Queer Classics – 10 Novels Collection. Radclyffe Hall

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СКАЧАТЬ was my unconscious ally,” Churm continued, without noticing the interruption. “Denman saved me from the worst, the bitterest fate that can befall a true man, — to marry a woman whose truth and purity he can allow himself to doubt.”

      “Bitter indeed! A blight of all the bloom and harvest of a life!” said I; — so fancy had taught me.

      “Ah, yes! as the ‘marriage of true minds’ alone gives fragrance and ripeness. I have missed the harvest, I escaped the blight. Denman, rich and handsome, with life clear before him, came back from Europe. Wealth had illusions for Emma Page. She was new to it. I was not poor; but my wealth was only in posse.”

      “Few divine a young man’s posse, I fear,” said I, as he paused to whiff.

      “Posse must be put into a pipe and blown into an illustrious bubble, before the world perceives the esse,” he rejoined. “But inventive power is the best capital. Mine has made me far richer than Denman. Well; he arrived at the moment of my agonizing doubt. Miss Page was The Beauty of our day. He was charmed. His cruder vision admired the rose and did not miss the dew-drop. She presently allowed me to perceive that he was to be my substitute. I will not tire you with the detail of the stranding and wreck of our engagement.”

      “No?” said I. “I begin to identify myself strangely with your story.”

      “No. No detail! To recall talks and looks and tones would be more tragedy than I could bear, even to make my story sharper. So our engagement ended. That slight perfidy was nothing. My wrong was deeper.”

      “Ah, poor Emma!” he continued, “forgiven long ago! That stain of hers, whether it were taint of being, or fault of nurture, or rash or sober sin, killed faith and hope in me for a time.”

      He paused again, and the blank seemed to symbolize a blank in his life.

      “It was a wide gulf to swim over,” he said. “Dark waters, Robert! Dark and broad! and I have seen many souls of men and women drown, that had not force to buffet through, or patience to drift across. But I escaped, and, having paid the price of suffering without despair, the larger hopes and higher faiths were revealed to me.”

      He struck aside the smoke with a strong, swimmer’s gesture of the arm, — a forceful character, as even his motions showed.

      “This is sacred confidence, Robert,” he said. “I give it to you, as a father warning a son.”

      “And as a son I take and treasure it.”

      “Denman,” Churm went on, “did not mind the wrong he might have been doing me, had my love not already perished. Denman never heeds any one between him and his object. He looks at the prospect; what is the fly on the pane to him? He has been walking over others all his life, trampling them if they lifted up their heads. But a selfish man gets himself sent first to Coventry, and then, if he does not mend, to St. Helena. Denman, a great merchant by inheritance, has gained money-power at the cost of moral weight. Our best men look coldly on him. He knows it, and grasps at bigger wealth to crush criticism. It is the old story, — vaulting ambition, the Russian campaign. Denman’s gigantic schemes are the terror, the wonder, and the admiration of Wall Street. But he seems to a cool student a desperate man. It saddens me to meet him now, — aged, worn, anxious, hardly daring to look me in the face, and, as I fear, wholly in the power of Densdeth.”

      “Densdeth!” cried I. “Who and what is Densdeth? Does he hold every man’s leading-strings to the Devil?”

      “What is Densdeth? My story will give you a fact or two in answer to the question. I go on with it rapidly.

      “Emma Page married Denman.

      “She tried splendor for a year. She was the beautiful wife of the richest young man in town.

      “At the year’s end, her daughter Emma was born.

      “A child is a terrible vengeance to a mother who has ever lowered her womanhood, by thought or act. What tortures she would have endured, — so she now too late thinks, — if she could lave purged and made anew the nature she has transmitted to an innocent being! But there it lies before her in the cradle, the embodiment of her inmost thought. There lies the heir, and the waste of his heritage is irreclaimable.”

      “Don’t be so cruelly stern,” said I. “You out-Herod Herod, in the converse. You massacre the Innocents because they are guilty. This is the old dead dogma of original sin, redivivus and rampant.”

      “No; the dogma is dead, and science handles the facts without the trammels of an impious theory. Life cures, and Death renews. But Life should be a feast, not a medicine.

      “Emma’s birth,” he continued, “transformed Mrs. Denman. For a year she was a faithful mother.

      “Denman did not like his wife so well in this capacity. They diverged widely. To be handsome for him and showy for the public was his notion of Mrs. Denman’s office. The second year flowed rough.

      “At the end of it, Clara was born, the child of a woman chastened and purified.

      “A fortnight after her birth, Denman came to me.

      “‘My wife is desperately ill,’ said he. ‘She wishes to see you.’

      “I went calmly to this farewell interview with my old love. The husband seemed to abdicate in my behalf.

      “‘I am to die,’ she said, almost gayly. ‘I have sent for you, because I trust you wholly. Dear friend, here are my daughters! Befriend them for my sake! I feel that you will understand the yearnings of young souls. Make them what you once hoped of me! Will you not be the father of their spiritual life? Forgive me, dear friend, for the old wrong, for the old wrongs! Prove that you have pardoned me by loving mine. Good-bye.’”

      Churm was silent awhile.

      He lighted a fresh cigar and smoked steadily. The smoke lifted slowly in the still room, and hung in wreaths overhead. He sat looking vaguely into the shifting cloud.

      Clara Denman, Dead

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      I watched Churm, as he smoked.

      Love, disloyalty, penitence, death, — were these all unrealities, that he could speak of them in his own history so calmly? Could a man be hurt as he had been, and overlive unscarred? I had heard cool men say, that “the tragedies of this life become the comedies of another, and that we should some time smile to recall our cruellest battles here, as now we smile to watch the jousts of flies in a sunbeam.” Churm’s tragedy was still tragedy to him. He had begun to recite it with evident pain. But the pain of his tone became indifference before he closed; and now he sat there smoking, as if he had related gravely, but without emotion, the mishaps of some stranger.

      I wondered.

      He looked through the smoke, caught my wondering eye, smiled soberly, and said: “Such an experience as I have described is like a shirt of Nessus, which one wears until the prickles of its poisoned serge have thoroughly toughened his skin. When it ceases to gall, he strips it off and hangs it by the highway for whoever runs to take; or if he finds some sensitive friend, СКАЧАТЬ