The Better Sort (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903)/Broken Wings/Chapter 5
V
She had appeared at first unwilling to receive him at home; but he understood it after she had left him, turning over more and more everything their meeting had shaken to the surface, and piecing together memories that at last, however darkly, made a sense. He was to call on her, it was finally agreed, but not till the end of the week, when she should have finished "moving"—she had but just changed quarters; and meanwhile, as he came and went, mainly in the cold chamber of his own past endeavour, which looked even to himself as studios look when artists are dead and the public, in the arranged place, are admitted to stare, he had plenty to think about. What had come out—he could see it now—was that each, ten years before, had miserably misunderstood and then had turned for relief from pain to a perversity of pride. But it was himself above all that he now sharply judged, since women, he felt, have to get on as they can, and for the mistake of this woman there were reasons he had, with a sore heart, to acknowledge. She had really found in the pomp of his early success, at the time they used to meet, and to care to, exactly the ground for her sense of failure with him that he had found in the vision of her gross popularity for his conviction that she judged him as comparatively small. Each had blundered, as sensitive souls of the "artistic temperament" blunder, into a conception not only of the other's attitude, but of the other's material situation at the moment, that had thrown them back on stupid secrecy, where their estrangement had grown like an evil plant in the shade. He had positively believed her to have gone on all the while making the five thousand a year that the first eight or ten of her so supremely happy novels had brought her in, just as she, on her side, had read into the felicity of his first new hits, his pictures "of the year" at three or four Academies, the absurdest theory of the sort of career that, thanks to big dealers and intelligent buyers, his gains would have built up for him. It looked vulgar enough now, but it had been grave enough then. His long, detached delusion about her "prices," at any rate, appeared to have been more than matched by the strange stories occasionally floated to her—and all to make her but draw more closely in—on the subject of his own.
It was with each equally that everything had changed—everything but the stiff consciousness in either of the need to conceal changes from the other. If she had cherished for long years the soreness of her not being "good" enough, so this was what had counted most in her sustained effort to appear at least as good as he. London, meanwhile, was big; London was blind and benighted; and nothing had ever occurred to undermine for him the fiction of her prosperity. Before his eyes there, while she sat with him, she had pulled off one by one those vain coverings of her state that she confessed she had hitherto done her best—and so always with an eye on himself—deceptively to draw about it. He had felt frozen, as he listened, at such likenesses to things he knew. He recognised as she talked, and he groaned as he understood. He understood—oh, at last, whatever he had not done before! And yet he could well have smiled, out of their common abyss, at such odd identities and recurrences. Truly the arts were sisters, as was so often said; for what apparently could be more like the experience of one than the experience of another? And she spared him things with it all. He felt that too, just as, even while showing her how he followed, he had bethought himself of closing his lips for the hour, none too soon, on his own stale story. There had been a beautiful intelligence, for that matter, in her having asked him nothing more. She had overflowed because shaken by not finding him happy, and her surrender had somehow offered itself to him as her way—the first that sprang up—of considering his trouble. She had left him, at all events, in full possession of all the phases through which in "literary circles" acclaimed states may pass on their regular march to eclipse and extinction. One had but one's hour, and if one had it soon—it was really almost a case of choice—one didn't have it late. It might, moreover, never even remotely have approached, at its best, things ridiculously rumoured. Straith felt, on the whole, how little he had known of literary circles or of any mystery but his own, indeed; on which, up to actual impending collapse, he had mounted such anxious guard.
It was when he went on the Friday to see her that he took in the latest of the phases in question, which might very well be almost the final one; there was at least that comfort in it. She had just settled in a small flat, where he recognised in the steady disposal, for the best, of various objects she had not yet parted with, her reason for having made him wait. Here they had together—these two worn and baffled workers—a wonderful hour of gladness in their lost battle and of freshness in their lost youth; for it was not till Stuart Straith had also raised the heavy mask and laid it beside her own on the table, that they began really to feel themselves recover something of that possibility of each other they had so wearily wasted. Only she couldn't get over it that he was like herself, and that what she had shrunken to in her three or four simplified rooms had its perfect image in the hollow show of his ordered studio and his accumulated work. He told her everything now, kept as little back as she had kept at their previous meeting, while she repeated over and over, "You—wonderful you?" as if the knowledge made a deeper darkness of fate, as if the pain of his having come down at all almost quenched the joy of his having come so much nearer. When she learned that he had not for three years sold a picture—"You, beautiful you?"—it seemed a new cold breath out of the dusk of her own outlook. Disappointment and despair were in such relations contagious, and there was clearly as much less again left to her as the little that was left to him. He showed her, laughing at the long queerness of it, how awfully little, as they called it, this was. He let it all come, but with more mirth than misery, and with a final abandonment of pride that was like changing at the end of a dreadful day from tight boots to slippers. There were moments when they might have resembled a couple united by some misdeed and meeting to decide on some desperate course; they gave themselves so to the great irony—the vision of the comic in contrasts—that precedes surrenders and extinctions.
They went over the whole thing, remounted the dwindling stream, reconstructed, explained, understood—recognised, in short, the particular example they gave, and how, without mutual suspicion, they had been giving it side by side. "We're simply the case," Straith familiarly put it, "of having been had enough of. No case is perhaps more common, save that, for you and for me, each in our line, it did look in the good time—didn't it?—as if nobody could have enough." With which they counted backward, gruesome as it was, the symptoms of satiety up to the first dawn, and lived again together the unforgettable hours—distant now—out of which it had begun to glimmer that the truth had to be faced and the right names given to the wrong facts. They laughed at their original explanations and the minor scale, even, of their early fears; compared notes on the fallibility of remedies and hopes, and, more and more united in the identity of their lesson, made out perfectly that, though there appeared to be many kinds of success, there was only one kind of failure. And yet what had been hardest had not been to have to shrink, but—the long game of bluff, as Straith called it—to have to keep up. It fairly swept them away at present, however, the hugeness of the relief of no longer keeping up as against each other. This gave them all the measure of the motive their courage, on either side, in silence and gloom, had forced into its service.
"Only what shall we do now for a motive?" Straith went on.
She thought. "A motive for courage?"
"Yes—to keep up."
"And go again, for instance, do you mean, to Mundham? We shall, thank heaven, never go again to Mundham. The Mundhams are over."
"Nous n'irons plus au bois;
Les lauriers sont coupés,"
sang Straith. "It does cost."
"As everything costs that one does for the rich. It's not our poor relations who make us pay."
"No; one must have means to acknowledge the others. We can't afford the opulent. But it isn't only the money they take."
"It's the imagination," said Mrs. Harvey. "As they have none themselves———"
"It's an article we have to supply? We have certainly to use a lot to protect ourselves," Straith agreed. "And the strange thing is that they like us."
She thought again. "That's what makes it easy to cut them. They forgive."
"Yes," her companion laughed; "once they really don't know you enough———!"
"They treat you as old friends. But what do we want now of courage?" she went on.
He wondered. "Yes, after all, what?"
"To keep up, I mean. Why should we keep up?"
It seemed to strike him. "I see. After all, why? The courage not to keep up———"
"We have that, at least," she declared, "haven't we?" Standing there at her little high-perched window, which overhung grey housetops, they let the consideration of this pass between them in a deep look, as well as in a hush of which the intensity had some thing commensurate. "If we're beaten!" she then continued.
"Let us at least be beaten together!" He took her in his arms; she let herself go, and he held her long and close for the compact. But when they had recovered themselves enough to handle their agreement more responsibly, the words in which they confirmed it broke in sweetness as well as sadness from both together: "And now to work!"