The Transgression of Andrew Vane: A Novel. Carryl Guy Wetmore

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СКАЧАТЬ line of stocks, tried to average too soon, and was finally forced to let go his holdings at about the bottom of the market.

      It was ruin, absolute and utter; but Helen almost welcomed it, in the belief that the spur of a necessity he had never known before would goad him to the achievement of better things. But the character of John Vane was not the stuff whereof is made the moral phœnix. He shrivelled before the fire of defeat, and sank hopelessly into the ashes of surrender.

      They moved from their luxurious apartment to a cheap hotel, thence to a cheaper one, thence to a boarding-house. The backward path was strewn with unsettled bills, and loans never to be repaid. Vane wrote spasmodically for the daily papers, and for such of the magazines as would still accept his work, and, on the pittance thus earned, and the generosity of Helen's father, they contrived to exist, in a fashion, for something over two years.

      But, given the temperament of John Vane, the next development was inevitable. At first Helen sturdily refused to believe that a new demon had entered the hell which he was making of her life. She met him, at night, with an attempt at a smile, deliberately ignoring his unsteady gait, his sodden face, his hot, rank breath. But the evidence was plain, constant, incontestable. Drink had gripped him, and she knew too well that whatever of weakness laid hand upon her husband never relinquished hold.

      So another year went by, the gulf between them widening and widening. Finally, he struck her – and then, or the first time, that final degradation, that ominous, unknowable end of hope and self-respect, loomed, hideous and shadowy, through the fog before her. Unable to interpret its significance, she told herself, nevertheless, that it was very near.

      They were living in Kingsbridge, in a little frame house into which a man who had known her husband in his Wall Street days had come, in settlement of a bad debt, and which he had offered them, for charity's sake, at a paltry annual rental. The same Samaritan had given Vane a small position in his office, and the latter now went to and fro, between the city and its gruesome little neighbour on the Harlem, taking leave of his wife with a curt, contemptuous nod, and returning, bloated and foul-breathed, to pass the evenings in a semi-stupor.

      The chance had been too good to be disregarded, but life under such conditions was no better than sheer existence. The cottage was one of a squat, ill-favoured row on a side street, within a stone's throw of the railway station. They had found it equipped, in a way, with cheap, yellowish furniture, worn and faded carpets, and kitchen utensils distinguished by the grime of many meals and the musty inheritance of insufficient washings. About the house there was a stale, moist smell of plaster, and the plot of turf in the little front yard was dry and discoloured, like the mats of imitation grass in the establishment of a country photographer. Helen had striven to redeem the desolation of the tiny living-room with the few pictures and articles of furniture which she had contrived to save from the wreck of their former fortunes; but the attempt was not successful. The rare prints were out of place against the tawdry wall-paper, and the few pieces of Sheraton and Chippendale to which she had clung took on, in such surroundings, the shabbiness of what was already there.

      She was obliged to do her own marketing and cooking and housework, since a servant, in their straitened circumstances, was out of the question: and not the least part of her martyrdom was the purchase of scrawny yellow fowls, and vegetables of a freshness past, and their preparation in the dingy little kitchen, which left an odour of frying lard on the very clothes she wore.

      Vane had left her, an hour before, on his way to the city; and now, as the weight of depression became intolerable, she took her hat, locked the door behind her, and started for a long walk over the hill-roads back of the town. This had lately come to be her habit. It was something to escape, even for half a day, from the dispirited little suburb, with its sallow frame houses, its patched fences, and its cinder-strewn roadways, along which lean cats slunk guiltily, and dishevelled fowls picked their way in search of food. Up on the hills, the air of late November was keen and chill, and grayed with a drifting smoke-mist from distant fires of dried leaves. The brown grass was veiled here and there with thin patches of snow, stippled with faint shadows, cast by the filial oak-leaves, which cling longer than any other to the maternal bough. As Helen passed, squirrels darted nimbly away to a safe distance, and then sat up to watch her, with their fore paws held coquettishly against their breasts. It was all very sane and healthy, all in wonderful contrast to her morbid life in the shadow of John Vane's personality.

      There had been no children – a fact which, in happier hours, she had deplored, but for which she was now profoundly grateful. There are things which it is easier to bear alone. To share with another – and that other her child – the humiliation of her ill-starred association with her husband, would but have been to double the burden's weight. In her own case the period of martyrdom was well-nigh done. For his son and hers it would simply be at its beginning, tragic in its boundless possibilities of shame.

      As the thought came of the motherhood thus denied her, she wondered why she had been faithful to John Vane. Once she had believed in him, and so strong had been this faith that some shreds of it yet remained, to bind her to him through all the unspeakably humiliating days of his gradual but inevitable degradation. Nor was her fidelity of the negative, meaningless kind which is strong simply because unassailed. As a woman of the world, she had, more than once, been brought into contact with men lax in their scrupulosity, but scrupulous in their laxity. She had had her temptations, her chances of escape; and the price to be paid was not exorbitant, in view of the relief to be obtained. But upon these she had resolutely turned her back, hoping against hope for the miracle which never came. Even now, her father's door stood wide to her, and every instinct of reason impelled her to a separation. But Vane had not only killed her love for him; he had destroyed her very taste for life itself, under any circumstances whatever. She clung to him now, not because she loved him, not because it was impossible to do without him, but because he had sapped her youth, her faith, her craving for anything short of oblivion.

      She stood for a long time, motionless, at a point where a little stream tinkled pleasantly over the stones beneath its first thin sheathing of ice. The trees, saving only the oaks, were bare, and stood stiffly, in close proximity, in the weird, white brilliance of contre-lumière; and for a few moments the barren tranquillity of the scene was indescribably restful. Then the light changed, as a slow cloud crept across the sun, and, with the coming of the resultant shadow, Helen, always exquisitely sensible to the moods of nature, returned suddenly to a consciousness of her extremity. It was not real, then, this negative beauty, this serene simplicity of nun-like, early winter; it was not real, her own unwonted calm! What was actual, material, inevitable, was the personality of the man who dominated her life like an evil spirit, using her as his chattel, abusing her as his slave. Abruptly, the whole course of their association spread itself before her, up to her last glimpse of him, that morning, shambling on his way to the miserable daily duty to which he had sunk. And this was the life which she had been so eager to share with him, the life which, in those early days, his promises had made to seem so fair! Together, they were to have seen the world – the wonderful, great world, that had shone in the distance, like a Promised Land, from the Pisgah of her girlish imaginings: London, Paris, Rome, the Nile, Greece, India, and Japan. They were to have seen them all – drunk, in company, of the wine of beauty and inspiration, doubling their individual pleasures with the magic wand of mutual comprehension, as he should turn the treasures found along their enchanted way into such words as men preserve to praise, and she stand at his side, the first to read and reverence. And now? For the first time, the full splendour of the dream, the full squalor of the reality, swept down upon her. She saw him, diverted from his own ideals, and ignorant of hers, taking the initial step upon his downward way, no foot of which was ever to be retraced: drunken, debauched, impotent to write one worthy word, skulking, shamefaced and sodden, through a world of sunlight and manly endeavour, like some noisome prowler of the night, surprised, far from its lair, by the dawn of sweet young day. She was no more than a girl, and already it was too late. The blitheness of life was gone, never to return. For a moment she stood with her worn hands crushed against her face, and then she stretched her arms upward to their full length, and cried aloud, "Ah, God! Ah, God!" СКАЧАТЬ