The Relentless City

Ginger, as has been seen, was immensely interested in other people's affairs, having none, as he said, of his own which could possibly interest anybody. On this occasion he could not quite stifle his curiosity.

'I remember you telling me that you once wrote her a very – very friendly letter,' he said.

'Certainly. It is in my possession now. I keep it as an interesting memento.'

Ginger shuddered slightly.

'I should as soon think of keeping a corpse,' he said.

'Burn it. She's rather a brick to have given it you back, though. Sort of wedding-present?'

'Yes, a valuable one.'

'Does she still carry on with Bilton?' asked Ginger.

'I don't know.'

'Well, I hope she didn't show it him before she returned it,' said the other.

January in London, with few exceptions, had been a month of raw and foggy days – days that were bitter cold, with the coldness of a damp cloth, and stuffy with the airlessness of that which a damp cloth covers. Far otherwise was it at Davos, where morning after morning, after nights of still, intense cold, the sun rose over the snow-covered hills, and flamed like a golden giant, rejoicing in his strength, through the arc of crystalline blue. Much snow had fallen in December, but when the fall was past, the triumphant serenity of the brilliant climate reasserted itself. The pines above the long, one-streeted village had long ago shaken themselves clear of their covering, and stood out like large black holes burned in the hillside of white. Day after day the divine windlessness of the high Alpine valley had communicated something of its briskness to those fortunate enough to be there, and the exhilaration of the atmosphere seemed to percolate into minds of not more than ordinary vivacity.

The village itself lies on a gentle down gradient of road, some mile in length, where Alpine chalets jostle with huge modern hotels. Below lies the puffy little railway which climbs through the pinewoods above the town, and communicates in many loops and detours with the larger routes; and straight underneath the centre of the village is the skating-rink, where happy folk all day slide with set purpose on the elusive material, and with great content perform mystic evolutions of the most complicated order. Others, by the aid of the puffy railway, mount to the top of the hills above the town, and spend enraptured days in sliding down again on toboggans to the village of Klosters. Motion, in fact, of any other sort than that of walking is the aim and object of Davos life – an instinct dictated and rendered necessary by the keen exhilaration of the air. At no other place in the world, perhaps, is the sluggard so goaded to physical activity; at no other, perhaps, is the active brain so lulled or intoxicated into quiescence. It lies, in fact, basking and smiling, while the rejuvenated body, free from the low and cramping effects of thought, goes rejoicing on its way.

Charlie, by reason of his malady, had been debarred from taking either much or violent exercise; he had been told to be out always and to be idle usually. This he found extremely easy, for his mother was there to be idle with him, and Sybil was there to furnish entertainment for both. With her usual decision and eye for fitness, she had seen at once that for the present there was only one thing in the world worth doing – namely, skating. She skated extremely badly, but with an enjoyment that was almost pathetic, in consideration of the persistence of 'frequent fall.' Thus, morning after morning, she, setting out at earlier hours, would be followed down to the rink by Charlie and his mother, where they would lunch together, returning to the hotel before dark fell for the cosy brightness of the long winter evenings.

Mrs. Brancepeth was a widow, cultivated, intelligent, and gifted with a discernment that was at times really rather awkward to herself, though never to those to whom she applied it, since she never used what her intuition had enabled her to see, to their discomfort. This gift put her into very accurate possession of the state of affairs between Charlie and Sybil; it was clear to her, that is to say, that Sybil was wiling him back into the desire to live, waking his dormant interests, as if by oft-repeated little electric shocks of her own vitality, charming him back into life. She knew, of course, the state of her son's feelings towards Sybil, and did her the justice of allowing that, not byword or look, direct or indirect, did she ever hold herself out as the prize for which life was worth living. Indeed, Mrs. Brancepeth admired with all the highly-developed power of appreciation that was in her the constant effacement of herself which Sybil practised – effacement, that is, of the personal element, while by all healthy and impersonal channels she tried to rekindle his love for life. Whatever was – so Sybil's gospel appeared to run – was worth attention. Her own falls on the ice were matters for amused comment; the outside edge was per se a thing of beauty; the stately march of the sun was enough to turn one Parsee. Enthusiastic, vitally active as Sybil always had been, it required less penetration than Mrs. Brancepeth possessed to see that her amazing flood of vitality was deliberately outpoured for the sake of Charlie. This was the more evident to her by the fact that Sybil, when alone with her, subsided, sank into herself, and rested from an effort. At times, indeed, when Charlie was not there, she was almost peevish, which, in a woman of equable temper, is a sure sign of some overtaxed function. Such an instance occurred, so Mrs. Brancepeth thought, on an evening shortly before Bilton arrived at Davos. In the six weeks that they had now spent there, the elder woman had got to know the younger very well, to like her immensely, and to respect, with almost a sense of awe, the extreme cleverness with which she managed her affair. The 'affair' was briefly, to her mind, to make Charlie take a normal interest in life again, without exciting an abnormal interest in herself – to transfer his affection, in fact, from herself to life.

They had dined together that evening at their small table at the Beau Site, and Sybil had traced loops on the tablecloth with a wineglass, and sketched threes and brackets to a centre with the prong of a fork.

'Yes, it sounds silly,' she said, 'but it is the most fascinating thing in the world to try to do anything which you at present believe yourself incapable of doing. I have no eye for colour at all, therefore two years ago I took violently, as Charlie remembers, to painting. I have no eye for balance, therefore now I spend my day in trying to execute complicated movements which depend entirely on it.'

Charlie's eye lit up.

'The quest of the impossible,' he said. 'How I sympathize!'

This 'was direct enough; with returning health he had got far greater directness. Mrs. Brancepeth waited for Sybil's reply; it came as direct as his.

'Oh, Charlie, you always confuse things,' she said. 'You do not mean the quest of the impossible, but the quest of the improbable. The quest of the improbable is the secret of our striving. Anyone can grasp the impossible; it is merely an affair of the imagination. I can amuse myself by planning out what my life would be if I were a man. What I cannot do is to plan out for myself a successful career as a woman.'

'Surely you have plans enough,' said Mrs. Brancepeth.

'No, no plans,' said Sybil – ' desires merely. I have lots of desires. One is control of the outside edge; that is unrealized. Dear Charlie, you look so well this evening; that is another of my plans. It is getting on.'

'He gained two pounds last week,' said his mother.

'How nice! I lost a hundred, because I speculated on the Stock Exchange. It sounds rather grand to speculate, but it wasn't at all grand. What happened was that a pleasant young gentleman here, whose name I don't know, said two days ago to me, "Buy East Rands." I bought a hundred. They went down a point. I sold. But I bought many emotions with my hundred pounds. One was that one could get interested in anything, whether one knew what it was or not, as long as one put money into it. And if money interests you, surely anything else will.' This, too – so Mrs. Brancepeth interpreted it – was a successful red herring drawn across the path. Charlie appeared equally interested.

'Ah, you are wrong there, Sybil,' he said. 'Money in excelsis must be the most interesting thing in the world; there is nothing it cannot do.'

'Oh, it can do everything that is not worth doing,' interrupted Sybil; 'I grant that.'

'And most things that are,' he continued. 'For, except content, which it will not bring you, there is nothing which is not in its sphere.'

'Toothache,' said Sybil promptly. 'I had three minutes' toothache yesterday, and was miserable.'

'Painless extraction.'

'But not the courage for extraction,' said she. 'I always think that extraction is at the root of it. One can get along all right with what one has not got; what one cannot do is to part with something that one has which gives pain.'

Mrs. Brancepeth tapped with the handle of her fork on the table.

'This is irrelevant,' she said; 'the question before the house is the power of money.'

'Dear Mrs. Brancepeth,' said Sybil, 'please don't let us discuss; let us babble. "In a little while our lips are dumb," as some depressing poet says. Poets are so often depressing.'

'Sybil is the most prosaic poet I know,' said Charlie.

'She casts her thought really in the mould of poetry, and before it is cold she hammers it to prose. She is the only person I know who has the romantic temperament and is ashamed of it.'

'Not ashamed of it,' cried she; 'but it is not current coin. I hammer the metal into currency. And he calls me prosaic.' The ice was thin here, so thought Mrs. Brancepeth.

'Everyone has the same difficulty,' she said. 'One has either to hammer one's poetry into prose before it is current or trick out one's prose into poetry. The raw product of any of us – that is what it comes to – does not pass.'

'Ah, but what is the raw product?' said Charlie. 'If one knew, one would use it. But no one knows about himself. "Know thyself" – the first of mottoes, and, like all mottoes, impossible to act upon.'

'If you know other people, it is a good working basis about one's self,' said Sybil; 'one is very average – that is the important thing to remember.'

'But if everybody is average, why does A single out B?' asked Charlie. 'Why not C or D, up to Z?'

Sybil finished her pudding.

'I don't know,' she said. 'Probably because B comes first – is next to A. About money – of course it will not give you content. Content is a matter of temperament. But it will give you the power to gratify any taste; and, considering how many beautiful things there are in the world, it is a confession of idiocy or of want of taste, which is the same thing, not to be able to be absorbed in some one of them.'

'That is quite true,' said Mrs. Brancepeth; 'and it matters hardly at all what one is absorbed in so long as one is absorbed.

Charlie responded to this.

'And one's power of absorption depends almost entirely on health,' said he.

The evening post came in on this, and not long after Charlie went upstairs to answer certain letters which had come for him, leaving the other two together. Since the arrival of the post, Sybil had become very silent and preoccupied; one letter, in fact, she read three times over, with silent frownings between each perusal. At length she rose, took a turn or two up the room, and spoke.

'I have had disquieting news,' she said; 'and I want advice.'

'Do tell me, dear,' said Mrs. Brancepeth. 'I will do my best.'

'I don't know if you know Mr. Bilton,' she said. 'I have just heard from him; he is starting to-morrow for Davos.'

'Charlie has mentioned him,' said the other.

'You know who he is, then,' said Sybil. 'Shortly before I left England he proposed to me. I refused him. I don't want him to come here; but how is it possible for me to stop him?'

She faced about, and stood opposite the elder woman.

'What am I to do?' she asked. 'He is strong, masterful; I am afraid of him, and it will take a great deal of nervous force out of me. Now, I can't spare that.'

She paused a moment.

'Perhaps I had better say straight out what I mean,' she said. 'I am having rather a hard time as it is; that I take on myself very willingly. But every day leaves me more and more tired when the need for playing up is over. But it is worth it: I should be a very feeble creature if I did not feel that. Because he is getting better, is he not?'

Mrs. Brancepeth laid her hand on Sybil.

'Every day I thank God for what you are doing,' she said, 'and I thank you; but – but I suppose I have been more sanguine than I should. Is there no chance for Charlie?'

Sybil threw her arms out with a hopeless gesture.

'I don't know – literally I don't know. I like him so much that I can't offer him only liking; and I don't know that I have anything more to offer him. It is all very difficult. I don't suppose there is a woman in the world who knows herself so badly as I do. And I used to think I was so decisive, so clear cut. What is happening to me?'

Mrs. Brancepeth looked at her with a wonderful tenderness and pity. She had often noticed how completely she was in the clutch of her temperament, how the mood of the moment completely blotted out all other landmarks and guiding-posts which experience from without and her own character from within might have been supposed to be of some directing value in perplexities. But it was not so with her; in such things she was a child, ruled by the impulse – not led by the reason, nor steered by any formed character. With her the present moment so blotted out the past that all precedents, all warnings, all points which ninety-nine grown-up people out of a hundred have to help their decisions, were with her simply non-existent. If the present moment was pleasant, she abandoned herself to childish delight; if perplexing, she was the prey of in-soluble doubts. She had a passion for analysis, but her analysis, brilliant as it often was, was as fruitless as the Japanese cherry. It was the process of thought which she loved to dissect, and having dissected it, she threw it away. All this Mrs. Brancepeth saw – saw, too, that Sybil's was a nature to which it was no use to preach principles; the practical dealing with the concrete instance was all that could help her.

'Tell me more about Mr. Bilton,' she said.

'He is dominating,' said Sybil. 'I was greatly attracted by him. Then he did something disgusting, or so I thought it, and I was disillusioned. I even began to dislike him. But he has force, and it will need force on my part to fight him. What will the result be? I shall have less force to fight Charlie's microbes for him.'

'Yes, that is what you are doing,' said Mrs. Brancepeth softly.

'And even here, even when I see most clearly how much better he is getting, I ask myself whether I am doing wisely or not,' continued Sybil. 'What will the end be? Is he filled with certain hopes which I cannot say will ever be realized? And what if he is disappointed of them?'

There was no reply, and after a minute she went on.

'Mr. Bilton will arrive in two days,' she said; 'he will come to this hotel. It is impossible for me to cut him, not to recognise him. He is quite extraordinarily like Charlie, by the way. I must speak to him when he speaks to me. I must behave decently. And I know – oh, how well I know it! – he will interest me again. I shall be forced to be interested. There is that about him – some force, some relentless sort of machinery that goes grinding on, pulverizing what gets in its way.'

Mrs. Brancepeth rose.

'Now, dear, be quiet,' she said. 'You are working yourself up about it. Don't do that. Don't whip up your imagination on the subject. You take things too vividly.' Sybil smiled rather hopelessly.

'That does not help matters,' she said; 'some people take them not vividly enough. I am myself, you are yourself; the broad lines of each of us are inexorably laid down for us. All we can do is not to make a very shocking mess of them. We are all unsatisfactory. No, I don't think you are; you are very nice and restful. Now, what am I to do – not about Bilton, I mean, but now this minute. That is always so important.'

Mrs. Brancepeth laughed.

'And that is so like you,' she said. 'Go to bed, dear, and dream as vividly as you can of the outside edge.'

Bilton arrived two days afterwards, and, as was quite natural, paid a call on his friends before dinner in their sitting-room. As chance would have it, neither Charlie nor his mother were in, and he found Sybil alone. She rose and shook hands with him as he entered, but gave him no smile.

'I was surprised to get your letter,' she said; 'I thought you were too busy to come out to this very idle place.'

'I chose it for its idleness,' he said. 'I was very tired, and I have a busy time ahead of me again. It is economical to spend a fortnight in complete idleness rather than let your work suffer for a year.'

He paused a moment.

'That was my excuse,' he said; 'I had also a reason.' Sybil felt a sudden anger with him, which flared up and died down again as he went on.

'I am glad to find you alone,' he said, 'because I wanted to see you. I had to see you; I was thirsty for the sight of you. But do not be afraid; I shall not make myself importunate; I shall say nothing to offend you; I shall not entreat you by word or look. I just wanted – wanted to see you: that is all.'

He spoke rather low, and rather more slowly than his wont; but next moment he resumed the ordinary tone of his speech.

'I came here a couple of years ago,' said he; 'and I carried away with me an extraordinary sense of coolness and rest. I think one's brain goes to sleep here. We Americans need that; we have awful insomnia of the brain. I want to go sliding on a silly sledge down a steep place; I want to fall about on skates, and not read the paper.'

Sybil laughed; there had been a certain modesty and good taste in his first speech that had rather touched her, and from that he had gone straight to ordinary converse. The assurance of the harmlessness of his intentions seemed to her very genuine. As a matter of fact, it was profoundly calculated, and produced just the effect he wanted; for he particularly desired to be admitted without embarrassment or delay into the others' party.

To Charlie's mind, this addition – for though Bilton never seemed to intrude himself, yet he usually was there – was nothing more at first than a slight nuisance. More than that, it could not be called, since he knew of Sybil's complete and final rejection of Bilton as a lover, and it was not consonant with the sweetness of his own nature to be rendered jealous and exacting about her friends. But by degrees – so gradual that he could not notice the growth of the feeling, but only register the fact that it had grown – he became aware of uneasiness of mind, which, as it increased, diminished from the great content in which he had passed the earlier weeks of their stay at Davos. Also he began to realize that in the shade of his mind there had grown up unconsciously a hope – or, if not a hope, the possibility of the hope – that he himself might find in her some day more than a friend. He had often asked himself before whether he still cherished and watered the tender seedling, and as often he had honestly told himself that he did not. But Bilton's coming, and the terms he was on with Sybil, cast a light into his own dark places, and he knew that that hops was still not rooted up from his mind. And, realizing this, he realized how vital such a hope was to him.

Sybil, too, during the ten days following Bilton's arrival, had insensibly changed in her attitude towards him. Having definitely decided that he should not be her lover, she speedily began to find in him excellences as a friend which she had scarcely realized before. As a lover, she had found him wanting; a certain coarseness of nature in him prevented her from receiving him on that footing. But once off that ground, this coarseness almost ceased to offend her; at any rate, transferred on to the less intimate plane, it ranked a 'minus' of the same calibre as one of his numerous 'pluses.' Among these, his practical qualities greatly appealed to her – his quickness at grasping the salient points of any question; his very firm hold on concrete affairs, from the quickest and securest way of tying a bootlace to his lucid exposition of American finance, as typified in that Napoleon, Lewis Palmer, or his knowledge in his own business of what constituted a play that would draw. On a hundred occasions every day she had some exhibition of this brought to her notice; in whatever he did or said he showed efficiency. That quality, as she had settled, was not one to be loved, but socially she delighted in it. Moreover, the force she had feared seemed to be in abeyance. He made no demands on her nervous energies that she recognised as demands.

Now, love, though proverbially blind, is often very prone to see something which has no existence whatever, and before long Charlie began to conjure up a very complete phantom, which would have done credit to a much finer imagination than he really possessed, had not he viewed the situation through the eyes of a lover, to whose vision all is intensified. He saw, what was true, that Sybil listened with very genuine interest to what Bilton had to say; he saw her an eager pupil of that excellent skater; he saw, if some expedition was projected, that she left all the arrangements of sleighs and food in his hands. To the unbiassed observer nothing could have been more natural, for he talked well on subjects that interested her, he gave her valuable aid towards accomplishing the elusive outside back edge, and his arrangements in expeditions were admirable; for sleighs were punctual, and nothing was forgotten out of the luncheon-basket. But Charlie was not unbiassed, and the conclusions that slowly and silently formed themselves in his mind were both untrue in the abstract and in the concrete unjust to her. He was still sufficiently young to have an attack of childishness, and he was quite sufficiently in love with her to be a prey to jealousy.

The second week of Bilton's stay had passed, and still he dropped no hint about his imminent return, and on this particular morning, after a rather worried week, rendered not more easy because he kept his worries strictly to himself, Charlie had just returned rather gloomily from a visit to his doctor.

During the last ten days he had gone down a little in weight, and, though the doctor would have preferred it otherwise, he reminded him that he must have ups and downs; no cure was uninterrupted progress. But this, piled on the top of his other cares, which were rendered harder to bear by a couple of days of south wind, instead of the cold purity of windlessness, unduly depressed him, and Sybil, coming out of the hotel to the sheltered corner of the veranda which he usually occupied in the morning, found him somewhat listless and dejected. But, with tact which had often succeeded before, she affected not to notice it, and discoursed on indifferent subjects.

'Such a bore!' she said. 'The road down the valley is too soft for sleighing, and the rink is too sloppy for skating.'

Charlie brightened up a little; he seemed to have seen much less of her lately.

'So you're going to have an idle day,' he said. 'Sit and talk to me.'

'Well, we are going out almost immediately,' she said, 'just to go down the Schwester toboggan-run, which they say is still possible. I wish you could come, Charlie, but there's no way of getting up except walking.'

Charlie instantly froze into himself.

'I'm afraid that's quite impossible,' he said. 'You're going with Bilton, I suppose.'

'Yes; I rather think he's waiting for me.'

Charlie registered to himself the fact that she had not asked for the doctor's report of him, though Monday was his regular day for being overhauled.

'Never keep people waiting,' he said, and opened a book. Then his better disposition came to his aid.

'I hope it will be possible for you to get a good run,' he said cordially. 'It is horrid, this weather, is it not?'

'Horrid – quite horrid!' she said. 'Well, good-bye; your mother will be out directly.'