Crucial Instances

“You fellows knew enough of my early history to A guess what my second marriage meant to me.  I say guess, because no one could understand—­really.  I’ve always had a feminine streak in me, I suppose:  the need of a pair of eyes that should see with me, of a pulse that should keep time with mine.  Life is a big thing, of course; a magnificent spectacle; but I got so tired of looking at it alone!  Still, it’s always good to live, and I had plenty of happiness—­of the evolved kind.  What I’d never had a taste of was the simple inconscient sort that one breathes in like the air….

“Well—­I met her.  It was like finding the climate in which I was meant to live.  You know what she was—­how indefinitely she multiplied one’s points of contact with life, how she lit up the caverns and bridged the abysses!  Well, I swear to you (though I suppose the sense of all that was latent in me) that what I used to think of on my way home at the end of the day, was simply that when I opened this door she’d be sitting over there, with the lamp-light falling in a particular way on one little curl in her neck….  When Claydon painted her he caught just the look she used to lift to mine when I came in—­I’ve wondered, sometimes, at his knowing how she looked when she and I were alone.—­How I rejoiced in that picture!  I used to say to her, ’You’re my prisoner now—­I shall never lose you.  If you grew tired of me and left me you’d leave your real self there on the wall!’ It was always one of our jokes that she was going to grow tired of me—­

“Three years of it—­and then she died.  It was so sudden that there was no change, no diminution.  It was as if she had suddenly become fixed, immovable, like her own portrait:  as if Time had ceased at its happiest hour, just as Claydon had thrown down his brush one day and said, ’I can’t do better than that.’

“I went away, as you know, and stayed over there five years.  I worked as hard as I knew how, and after the first black months a little light stole in on me.  From thinking that she would have been interested in what I was doing I came to feel that she was interested—­that she was there and that she knew.  I’m not talking any psychical jargon—­I’m simply trying to express the sense I had that an influence so full, so abounding as hers couldn’t pass like a spring shower.  We had so lived into each other’s hearts and minds that the consciousness of what she would have thought and felt illuminated all I did.  At first she used to come back shyly, tentatively, as though not sure of finding me; then she stayed longer and longer, till at last she became again the very air I breathed….  There were bad moments, of course, when her nearness mocked me with the loss of the real woman; but gradually the distinction between the two was effaced and the mere thought of her grew warm as flesh and blood.

“Then I came home.  I landed in the morning and came straight down here.  The thought of seeing her portrait possessed me and my heart beat like a lover’s as I opened the library door.  It was in the afternoon and the room was full of light.  It fell on her picture—­the picture of a young and radiant woman.  She smiled at me coldly across the distance that divided us.  I had the feeling that she didn’t even recognize me.  And then I caught sight of myself in the mirror over there—­a gray-haired broken man whom she had never known!

“For a week we two lived together—­the strange woman and the strange man.  I used to sit night after night and question her smiling face; but no answer ever came.  What did she know of me, after all?  We were irrevocably separated by the five years of life that lay between us.  At times, as I sat here, I almost grew to hate her; for her presence had driven away my gentle ghost, the real wife who had wept, aged, struggled with me during those awful years….  It was the worst loneliness I’ve ever known.  Then, gradually, I began to notice a look of sadness in the picture’s eyes; a look that seemed to say:  ‘Don’t you see that I am lonely too?’ And all at once it came over me how she would have hated to be left behind!  I remembered her comparing life to a heavy book that could not be read with ease unless two people held it together; and I thought how impatiently her hand would have turned the pages that divided us!—­So the idea came to me:  ’It’s the picture that stands between us; the picture that is dead, and not my wife.  To sit in this room is to keep watch beside a corpse.’  As this feeling grew on me the portrait became like a beautiful mausoleum in which she had been buried alive:  I could hear her beating against the painted walls and crying to me faintly for help….

“One day I found I couldn’t stand it any longer and I sent for Claydon.  He came down and I told him what I’d been through and what I wanted him to do.  At first he refused point-blank to touch the picture.  The next morning I went off for a long tramp, and when I came home I found him sitting here alone.  He looked at me sharply for a moment and then he said:  ’I’ve changed my mind; I’ll do it.’  I arranged one of the north rooms as a studio and he shut himself up there for a day; then he sent for me.  The picture stood there as you see it now—­it was as though she’d met me on the threshold and taken me in her arms!  I tried to thank him, to tell him what it meant to me, but he cut me short.

“‘There’s an up train at five, isn’t there?’ he asked.  ’I’m booked for a dinner to-night.  I shall just have time to make a bolt for the station and you can send my traps after me.’  I haven’t seen him since.

“I can guess what it cost him to lay hands on his masterpiece; but, after all, to him it was only a picture lost, to me it was my wife regained!”