Wings: Tales of the Psychic/Renunciation
RENUNCIATION
When she came to him that night, forty-eight hours before he sailed for France with his battalion, she did so of her own free will.
For he had not seen her; he had not written to her; he had even tried not to think of her since that shimmering, pink-and-lavender noon of early June, two years earlier, when, in rose point lace and orange-blossoms, she had walked up the aisle of St. Thomas's Church and had become the wife of Dan Coolidge.
Her low, trembling "I will!" had sounded the death-knell of Roger Kenyon's tempestuous youth. He had plucked her from his heart, had uprooted her from his mind, from his smoldering, subconscious passion had cast the memory of her pale, pure oval of a face to the limbo of visions that must be forgotten.
It seemed strange that he could do so; for Roger had always been a hot-blooded, virile, inconsiderate man who rode life as he rode a horse, with a loose rein, a straight bit, and rowel-spurs. He had always had a headstrong tendency to hurdle with tense, savage joy across the obstacles he encountered—which were of his own making as often as not.
He had been in the habit of taking whatever sensations and emotions he could—until he had met Josephine Erskine up there in that sleepy, drab New England village where, for a generation or two, her people had endeavored to impose upon the world with a labored, pathetic, meretricious gentility.
Heretofore, woman had meant nothing to him except a charming manifestation of sex.
Then suddenly, like a sweet, swift throe, love had come to him in Josephine's brown, gold-flecked eyes and crimson mouth.
He had told her so quite simply as they walked in the rose-garden; but she had shaken her head.
"No, Roger," she had replied.
"Why not?"
"I do not love you."
She told him that she was going to become the wife, for better or for worse, of Dan Coolidge, a college chum of his—a mild, bald-headed, paunchy, stock-broking chap with a steam-yacht, a garage full of imported, low-slung motor-cars, a red-brick-and- white-woodwork house on the conservative side of Eleventh Street, a few doors from Fifth Avenue, a place in Westchester County at exactly the correct distance between suburbia and yokeldom; four servants, including a French—not an English—butler; and a mother who dressed in black bombazine and bugles.
"Yes," she had said in a weak, wiped-over voice, "I am going to marry Dan."
"Because you love him—and because you don't love me?"
"Yes, Roger!"
He had laughed—a cracked, high-pitched laugh that had twisted his dark, handsome face into a sardonic mask.
"You lie, my dear," he had replied brutally, and when she gasped and blushed he had continued: "You lie—and you know you do! You love—me! I can feel it in my heart, my soul, in every last fiber and cell of my being. I can feel it waking and sleeping. Your love is mine, quite mine—a thing both definite and infinite. You don't love Dan!"
"But—"
"I ll tell you why you're going to marry him. It's because he has money, and I have no financial prospects except a couple of up-State aunts who are tough and stringy, and who have made up their minds to survive me, whatever happens."
"I must think of mother and the girls," had come her stammered admission through a blurred veil of hot tears; "and Fred—he must go to Harvard—"
"Right! You have your mother, and the girls, and Fred, and the rest of your family, and they'll all live on Dan's bounty and on the sacrifice you're making of yourself—not to mention myself!"
Then, after a pause, taking her by both her slender shoulders, he went on:
"I could make love to you now, my dear. I could crush you in my arms—and you'd marry Dan afterward, and somehow strike a compromise between your inbred, atavistic Mayflower Puritanism and the resolute Greek paganism which is making your mouth so red. But"—as she swayed and trembled—"I won't! I'm going to play the game!"
She said nothing. He laughed and spoke again:
"Confound it! You can put your foot on every decency, on every bully, splendid emotion, on the blessed decalogue itself—as long as you play the game!"
So he had gone away, after being Dan's best man, to his little plantation in South Carolina.
For two years he had not seen her, had not written to her, had even tried not to think of her—
And there she stood—now—on the threshold of his room in the discreet little hotel where he had put up, with a grinning, plump boy in buttons, his hand well weighted with money, winking as if to say:
"It's O. K., boss. I'm goin' to keep mum, all right, all right!"
Then the boy closed the door, and the bolt snapped into the lock with a little steely, jeering click.
She was dressed in white from head to foot; only her lips were red, and the long-stemmed Gloire de Dijon rose that she held in her hand.
She spoke in a matter-of-fact voice, as if continuing a conversation that had been interrupted just for a second by the entry of a servant or the postman's whistle:
"Don't you see, Roger? I had to come. I had to say good-by to you—before you sail for France!"
He did not move from where he stood between the two windows, with the moonlight drifting across his shoulders into the dim, prosy hotel room, and weaving a fantastic pattern into the threadbare carpet.
There was surprise in his accents, and a keen, peremptory challenge.
"How did you know that I was booked to sail? Our orders are secret. I am here on a special mission until the day after to-morrow—incognito, at that. Josephine, how did you find me out? Who told you that I was here?"
She smiled.
"Of course I knew, dear. How could I help knowing?"
Suddenly, strangely, the explanation—what there was of it—seemed lucid and satisfactory and reasonable, and he crossed the room and bowed over her hand. He took the rose from her narrow, white fingers and inhaled its heavy, honeyed fragrance.
"A rose from your garden!" He heard his own voice coming in an odd murmur. "From your garden up there in the little New England village!"
"Yes, Roger."
"Did your mother send it to you?"
"No, I picked it myself. It kept fresh, didn't it, Roger dear?"
"Yes."
He remembered the garden where they had walked side by side, two years earlier—where he had told her of his love.
It was the one splotch of color, the one sign of the joy of life, in the whole drab Massachusetts community, this old garden which the Erskine family had jealously nursed and coddled for generations. It was a mass of roses, creepers as well as bushes, scrambling and straining and growing and tangling in their own strong-willed fashion, clothing old stones with hearts of deep ruby and amethyst, building arches of glowing pink and tea-yellow against the pale sky, lifting shy, single, dewy heads in hushed corners, as if praying.
But he had always liked the scarlet Gloire de Dijon roses best.
They were like her lips.
He looked up.
"What about Dan?" he asked.
"Oh, Danny—" She smiled.
"He is my friend, and your husband. If he knew—"
"Danny won't mind, dear," she said.
Her words carried conviction. Somehow he knew that Dan wouldn't mind.
He sat down on the hard couch that faced the windows, drew her down beside him, and put his arm around her shoulder.
Her hand, which sought and found his, was very steady and very cool.
He did not speak; neither did she. Twisting his head sidewise, he looked at her.
She was in shadow from the shoulder downward. Only her face was sharply defined in the moonlight. The scarlet lips seemed to swim to him along the slanting, glistening rays, and he leaned over.
There was hunger in his soul, in his mind, in his heart, in his body.
"I am going to play the game!"
The words came from very far, from across the bitter bridge of years, with the jarring, dissonant shock of a forgotten reproach.
"Dear, dear heart!" he whispered.
She did not resist. She did not draw back; nor did she say a word.
Only, just as his lips were about to touch hers, something—"an immense, invisible, and very sad presence,"—he described it afterward—seemed to creep into the room, like a winged thing.
It came soundlessly; but he felt the sharp displacement of air. It was as if a huge bird's pinions had cut through it, the left tip resting on the farther window-sill, the right on a chair near the bed, on which he had thrown his khaki overcoat and his campaign hat.
With it came a sense of unutterable peace and sweetness, strangely flavored with a great pain. As he leaned back without having touched her lips, the pain was mysteriously transmuted.
It became a realization, not a vision, of color—clear, deep scarlet with a faint golden glow in the center. Then began to assume a definite form—that of a gigantic Gloire de Dijon rose, which, as he watched, slowly shrank to its natural proportions until it rested, velvety, scented, where he had dropped the rose among the books on his writing-desk.
He rose to pick it up.
When he turned back again, he saw that she had left the couch and was standing on the threshold of the open door, a blotch of filmy, gauzy white.
She was gone before he could rush to her side. When he tried to cross the threshold, to run after her, he felt again the wings, and the feeling brought with it a sense of ineffable sweetness and peace, which enveloped his subconscious self in a rush of blind delight.
It was Captain Donaldson of his regiment who startled him out of his sleep early the next morning.
"Hurry up, old man!" he said. "The transport sails this afternoon instead of to-morrow."
Roger Kenyon tumbled out of bed and walked over to the desk where he had dropped the rose the night before.
"What are you looking for?" asked his friend. "A cigarette? Here—have one of mine!"
"No, no. I thought I had left a rose here last night—a scarlet Gloire de Dijon rose; but—"
"Gallant adventure, eh?" laughed Donaldson. "Say, you must have been drinking! Why, this isn't a rose—it's a white lily!"
He picked up the stiff, sweet-scented flower.
"By the way," asked Donaldson, facing his friend over coffee and toast and eggs, "have you heard that Danny Coolidge's wife died last night?"
"Yes," replied Roger Kenyon.