The Touchstone Page 5

  In the street he was seized with a sudden apprehension. What if he were to meet Flamel? The thought was intolerable. He called a cab and drove straight to the station where, amid the palm-leaf fans of a perspiring crowd, he waited a long half-hour for his train to start.

  He had thrust a volume in either pocket and in the train he dared not draw them out; but the detested words leaped at him from the folds of the evening paper. The air seemed full of Margaret Aubyn’s name. The motion of the train set it dancing up and down on the page of a magazine that a man in front of him was reading….

  At the door he was told that Mrs. Glennard was still out, and he went upstairs to his room and dragged the books from his pocket. They lay on the table before him like live things that he feared to touch…. At length he opened the first volume. A familiar letter sprang out at him, each word quickened by its glaring garb of type. The little broken phrases fled across the page like wounded animals in the open…. It was a horrible sight…. A battue of helpless things driven savagely out of shelter. He had not known it would be like this….

  He understood now that, at the moment of selling the letters, he had viewed the transaction solely as it affected himself: as an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise presentable record. He had scarcely considered the act in relation to Margaret Aubyn; for death, if it hallows, also makes innocuous. Glennard’s God was a god of the living, of the immediate, the actual, the tangible; all his days he had lived in the presence of that god, heedless of the divinities who, below the surface of our deeds and passions, silently forge the fatal weapons of the dead.

  VII

  A knock roused him and looking up he saw his wife. He met her glance in silence, and she faltered out, “Are you ill?”

  The words restored his self-possession. “Ill? Of course not. They told me you were out and I came upstairs.”

  The books lay between them on the table; he wondered when she would see them. She lingered tentatively on the threshold, with the air of leaving his explanation on his hands. She was not the kind of woman who could be counted on to fortify an excuse by appearing to dispute it.

  “Where have you been?” Glennard asked, moving forward so that he obstructed her vision of the books.

  “I walked over to the Dreshams for tea.”

  “I can’t think what you see in those people,” he said with a shrug; adding, uncontrollably—“I suppose Flamel was there?”

  “No; he left on the yacht this morning.”

  An answer so obstructing to the natural escape of his irritation left Glennard with no momentary resource but that of strolling impatiently to the window. As her eyes followed him they lit on the books.

  “Ah, you’ve brought them! I’m so glad,” she exclaimed.

  He answered over his shoulder, “For a woman who never reads you make the most astounding exceptions!”

  Her smile was an exasperating concession to the probability that it had been hot in town or that something had bothered him.

  “Do you mean it’s not nice to want to read the book?” she asked. “It was not nice to publish it, certainly; but after all, I’m not responsible for that, am I?” She paused, and, as he made no answer, went on, still smiling, “I do read sometimes, you know; and I’m very fond of Margaret Aubyn’s books. I was reading ‘Pomegranate Seed’ when we first met. Don’t you remember? It was then you told me all about her.”

  Glennard had turned back into the room and stood staring at his wife. “All about her?” he repeated, and with the words remembrance came to him. He had found Miss Trent one afternoon with the novel in her hand, and moved by the lover’s fatuous impulse to associate himself in some way with whatever fills the mind of the beloved, had broken through his habitual silence about the past. Rewarded by the consciousness of figuring impressively in Miss Trent’s imagination he had gone on from one anecdote to another, reviving dormant details of his old Hillbridge life, and pasturing his vanity on the eagerness with which she received his reminiscences of a being already clothed in the impersonality of greatness.

  The incident had left no trace in his mind; but it sprang up now like an old enemy, the more dangerous for having been forgotten. The instinct of self-preservation—sometimes the most perilous that man can exercise—made him awkwardly declare—“Oh, I used to see her at people’s houses, that was all;” and her silence as usual leaving room for a multiplication of blunders, he added, with increased indifference, “I simply can’t see what you can find to interest you in such a book.”

  She seemed to consider this intently. “You’ve read it, then?”

  “I glanced at it—I never read such things.”

  “Is it true that she didn’t wish the letters to be published?”

  Glennard felt the sudden dizziness of the mountaineer on a narrow ledge, and with it the sense that he was lost if he looked more than a step ahead.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” he said; then, summoning a smile, he passed his hand through her arm. “I didn’t have tea at the Dreshams, you know; won’t you give me some now?” he suggested.

  That evening Glennard, under pretext of work to be done, shut himself into the small study opening off the drawing-room. As he gathered up his papers he said to his wife: “You’re not going to sit indoors on such a night as this? I’ll join you presently outside.”

  But she had drawn her armchair to the lamp. “I want to look at my book,” she said, taking up the first volume of the “Letters.”

  Glennard, with a shrug, withdrew into the study. “I’m going to shut the door; I want to be quiet,” he explained from the threshold; and she nodded without lifting her eyes from the book.

  He sank into a chair, staring aimlessly at the outspread papers. How was he to work, while on the other side of the door she sat with that volume in her hand? The door did not shut her out—he saw her distinctly, felt her close to him in a contact as painful as the pressure on a bruise.

  The sensation was part of the general strangeness that made him feel like a man waking from a long sleep to find himself in an unknown country among people of alien tongue. We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours. Of the points in his wife’s character not in direct contact with his own, Glennard now discerned his ignorance; and the baffling sense of her remoteness was intensified by the discovery that, in one way, she was closer to him than ever before. As one may live for years in happy unconsciousness of the possession of a sensitive nerve, he had lived beside his wife unaware that her individuality had become a part of the texture of his life, ineradicable as some growth on a vital organ; and he now felt himself at once incapable of forecasting her judgment and powerless to evade its effects.

  To escape, the next morning, the confidences of the breakfast-table, he went to town earlier than usual. His wife, who read slowly, was given to talking over what she read, and at present his first object in life was to postpone the inevitable discussion of the letters. This instinct of protection in the afternoon, on his way uptown, guided him to the club in search of a man who might be persuaded to come out to the country to dine. The only man in the club was Flamel.

  Glennard, as he heard himself almost involuntarily pressing Flamel to come and dine, felt the full irony of the situation. To use Flamel as a shield against his wife’s scrutiny was only a shade less humiliating than to reckon on his wife as a defence against Flamel.

  He felt a contradictory movement of annoyance at the latter’s ready acceptance, and the two men drove in silence to the station. As they passed the bookstall in the waiting-room Flamel lingered a moment and the eyes of both fell on Margaret Aubyn’s name, conspicuously displayed above a counter stacked with the familiar volumes.

  “We shall be late, you know,” Glennard remonstrated, pulling out his watch.

  “Go ahead,” said Flamel, imperturbably. “I want to get something—”

  Gl
ennard turned on his heel and walked down the platform. Flamel rejoined him with an innocent-looking magazine in his hand; but Glennard dared not even glance at the cover, lest it should show the syllables he feared.

  The train was full of people they knew, and they were kept apart till it dropped them at the little suburban station. As they strolled up the shaded hill, Glennard talked volubly, pointing out the improvements in the neighborhood, deploring the threatened approach of an electric railway, and screening himself by a series of reflex adjustments from the imminent risk of any allusion to the “Letters.” Flamel suffered his discourse with the bland inattention that we accord to the affairs of someone else’s suburb, and they reached the shelter of Alexa’s tea-table without a perceptible turn toward the dreaded topic.

  The dinner passed off safely. Flamel, always at his best in Alexa’s presence, gave her the kind of attention which is like a beaconing light thrown on the speaker’s words: his answers seemed to bring out a latent significance in her phrases, as the sculptor draws his statue from the block. Glennard, under his wife’s composure, detected a sensibility to this manoeuvre, and the discovery was like the lightning-flash across a nocturnal landscape. Thus far these momentary illuminations had served only to reveal the strangeness of the intervening country: each fresh observation seemed to increase the sum-total of his ignorance. Her simplicity of outline was more puzzling than a complex surface. One may conceivably work one’s way through a labyrinth; but Alexa’s candor was like a snow-covered plain where, the road once lost, there are no landmarks to travel by.

  Dinner over, they returned to the veranda, where a moon, rising behind the old elm, was combining with that complaisant tree a romantic enlargement of their borders. Glennard had forgotten the cigars. He went to his study to fetch them, and in passing through the drawing-room he saw the second volume of the “Letters” lying open on his wife’s table. He picked up the book and looked at the date of the letter she had been reading. It was one of the last… he knew the few lines by heart. He dropped the book and leaned against the wall. Why had he included that one among the others? Or was it possible that now they would all seem like that…?

  Alexa’s voice came suddenly out of the dusk. “May Touchett was right—it IS like listening at a keyhole. I wish I hadn’t read it!”

  Flamel returned, in the leisurely tone of the man whose phrases are punctuated by a cigarette, “It seems so to us, perhaps; but to another generation the book will be a classic.”

  “Then it ought not to have been published till it had become a classic. It’s horrible, it’s degrading almost, to read the secrets of a woman one might have known.” She added, in a lower tone, “Stephen DID know her—”

  “Did he?” came from Flamel.

  “He knew her very well, at Hillbridge, years ago. The book has made him feel dreadfully… he wouldn’t read it… he didn’t want me to read it. I didn’t understand at first, but now I can see how horribly disloyal it must seem to him. It’s so much worse to surprise a friend’s secrets than a stranger’s.”

  “Oh, Glennard’s such a sensitive chap,” Flamel said, easily; and Alexa almost rebukingly rejoined, “If you’d known her I’m sure you’d feel as he does….”

  Glennard stood motionless, overcome by the singular infelicity with which he had contrived to put Flamel in possession of the two points most damaging to his case: the fact that he had been a friend of Margaret Aubyn’s, and that he had concealed from Alexa his share in the publication of the letters. To a man of less than Flamel’s astuteness it must now be clear to whom the letters were addressed; and the possibility once suggested, nothing could be easier than to confirm it by discreet research. An impulse of self-accusal drove Glennard to the window. Why not anticipate betrayal by telling his wife the truth in Flamel’s presence? If the man had a drop of decent feeling in him, such a course would be the surest means of securing his silence; and above all, it would rid Glennard of the necessity of defending himself against the perpetual criticism of his wife’s belief in him….

  The impulse was strong enough to carry him to the window; but there a reaction of defiance set in. What had he done, after all, to need defence and explanation? Both Dresham and Flamel had, in his hearing, declared the publication of the letters to be not only justifiable but obligatory; and if the disinterestedness of Flamel’s verdict might be questioned, Dresham’s at least represented the impartial view of the man of letters. As to Alexa’s words, they were simply the conventional utterance of the “nice” woman on a question already decided for her by other “nice” women. She had said the proper thing as mechanically as she would have put on the appropriate gown or written the correct form of dinner-invitation. Glennard had small faith in the abstract judgments of the other sex; he knew that half the women who were horrified by the publication of Mrs. Aubyn’s letters would have betrayed her secrets without a scruple.

  The sudden lowering of his emotional pitch brought a proportionate relief. He told himself that now the worst was over and things would fall into perspective again. His wife and Flamel had turned to other topics, and coming out on the veranda, he handed the cigars to Flamel, saying, cheerfully—and yet he could have sworn they were the last words he meant to utter!—“Look here, old man, before you go down to Newport you must come out and spend a few days with us—mustn’t he, Alexa?”

  VIII

  Glennard had, perhaps unconsciously, counted on the continuance of this easier mood. He had always taken pride in a certain robustness of fibre that enabled him to harden himself against the inevitable, to convert his failures into the building materials of success. Though it did not even now occur to him that what he called the inevitable had hitherto been the alternative he happened to prefer, he was yet obscurely aware that his present difficulty was one not to be conjured by any affectation of indifference. Some griefs build the soul a spacious house—but in this misery of Glennard’s he could not stand upright. It pressed against him at every turn. He told himself that this was because there was no escape from the visible evidences of his act. The “Letters” confronted him everywhere. People who had never opened a book discussed them with critical reservations; to have read them had become a social obligation in circles to which literature never penetrates except in a personal guise.

  Glennard did himself injustice, it was from the unexpected discovery of his own pettiness that he chiefly suffered. Our self-esteem is apt to be based on the hypothetical great act we have never had occasion to perform; and even the most self-scrutinizing modesty credits itself negatively with a high standard of conduct. Glennard had never thought himself a hero; but he had been certain that he was incapable of baseness. We all like our wrong-doings to have a becoming cut, to be made to order, as it were; and Glennard found himself suddenly thrust into a garb of dishonor surely meant for a meaner figure.

  The immediate result of his first weeks of wretchedness was the resolve to go to town for the winter. He knew that such a course was just beyond the limit of prudence; but it was easy to allay the fears of Alexa who, scrupulously vigilant in the management of the household, preserved the American wife’s usual aloofness from her husband’s business cares. Glennard felt that he could not trust himself to a winter’s solitude with her. He had an unspeakable dread of her learning the truth about the letters, yet could not be sure of steeling himself against the suicidal impulse of avowal. His very soul was parched for sympathy; he thirsted for a voice of pity and comprehension. But would his wife pity? Would she understand? Again he found himself brought up abruptly against his incredible ignorance of her nature. The fact that he knew well enough how she would behave in the ordinary emergencies of life, that he could count, in such contingencies, on the kind of high courage and directness he had always divined in her, made him the more hopeless of her entering into the torturous psychology of an act that he himself could no longer explain or understand. It would have been easier had she been more complex, more feminine—if he could have counted on her ima
ginative sympathy or her moral obtuseness—but he was sure of neither. He was sure of nothing but that, for a time, he must avoid her. Glennard could not rid himself of the delusion that by and by his action would cease to make its consequences felt. He would not have cared to own to himself that he counted on the dulling of his sensibilities: he preferred to indulge the vague hypothesis that extraneous circumstances would somehow efface the blot upon his conscience. In his worst moments of self-abasement he tried to find solace in the thought that Flamel had sanctioned his course. Flamel, at the outset, must have guessed to whom the letters were addressed; yet neither then nor afterward had he hesitated to advise their publication. This thought drew Glennard to him in fitful impulses of friendliness, from each of which there was a sharper reaction of distrust and aversion. When Flamel was not at the house, he missed the support of his tacit connivance; when he was there, his presence seemed the assertion of an intolerable claim.

  Early in the winter the Glennards took possession of the little house that was to cost them almost nothing. The change brought Glennard the immediate relief of seeing less of his wife, and of being protected, in her presence, by the multiplied preoccupations of town life. Alexa, who could never appear hurried, showed the smiling abstraction of a pretty woman to whom the social side of married life has not lost its novelty. Glennard, with the recklessness of a man fresh from his first financial imprudence, encouraged her in such little extravagances as her good sense at first resisted. Since they had come to town, he argued, they might as well enjoy themselves. He took a sympathetic view of the necessity of new gowns, he gave her a set of furs at Christmas, and before the New Year they had agreed on the obligation of adding a parlour-maid to their small establishment.