Books: The One Woman
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Thomas Dixon >> The One Woman
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He seized her hand.
"You will take the risk. You are cast in such a mould," he said,
with ringing assurance. "You are the chosen one, my dauntless
comrade in a holy crusade. We will call womanhood from enslavement
to form, ceremony and tradition, in which the brute nature of man
has bound her, out and up into her larger self, the mate and equal
of man."
She shook her head, and her hair began to fall in waving ringlets
about her forehead, temples and neck.
"I am afraid. I cannot permit this sacrifice on your part. You must
break with society, your friends, your father, your past, your wife
and children. I must brave the sneers of gossip and the tongue of
slander. It will destroy your work and end your career."
"It will give it grander scope. Back of the dead forms of the age,
the living heart of a new life is beating. It will burst its bounds
as surely as the dead limbs in that park will in spring put on their
shimmering satin which Nature is now weaving in her mills beneath
the sod. You and I will open the doors of the soul and body to a
new and wider life. And, after all, the body is the soul. I know
it as I drink the madness of your beauty."
"I do not fear the world so much, I shrink from striking a woman
a mortal blow. I know what it is to love now," she insisted sadly.
"Ruth and I have grown out of each other's life. Besides, you do
not know her. Beneath her little form are caged powers you have not
guessed," he replied, with a curious smile. "I groan and bellow in
pain until you can hear me a mile. It is my way. She can take her
place on the cold slab of a surgeon's table, feel the crash of
steel through nerve and muscle and artery without a groan. I might
rave, commit suicide or murder in a tempest of passion, but mark
my word, she will lift her lithe figure erect and, with soft, even
footstep, go her way."
He said this with a ring of tender pride, as though she were his
child about whom he was boasting.
"I believe you love her still," Kate said, flushing with a look of
surprise.
"You know her love could not live in the fires with which my eyes
are consuming you," he said with intensity.
She lowered her gaze and glanced uneasily about as though afraid
of him.
"Must the strength of manhood be forever throttled by the impulses
and mistakes of youth? Great changes in society are impending. You
have felt it. The whole world is trembling at their coming. Changes
in the forms of marriage must come that shall give scope for our
highest development. I ask you to enter with me into this new world
as a comrade pioneer and priestess. We will enter into a marriage
so free, so spontaneous no chains shall gall it; and yet in the
breadth of its freedom so sweet, so strong, so harmonious it will
be a sublime revelation to the world."
"And you think me fit for such priesthood?" she asked. "There are
hidden fires beneath this form you deem so fair. I have never known
restraint except in the willing slavery of your love. You do not
know me--I warn you. I did not know myself until I felt the mad
rush of blood from my heart in your arms yesterday. I am afraid of
this woman I met for the first time in the wild joy of your kiss."
"I'm not afraid of you," he laughed, springing to his feet and
striding toward her.
She trembled at his approach, but did not protest except with a
helpless look in her violet eyes.
He stood for a moment towering over her, his feet braced apart, his
big hands fiercely locked, his wide chest heaving with the exultant
joy of the mastery of her life, his steel-gray eyes sparkling with
the insolence of strength.
"We were born for one another," he said, in low, burning tones.
"It was for me you were waiting. Lo! I am here, and you are mine.
In you I have seen the ideal that haunts every full-grown man's
soul, of comradeship in every work, sympathy with every hope, the
glory of a perfect body, and perfect faith with perfect freedom."
"And you see all this in me?" she asked earnestly.
"Yes. You are my affinity, nerve answering nerve, thought echoing
thought. In our union I see a love so strong, of such utter surrender,
of such devotion of intellect, such mystic enthusiasm and physical
joy, its waves must break in ecstasy on our souls forever."
She arose with a sigh, looked appealingly at him, and her lips
mechanically said:
"It is wrong."
But the man saw the flash of unutterable love in her eyes and the
tender smile about her full lips; and laughing aloud, he took her
deliberately in his arms.
He kissed a tear from her lashes. A tremor shook her splendid form,
she closed her eyes, breathing deeply, slipped her arms around his
neck and sighed:
"My darling!"
CHAPTER XV
GOEST THOU TO SEE A WOMAN?
Again Gordon was seated in Overman's library and his single eye
was asking some uncomfortable questions.
"I sent for you, Frank, because I discovered by accident, in
the office of a newspaper of which I am a stockholder, that some
curious things are going on between you and a young woman of your
congregation. I put two and two together, and I've guessed the
secret of your Temple. There's more behind all this than religious
enthusiasm. That gift was not laid on God's altar, but on the altar
of one of his little images here below. Out with it. You can't fool
me."
"Well, your guess is correct. She gave the money. I love her
and she loves me. Ruth will go South for the winter, and we have
separated. A divorce will be obtained in due time, and I will marry
Miss Ransom under the new forms of Social Freedom, and you will be
my best man."
"Not on your life," Overman slowly growled, bringing his enormous
jaws together and twisting the muscles of his mouth upward as though
he smelled something.
"Can't stand the rustle of a woman's dress?"
"Oh, I might survive. You know they say the only really happy people
at a wedding are the old bachelors."
"Then why not?"
"I draw the line at the progressive harem idea."
"And a bachelor?" Gordon sneered.
Overman nodded. "Many things may be forgiven sinners, but a bishop
must be the husband of one wife."
"I'm not a bishop. I'm a man. I ask no quarter of my enemies."
"You have but one enemy. You can see him in the mirror any time."
"It's funny to hear you preach!"
The banker bent forward.
"Frank, you're joking. You don't mean to tell me that your Socialist
poppy plant has borne its opium fruit so soon? That you are going
to desert that charming little woman, shy, timid and tremulous,
with her great soulful eyes, the bride of your youth, the mother
of your babes, and take up with another woman, just as any ordinary
cur has done now and then for the past four thousand years?"
Gordon winced.
"No. I am going to form a union with this beautiful woman which
shall be a prophecy and a propaganda of the freedom of the race,
when comrade life shall forget the ancient fears, each shall be
free to find and love his own, love be loosed from tragedy, doubt
or moan, each life be its own, original and masterful, each man a
god, arrayed and beautiful!"
Overman laughed softly.
"So fine as that? You're great on the frills. You have dressed it
up nicely. But when two of your man-gods, arrayed and beautiful,
get their eyes, set on the same woman-god, still more beautiful,
arrayed or unarrayed, you'll hear the rattle of the police wagon
in the streets of Heaven, with the ambulance close behind."
The banker grinned and fixed his eye on his friend with a quizzical
look.
"Don't be a monkey," Gordon scowled.
"Why not? You propose to go back to forest life."
"I propose to make human society a vast brotherhood," the preacher
cried, with a wave of his arm.
"Well, don't forget that Cain killed his brother Abel for less than
a woman's smile."
"Society is lost unless some great upheaval shall clear the rubbish
and we build new foundations on truth and fellowship and freedom."
Overman put his hand on Gordon's knee.
"Frank, I'm a godless, crusty bachelor, but I read history. Destroy
the integrity of the family and the salt of the earth is lost. The
whole thing will rot."
"But I propose to purify and glorify the home its life by building
it on love."
"Your dream's a fake and its world peopled with fools."
"Love must conquer all," the dreamer insisted.
"And to do it, Frank, it must begin at home. You are blinded by a
woman's beauty."
"No; I love her with the one master passion of manhood. Such love
is itself the highest expression of life."
"Confound you," snapped Overman, "love as many women as you
please, but don't desert your wife and children. It's too vulgar.
I'm ashamed of you."
"I will not live a lie," Gordon said, with emphasis.
"Strange madness. I urge you to tell a tiny little polite lie and
save your wife and children. You're too good to lie, so you kill your
wife, proclaim an insane crusade of lust, and call it a religion!"
"We can't control the beat of our hearts," was the dreamy reply.
"No, you can't; but you can control the stroke of your big, blue-veined
fist! You have struck the mother of your children with your brute
claws. It's a mean, low thing to do, call it by as many high names
as you please. Love as many women as you like, but for decency's
sake--can't you honour your wife with a polite lie?"
"It's not in me to lie, or to love but one woman."
The banker's massive shoulders went up and his bushy brows lifted.
"You'll end with a dozen, and it's such a stupid old story. You
think the performance an original drama in which you are playing
a star role. It's as old as the brute beneath the skin of your big
hairy hand. Alexander could conquer the world, but he died in drunken
revelry with a worthless woman. Caesar and Mark Antony forgot the
Roman Empire for the smile of Cleopatra. Frederick the Great became
a puppet in the hands of a ballet dancer. She spoke and he obeyed.
Conde, in the meridian of his splendid manhood, the pride and glory
of France, sacrificed his family, his fortune and his friends for
an adventuress, who murdered him. Charles Stewart Parnell, the
uncrowned king of Ireland, forgot his people and stumbled into
death and oblivion over the form of a woman. The hills and valleys
of the centuries are white with the bones of these fools."
"There was never a case just like mine."
"So every fool thought."
"But you have not seen this woman. You do not know her," Gordon
protested, hotly.
"No; and I don't want to know her. 'Goest thou to see a woman? Take
thy whip!' Women, savages and children are inferior and immature
forms of evolution. But they are going to prove more than a match
for you, my boy."
"Yes; I've heard you talk such rubbish before," Gordon replied,
dreamily. "Mark, I'm sorry for the poverty of your life. The man
who has not loved is not a man. He is a monstrosity out of touch
of sympathy with the race. You cannot understand me when I tell
you that our love is so pure, so wonderful, so perfect, it is its
own defense."
"Indeed! Which love? For Ruth or Kate? Frank, I marvel at the
childlike simplicity of your folly and your mental antics to justify
it. It's enough to make that cat laugh that broke up your sermon."
"We are going to bear in our union and life the flaming standard
of a revolution that will yet redeem society."
"I admire your ingenuity. Just a plain rooster-fighting sinner like
me would never have thought of making his sin a holy religion. You
haven't studied theology for nothing. I'll bet you could argue the
devil or the Archangel Michael to a standstill on any proposition
you'd set your heart on."
The preacher smiled.
"I never saw my course with greater clearness."
"Yes; but a nail in the pilot-house will draw the needle and drive
the mightiest ocean greyhound on the rocks with the captain at the
wheel dead sure of his course."
"Mark, it's utterly useless to talk. You and I are miles apart at
our starting-point and we get farther with every step. You look at
it from the vulgar point of view of the world. What I am doing is
a great act of the soul, a breaking of bonds and chains. You see
only the body. I am going to lead a crusade that shall so purify
and exalt the body that it shall become one with the soul. The
freedom of man can only be attained in unfettered fellowship, and
this beautiful woman will be with me a comrade priestess to teach
the world this sublime truth."
"And will you be the only priest with her in the Temple of Humanity?"
asked the banker, quizzically.
Gordon laughed with insolent assurance.
"In her eyes, yes."
"But other men have eyes."
"Their gaze will not disturb the serenity of our love, because it
will be built on oneness of ideal, hope, faith, taste and work."
"And yet dark hair loves the blond, and blue eyes hunger for the
brown. It's an old trick Nature has played before, Frank."
"Well, we are going to show you a miracle, and you are coming with
us by and by and be a deacon in this Church of the Son of Man."
Overman drew his straight bushy brow down over his one eye until
it looked like the gleam of a lighthouse through the woods, turned
his head sideways, peered at his friend and growled:
"Well, you are a fool!"
"I have faith that will remove mountains."
"You'll need it. I've been waiting for a church in New York broad
enough to invite the devil to join. I'll come when it's ready."
"Good. We'll give you a welcome."
Overman grunted, and gazed into the fire with his single eye,
frowning and twisting the muscles of his mouth into a sneer.
CHAPTER XVI
THE PARTING
The night before the day Gordon had fixed for their final parting
Ruth slept but little. The task of gathering his things scattered
about the house was harder than she had hoped.
Over each little trinket that spoke its message of the tender
intimacy of married life she had lingered and cried. She wished to
keep everything.
At last she placed the clothes in his trunk, his collars, cuffs,
cravats and such odds and ends as he would need at once, and the
rest she packed away carefully in bureau drawers and locked them
up.
His slippers and dressing-gowns she knew he would want, but she made
up her mind she would keep them. The slippers were an old-fashioned
pattern with quaint Spanish embroidery worked around the edges. She
had made the first pair before they were married, with her girl's
heart fluttering with new-found happiness. She had allowed him
no other kind since their marriage. This bit of sentiment she had
guarded even in the darkest days of the past year's estrangement.
She had worked each pair with her own hand.
His dressing-gowns, in which he often studied at home in her room
late on Saturday nights, she had always made for him, changing
their designs from time to time as her fancy had led her.
Around these two articles of his wardrobe her very heart-strings
seemed woven.
She placed them in his trunk once, telling herself through her
tears:
"He may think of me when he sees them."
Then the lightning flashed across the clouds in her eyes.
"She might touch them! Let her make them for him after her own
devil's fancy!"
She took them out, kissed them and packed them away. His picture
she took down carefully from the walls, his photographs from her
mantel and bureau and dresser. The life-sized one she locked in a
closet and packed the others with his belongings she meant to keep.
On a wedding certificate, set in a quaint old gold frame, she looked
long and tenderly. She took it down from its place over her bureau,
where it had hung for years, and brushed the dust from the back. On
its broad white margins he had written a poem to her on the birth
of their first baby. He had sent her yards of rhymes during their
courtship, but this was a poem. Every line was wet with his tears,
and every thought throbbed with the sweetest music of his soul
wrought to its highest tension of feeling.
She read it over and over again and cried as though her heart would
break as a thousand tender memories came stealing back from their
early married life.
"Oh, dear God!" she sobbed. "How could he have felt that--and he
did feel it--and now desert me!"
She sat for an hour with this framed emblem of her happiness and
her sorrow in her hands, dreaming of their past.
She was a girl again in old Hampton, Virginia, her heart all
a-quiver over a ball at the Hygeia, where she was to meet a guest,
a distinguished young preacher resting for the summer just from
his divinity course. He had seen her in the crowd at the hotel
and begged a friend to introduce him. She was going to meet him in
the parlours, dressed in the splendour of her ballroom dress that
night, and conquer this handsome young giant. And from the moment
they met, she was the conquered, and he the conqueror.
The incense of their honeymoon in a village of southern Indiana
during his first pastorate, when the wonder of love made storm
days bright with splendour and clothed in beauty the meanest clod
of earth, stole over her soul--each memory added to her pain, and
yet they were sweet. She hugged them to her heart.
"They are all mine at least!" she sighed. "And I am glad I have
lived them."
At two o'clock she went into the nursery and looked at the sleeping
children. She bent over the cradle of the boy. He was dreaming,
and a smile was playing about the corners of his lips.
He was so like Gordon, with his little mouth twitching in dreamy
laughter, she fell on her knees, and buried her face in her delicate
tapering hands, crying:
"How can I bear it!"
She placed her arms on the rail of the cradle and gazed at him
tenderly.
"Lord, keep him clean and pure, and whatever he may do in life,
may he never break a woman's heart!" she softly prayed.
Into her first-born's face she looked long and in silence. How
like her, and how like him, and how marvelous the miracle of this
union of flesh and blood and spirit in a living soul! Lucy was
growing more like her every day. She could see and hear herself in
her ways and voice, until she would laugh aloud sometimes at the
memory of her own childhood. And yet to see her very self growing
into the startling image of her lover who was deserting her cut
anew with stinging power.
Again she was softly praying: "Dear Lord, whatever shall come to
her, poverty or riches, joy or pain, honour or shame, sunshine or
shadow, save her from this. My feet will climb this Calvary, and
my lips drink its gall, but may the cup pass from her!"
After a few hours of fitful sleep, she rose and looked out her
window on another radiant November morning. So clear was the sky she
could see the flag-staffs of the great downtown buildings and back
of them in the distant bay the pennant masts of ships at anchor.
The trees in Central Park seemed to glow with the splendour of the
dying autumn's sun. The glory of the day mocked her sorrow.
"What does Nature care?" she sighed. "And yet who knows, it may be
a token! I must bravely play my part and leave the rest with God."
Watching at the window she saw Gordon coming, his broad feet
measuring a giant's stride, his wide shoulders and magnificent head
high with unconscious strength.
She wondered if he would stop in the parlour as a visitor or come
to her room as was his custom, and a sharp pain cut her with the
thought of their changed relationship.
He stopped in the hall, asked the maid to send the children down
at once, and stepped into the parlour.
He felt a strange embarrassment in his own home. This house he had
bought for Ruth soon after their arrival in New York. It had just
been built in the wide-open space of the cliffs on Washington Heights.
The Pilgrim Church's members were long since scattered over every
quarter of the city, and, by arranging his study in the church,
he was able to have his home so far removed from the noise of the
downtown district. He had thus fulfilled Ruth's passionate desire
for a home of her own within their moderate means. He recalled
now with tender melancholy how happy they had been decorating this
little nest, and how far from his wildest dream had been such an
ending of it all.
But he had come with important news, and he hoped her pain would
be softened by its announcement.
The children entered with shouts of delight. First one would hug
him, and then the other, and then both would try at the same time.
Lucy put her hands on his smooth ruddy cheeks and kissed his lips
and eyes with the quaintest imitation of her mother's trick of
gesture.
"Where have you been, Papa? We thought you were never coming? Mama
said you were gone for a trip and would come to-day, but"--her voice
sank--"she's been crying, and crying, and we don't know what's the
matter. I'm so glad you've come."
"Well, you and brother run upstairs to play and tell her Papa wishes
to see her."
The children left and Ruth came down at once.
As she entered the room, he was struck by the change in her face
and manner. She seemed transfigured by a strange, spiritual elation.
She was gracious, natural and friendly. The anxiety had passed
from her face, and the storm in her dark eyes seemed stilled by a
steady radiance from the soul.
"I'm glad to see you looking better, Ruth," he said, with feeling.
"Yes, I have a new standard now of measuring life, its pain and
its joy. The soul can only pass once through such a moment as that
I lived, prostrate on the floor at your feet last Monday. I have
looked Death in the face. I am no longer afraid."
"I am very, very sorry to give you such pain. I did not think you
cared so deeply," he said, gently.
"Yes, I know I have seemed indifferent and resentful for the past
year. I thought you would come back to your old self by and by.
In my poor proud soul I thought I was punishing you. How little,
dear, I dreamed of this! The thought of really losing you never
once entered my heart. It was unthinkable. I do not believe it yet.
Such love as ours, such tenderness and devotion as you gave to me
once, the delirium of love's joy that found itself in my motherhood
and wrought itself in the forms of our babies--no, Frank, it cannot
die, unless God dies! And I shall not lose you at last, unless God
forgets me, and He will not."
Her face, even through her tears, was illumined by an assurance so
strong, so prophetic, the man was startled.
"I need not tell you, Ruth, that I desire your happiness. And, strange
as it may seem to you, Miss Ransom regards you with tenderness."
The dark eyes flashed a gleam of lightning from their depths.
"Thanks. I can live without her maudlin pity."
"You misjudge her," he cried, raising his hand.
"Perhaps; but I'll ask you, Frank, not to dishonour me, or this
little home you were once good enough to give to me, by mentioning
that woman's name within its doors again."
The sensitive mouth closed with an emphasis he could not mistake.
"But I am the bearer from her to-day of a token of her regard.
She has determined to turn over to you as quickly as possible a
half-million dollars of her remaining fortune."
Ruth sprang to her feet, her face scarlet, her breast heaving, her
lithe figure erect and trembling.
"And you dare bring this message to me? This offer to sell my
husband and my love!"
"Come, come, Ruth, a woman has no need to sacrifice a great fortune
in New York for a husband. They are cheaper than that."
"They do seem cheap," she answered, bitterly.
"You should have common sense. The spirit of sacrifice in this great
gift to you and the children is too deep and honest to be met with
a sneer. It is my desire and hers that you shall be forever beyond
want."
Ruth's face softened and a tender smile lit it once more.
"Frank, my darling, you cannot think me so base? You know there is
not a drop of mean blood in me. Can gold pay for my heart's desire?
The price for my beloved? Pile the earth with diamonds to the stars,
I'd hold it trash for the touch of your hand!"
The man moved nervously.
"You must have some sense, Ruth. Surely, I'm not worth all this if
I leave you so. You must take this money."
She moved closer to him and held up her delicate hands, with the
sunlight gleaming through the red blood of her tapering fingers.
"You see these hands? They have only known the gentle tasks of love.
Well, I'll scrub, sew and wash the clothes of working-men before
one dollar of her gold shall stain them!"
"You cannot be so foolish," he protested, impatiently. "Besides,
she has given me this money to give to you."
"Ah, my love," she went on, as though she had not heard his last
words, "if you were frankly evil as other men, I might bear this
shame with better grace. Others before me, as good as I, have
borne its burden. But when I think that you are making your sin a
religion, and that you are going to preach with the zeal of a prophet
this gospel of the brute and call it freedom, how can I bear it?"
They were both silent for a moment.
"Let us change this disgusting subject, Frank," she said at length.
"I wish you to leave with something kindlier to remember in my face
than this shadow. You see, I have taken your pictures all down and
locked them up. I have placed your clothes, all I could spare, in
your trunk--for even these little things to me are heart treasures
now. I could not let you take the slippers I have made for you
with my own hands, or your dressing-gowns. That woman shall never
touch them. The marriage certificate, with the little poem written
to me on the birth of Lucy, I've packed up, too, with your pictures.
I've put them away, because, just now, it would break my heart to
look at them after this parting with you. When I come back from
the South I will be stronger, and I will bring them out again. Your
ring is mine until God's hand shall take it. I'll teach our babies
always to love you."
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