own woman. i had to go back to the photographs of the children to save myself from the blinding lightning of his eyes.
"are they like their mother?"
"i suppose so. i hope so—she was a good woman."
"i'm sure of that." he sat up with intention.
"ah, it isn't just a sense of what is due her that makes me say that. she was thoroughly good. when i met her out in idaho she was my chief's daughter and the only nice girl in the place. she wasn't what you are—no other woman is—but she was one of those plain, quiet women that have a kind of a grip on rightness. there was nothing could make her let go."
"my mother was like that. i think i can understand."
"well, it was mighty good for me. i'm a bad lot, i suppose. i always want things harder than most, and i think the wanting justifies me in getting them, but she taught me better. she did things to me that made me fit for you, and i don't want us to forget that."
"oh, my dear, it is i who am not fit."
but i could see he did not believe that. he had come upon me that day in the woods when happily the mood of perdita had shut round the odd, blundering olivia like an enchanter's bubble, through which iridescent surfaces he was always to see me; and by the mere act of loving he had fixed me in my happiest moment. he was the only man i ever knew, whom i could handle like an audience, perhaps he was the only man who never knew me in any other character than the lady of romance.
we went that evening to see beerbohm tree in a shakespearian piece, always so much more worth while in london than anything the same people can do on any other soil, as if the play had mellowed there by all the rich life it tapped with its four-hundred-year roots. borne up by my mood and the beauty of the production, so much greater than anything we could manage in new york at that time, i was chanting bits of it all the way home, and when we came to my room again i moved before him in the part of egypt's queen.
"who's born the day
when i forget to send to antony
shall die a beggar——"
"oh, helmeth, if you could just see me do it!" i was aching to lay up my gift before him as on an altar.
"you shall do them all for me when we are out in the shack in mexico."
"mexico!" i was blank for the moment.
"we'll have to live there for a few years, until i get this scheme on its legs. look here, olivia, you haven't said yet when you are going to marry me."
"i've only known you four days!" i tried for the note of feminine evasion.
"four days and an afternoon, to be exact. what's that got to do with it, when you are made for me?"
"don't you like this, helmeth?"
he caught me to him with that frank delight in the pressure of his arm about my body, the feel of his cheek against mine that was as fresh to me as water in a wilderness. "it's not this i'm objecting to, but the trouble i shall have doing without you." he let me go at that, as though he would not add the persuasion of his touch to what he had to say.
"the truth is i've no business to ask a woman to marry me for the next two years. i'm pledged to this mexican proposition. i've staked all i have on it, and i've asked other men to put their money in, and i can't go back on it. i shall have to be back and forth between london and new york and the mines, for at least a couple of years. if it wasn't for wanting you so ... but now that i've found you again, i know there's no going on without you!"
he turned his face toward me that i might see the lines of anxious thought there, the buffetings and disappointings, and through it all, the plain hunger of the man for his natural mate.
i saw that and i didn't flinch from it. i took his face between my hands and drew it down to my breast.
"i'm under contract for the next year," i told him. "i signed just before i left ... what does it all matter? can't we be just ... engaged."
"we'd be engaged to be married. and i couldn't take you to mexico on an engagement."
"i'm under contract," i told him again.
"you mean to say that you'd go on acting after we were married?"
it isn't worth while retailing what we said after that. it has been said so many times. it was the same thing that tommy said, better put, more fully. he was ready, you understand, to make concession to my liking for the stage, to feel himself sincerely a poor substitute for what i had got for myself out of living, but there it was at the end, that he couldn't make for his own work the concessions he demanded of mine.
"we would have to live in mexico," he said at last. "that's incontrovertible. and besides there are the kiddies to think of. their mother wouldn't want them brought up in the atmosphere of the stage." he had me there. i thought of miss dean and griffin, of the cecelia brunes i had known, and polatkin tracing the outline of my figure with his fat forefinger.
"i wouldn't either," and my frank admission of it brought us out of the atmosphere of controversy to the community of our love again.
"you understand, don't you, that i feel even more obligation to her now." i nodded. i understood fully that obstinate trace of disloyalty that came of his having given himself to what she wouldn't approve of, to what he couldn't for decency's sake admit of giving her daughters.
"i know what people think of the life of the stage," i agreed; "and i know what's worse, that most of it is true. not that it need to be; but it has got in the habit of being so."
"well, then, if you feel that way——" the inference was plain that he didn't know in that case why i held on to it.
"it has got into my blood, helmeth. i can't explain, and i didn't realize until we got to talking of it, but i don't believe i could live away from it. it is with me as it is with you about your engineering." if i had a momentary qualm lest that last should be not quite disingenuous, it passed in the realization that the comparison hadn't come home to him. i remembered how forester would have accepted the abnegation of my gift to his necessity of being important, and i didn't hold it out against helmeth that he failed to realize at all the place that my work occupied, just as work, in the scheme of my existence.
we came back to it the next day and the next. it would have been simpler, of course, if it hadn't been for the children, and for my being at one with him in the opinion that the stage wasn't the proper atmosphere for the rearing of young ladies. i was still of the opinion which was exemplified in so far as i knew it, by pauline and mrs. franklin shane, that the function of mothering could not go on except by complete separateness from the business of making a living. all my training and heredity had fostered an ideal of family life which rendered obligatory a proper house and servants, in the neighbourhood of good schools, and the exclusion from it of everybody but those who found themselves in an identical situation. and if we had been able to imagine a compromise, helmeth and i would have been hindered by the defrauded capacity for loving, from working it out logically. at the mere suggestion of anything to drive us apart, the mating instinct set us toward one another irresistibly. we would leave off any argument and fall to kissing. we were pierced through and through with loving.
"let us not think of it any more; something will work out for us. let us just be happy the way we are," i would protest.
"oh, child, child, will you never understand that the way we are is what is so hard to bear!" then he would snatch me up until the suffusing fire of his caress would steal through all my body and sing in me like bacchic sap of vineyards in the spring.
"you oughtn't to marry me unless you can't help yourself," he would laugh shamelessly. so we fell deeper in love and not out of our difficulties.
toward the end of that week, the weather which had been thickening to a storm, brought us to one of those thunderous london days, full of a stifling murk that might have been breathed out by the nostrils of the greasy, hurrying snake that went by in the bed of the river. inconsequential lightnings flashed in the smoky vault, from every quarter of which rolled unrelated thunder.
helmeth came over from mr. shane's office in london wall; the need we had of being together was oppressive like the day which, when we had sought it in the park, we could hear like some great monster bellowing for its mate. we went out and walked about for a time under the trees, fancying the relief of freshness in the green obscurity that under the ranked trunks, thickened to blackness. no one was about but a few belated nursery maids, scurrying in silhouette against the pale glow of the light pinned down and imprisoned under the thick cloud of foliage. we were on the broad walk, when suddenly a wind tore loose in the firmament. it made a whirling chaos of the murk, it wrung the treetops, but the air along the ground was stagnant as a cistern. now and then a few great drops spattered on the leaves of the limes. over a quarter of a mile from us, near the alexandria gate, the tension of the day snapped suddenly in flame, a bolt had shattered one of the great trees. straight across the grass toward us the bolt sped like a ball of light. it skimmed the ground knee high, flame points on its edges, flickered viciously as it drove at us.
there was no time for anything. helmeth cried out to me once and i stepped within the circle of his arms; we could hear the fire ball sizzling as it cleared the grass; within a yard of us it went out in a flare of gas and a crack like thunder. suddenly buckets of rain were precipitated on us, we could hear the slap of them on the pavement as we ran.
i was crying hysterically by the time we came to my room in a cab. i remember helmeth trying to rid me of my wet things and my clinging to him crying.
"oh, my dear, my dear, it was so near, so near, i thought i was to lose you before i had had you—before i had had you at all!"
"no, no ... not that, olivia, not that!" his arms were around me and all my life up to that moment was no more to me than a path which led up to those arms. i remember that ... and the world dissolving in the wash of the rain outside ... and the lift of his breast; and deep under all, old, unimagined instincts reared their heads and bayed at the voice of their master....
