One Way of Love (Lee)/Chapter 12
XII.
But if there were no promises, there was much happiness in the months that followed. After the talk in the studio their life assumed a new phase—something as far removed from the unrest of courtship on the one hand, as from the commonplaceness of married life on the other.
Derring had accepted her decision as final. There was to be no marriage—not even a promise of marriage at some distant day. His love for her must begin and end in itself. One less capable of love, or one who had longed less for love, might have fretted at the anomalous position in which he found himself—neither aspirant nor accepted lover. But to Derring it seemed that never since man was created had a love so unique been upon the earth.
He was at the studio daily, sometimes several times a day. He fell into the habit of going there to write up the articles for which he had been gathering material—an art lecture below stairs or a first view above. Often he read these articles to her as she sat at work. Her criticisms were frank and unsparing. Sometimes for days together, a stranger, overhearing them as they talked or jested, would not have guessed that they were more than good comrades. Only, now and then, a word, half-breathed, as he sat watching her move about the studio, would speak volumes and bridge over hours of commonplace. Then again there would be days when they would talk of their love as of any accepted fact of common interest.
Perhaps nowhere but in the art world could such a friendship have existed without danger of misunderstanding. At the boarding-house they had instinctively remained mere table acquaintances. But among the artists they came and went with Platonic freedom. No one criticised. No one watched with malicious eyes. Here, as wherever artists meet, life was too busy for petty spying. Or is it, after all, not indifference or preoccupation, but the inherent purity of an apparently careless life, that makes artists slow to think evil of each other? In any case, these two were safe among them from fear of misunderstanding; and Derring was in the studio whenever his work, or leisure, gave him opportunity.
“I always knew you must be somewhere,” he said one day. He had finished writing and sat leaning back, his hands clasped behind his head. It had been half an hour since he finished work and no word had broken the silence till he spoke.
“I never dared believe I should find you, though,” he continued.
She was turning her head to one side and leaning back, with half-closed eyes, to get a view of the last wash. “Yes, you were a good while finding it out.” She gave critical touches here and there with the extended brush.
He started suddenly forward to an upright position. “What do you mean? Did you know—or care?”
“That is another strange thing,” she said, smiling a little to him, “the woman always knows first. But she must wait patiently until the man's lumbering intelligence finds it out.”
“But I never dreamed,” he persisted, coming back to the concrete case. “You seemed so indifferent”
“Of course. It wouldn't have been modest not to. And, besides, I did not want you to find out. I didn't suppose any man could be generous enough to understand how a woman might feel.”
“It isn't that we don't understand. Anyone can see how unfair marriage is to a woman—that it compels her to give up everything and offers her nothing. We see it plainly enough. But what can we do? We love you, and most of us see no way out of it but marriage.”
“Now it is you who are hard,” she returned. “The fault cannot all lie on one side. Marriage, in itself, is no harder for a woman to-day, I suppose, than it has always been. The difference is that so many other ways of happiness are open to her; and when she finds her marriage a failure, she does not try to make the best of it, without protest, as the only thing open to her. She is more restive under her own mistake than when fate left her no choice. So everything gets into a nice tangle and they don't live happy forever afterwards,” she finished laughingly.
Gradually he came to understand that her determination not to marry him was influenced by something stronger than a mere personal shrinking from a false marriage. She would not marry, because she would not take a selfish happiness at the expense of her mother and those that depended on her; but more than that, and deeper, she would not by a rash promise add one more to the marriages that end in vain regret or divorce.
Gradually, too, he came to understand more fully what she had meant by saying that if they were made for each other they would find it out without promises, and if not, it were a thousand times better they should drift apart. And as he came to understand, an element of reverence mingled with his love for her, deepening and intensifying it.
He himself would not have questioned. He would gladly have married. To him it would not have been a test, but a consummation. But that they were not to marry did not trouble him. Why should he ask more of a love that was proving the fulfilment of all the longing of his boyhood and youth? It was transforming him—mind, body, and soul. His frame, which had been tall, spare, and loosely built, began to fill and settle into strength; his step became firm and quick; his head took a firmer poise above the square shoulders; even his eyes shared in the metamorphosis—they lost their dreamy, pleading look and became alert, laughing, and full of happiness and a strange power that seemed no longer to ask, but to command help and sympathy from all who met their glance.
Something of this change Derring himself recognized. He knew that he was alive, glowing in every fibre; but he was less analytic in his happiness than in his misery; he did not see that his overflowing vitality communicated itself to everyone with whom he came in contact. It was only when someone spoke of the change that he knew that it was being marked. He exulted in his heart that no one guessed the cause.
He was settled down and working with a vigor of which he had not dreamed himself capable. Everything bent before him. He felt within himself power to conquer the world should it stand in his way. Sometimes he clenched his hands and stretched his arms to their fullest to give outlet to the play impulse that could not exhaust itself in work.
In his inner life, too, a change, less perceptible, but no less real, was taking place. Sight and hearing were opened to new beauty. Music had become to him a medium of soul speech; and the sordid city streets, with their overhanging clouds of smoke, started to picturesque life and beauty.
A long archway with a slant of sunshine at the farther end—an Italian woman stealing into the shadow, a huge bundle on her back and colored kerchief about her head—would stir his pulses like an old painting. The unsightly process of building, with its débris of mortar, bricks, and lath, gained artistic value as his eyes took in the grouping of the men at work around the mortar-beds—the soft, gray-white of the mortar, the dull red, blue, or orange of the shirts upon the supple or stolid figures of the men, with the play of muscle beneath. Sometimes it was a single figure, that might have stepped from a Rembrandt canvas, appearing for a minute and disappearing in the shifting crowd. Always, everywhere, there was beauty—until Derring, seeing it all, longed at times to relieve his overcharged senses by a loud cry—so wonderful, so overpowering, had the beauty of the world become.
Undoubtedly much of this quickened insight was due to the thought of Helen, who was never for a moment absent from his mind. Whatever work was engaging his hand or brain, deep below it all was a consciousness of her existence, like a second ego, only a thousand times dearer and more inspiring than his own personality. It seemed to give him a sixth sense by which he perceived the beautiful—until Helen gave up in despair the attempt to transfer to canvas all that he brought to her notice.
It became a common sight for her sketching stool to be set up in some sheltered corner of the busiest part of the city. Derring, who had dreaded the experiment, saw, with a thrill, that the quiet power of her personality that so rested and soothed him was felt here. The crowd either passed her by or stopped for a moment to look with respectful curiosity as the work grew under her hand. Sometimes a mason filled her water-can or a carpenter paused for a moment in his work to adjust her umbrella. It was the Chicago spirit—laissez faire, and help when you can. Except for the dust and rattle of the street she was as unmolested as in her quiet studio.