Phases of an Inferior Planet

He swallowed an added dose of caffeine and looked at the page before him. The last written words stared him in the face and seemed so alien to his present train of thought as to have emanated from another person. He wondered what that other person's completion of the sentence would have been.

"Optimism is the first duty of the altruist." What in thunder had that to do with the effects of the bicycle? And what beastly rot it was. One might as well state that to be comfortable is the first duty of the damned.

"Optimism is the first duty of the altruist." He wrote on with the feeling that he was existing as an automaton, that while his hand was executing the result of some reflex action, his thinking entity was in the still room behind the closed door.

But with the absence of personality his senses were rendered doubly acute, and he seemed to see the rhythm of the atmospheric waves about him, while his ears were responsive to every sound in the night without – hearing them, not in a confused discord, but in distinct differentiation of note and key. Once his gaze encountered the grinning skull above the mantel, and, to his giddy senses, it seemed to wink with its hollow sockets. He found himself idly wondering if the skull had caught the trick of winking from its former accompaniment of flesh, and was forced to pull his thoughts together with a jerk. Then there came one of those sudden attacks of vertigo to which he had become subject, and he laid aside his pen and closed his eyes. "Too much caffeine," he muttered. But when it passed he went on again.

As the day broke he finished his articles, placed them in envelopes, stamped and addressed them, and rose to his feet. He blew out the lamp, and the faint odor of heated oil caused him a sensation of nausea. Crossing to the window, he raised the shade and stood inhaling the insipidity of atmosphere which is the city imitation of the freshness of a country morning. Without, a sombre, neutral-toned light flooded the almost deserted streets. In the highest heaven a star was still visible, and the vaguest herald of dawn flaunted itself beyond the chimney-pots.

As he lifted the shade he noticed that his hand trembled and that his head was unusually light. That massive sense of loneliness which the transition hour from darkness to day begets in the on-looker oppressed him with the force of an estrangement of hope. Such an impression had been produced upon him a hundred times by the breaking of dawn after a sleepless night.

He turned away and opened the door softly.

The night-lamp was still burning, but the beginning of the morrow washed with a faint grayness the atmosphere. The objects he had dwelt upon the night before were magnified in size, and in an instant the unpacked trunks, the rubber doll, and the bottles of medicine obtruded themselves upon his vision.

Mariana was still sitting as he had left her, waving to and fro the palm-leaf fan. He wondered vaguely if she had sat thus since midnight. Then he laid his hand upon her shoulder.

"Mariana, you must lie down." And as he stooped nearer he saw that the child was dead.

CHAPTER XVIII

For the next six weeks Anthony was forced to listen to the distracted self-accusations of Mariana. When the little white coffin had been carried to Greenwood and laid in the over-grown plot beside the graves of Algarcife's parents, to be shadowed by the storied urns that redounded to the honor of a less impoverished generation, Mariana returned, and, throwing herself upon the floor, refused consolation.

"I want nothing," she said – "nothing, nothing. What could comfort me?"

At Anthony's protestations of love and grief she lifted dull and scornful eyes, wherein the triumph of motherhood showed supreme over all other emotions.

"How can you know?" she asked, between tearless sobs. "You did not nurse her, and hold her in your arms night and day; you did not bathe her while she laughed at the bubbles; you did not put on her little dresses and socks. Oh, my baby! my baby! I want my baby!"

Then she would rise and pace up and down in a sudden frenzy of despair, clinching her hands at her own impotence, tearing her wounds asunder with remorseless recollections. It was as if she found satisfaction in thus inflicting upon herself the added agony of recalling the minor details of her loss – in voicing the keenest passion of her grief.

Algarcife, writing in the adjoining room and wrung by a tortured brain, would listen to her unsteady tread as she walked ceaselessly back and forth, until the sound would madden him with its pauseless monotony – and then would come that half-choked cry for reckoning with fate, "Oh, my baby!"

To his more self-contained nature the violence of Mariana's grief was like the searing of the bleeding sores in his own heart. To avoid that cry of stricken motherhood he would have given the better portion of his life – to have been deaf to that impulsive expression of a pain he felt but could not utter he would have damned his soul.

And when, during the first few days, Mariana gathered together all the scattered little garments, and brooded over them with the passion of irremediableness, he would cry aloud out of his own bitterness,

"Put them away! If you love me, Mariana, hide them."

But Mariana, in the selfishness of loss, would glance at him with reproachful eyes, and turn to stroke the rubber doll in its bright-hued dress, and the half-worn socks with the impress of restless feet.

In the night she would start from a troubled sleep with corroding self-questionings. "Make a light," she would say, fretfully, sitting up and staring into the gloom. "Make a light. The darkness stifles me. I can't breathe."

Then, when the flame of the candle would flare up beside her, she would turn upon Anthony the blaze of her excited eyes, and play upon the sheet with feverish fingers. The loss of sleep which these spasms entailed upon Algarcife was an additional drain upon his wrecking system, and sometimes in sheer exhaustion he would plead for peace.

"Mariana, only sleep. Lie still, and I will fan you – or shall I give you bromide?"

But the hot questions would rush upon him and he would answer them as he had answered such questions for the past six weeks.

"Was it my fault? Could I have done anything? Was it taken away because I didn't want it to come?"

"Mariana!"

"Do you remember that I said I hoped it would die? You knew they were idle words, didn't you? You knew that I didn't mean it?"

"Of course, my dearest."

"But somebody told me once that for every idle word we would be held to account. Is this the account?"

"Hush."

For a moment she would lie silent, and then, rising again, the torrent would come.

"Perhaps if I had not left the window open that first warm day. And I did not send for the doctor at once. I thought it was only fretful. Perhaps – "

"You could have done nothing."

"I did not know. I was so ignorant. I should have studied. I should have asked questions."

Then she would turn towards him, laying her hot hand upon his arm.

"Tell me that it was not my fault. Tell me – tell me!"

"It was not. It was not."

"But I want her so. I want to feel her. I want to feel her soft and warm in my arms. Oh, my baby!"

And so the summer nights would wear away.

But as time went on a reactionary lethargy pervaded her. Her vitality being spent, she was left limp and devoid of energy. For hours she would lie motionless in the heated room, the afternoon sun, intensified by the reflected glare of pressed brick, streaming upon her, and she would appear to be indifferent to both heat and glare. From Algarcife she turned with an avoidance which was almost instinctive. When he touched her she shrank into silence, when he spoke she met his words with lethargic calm. It was as if the demands he made upon her emotional nature became irksome to her when that nature lay dormant.

"I suppose I love you," she said one day, in answer to his questions. "I think I do, but I don't feel it. I don't feel anything. I only want to forget."

"Not to forget me, Mariana?"

Mariana shook her head impatiently.

"Do you know," she continued, "that the thought of feeling makes me positively sick? I haven't any left, and I don't like it in other people. I am tired of it all."

"And of me?"

"I don't know. I think not, but I oughtn't to have married you."

"Mariana!"

"It would have been much better. You said so yourself once. But love is so strange. It makes people do such absurd things."

Algarcife did not reply. There was resentment in the look he bent upon her. He had not learned that even a woman in love is not a woman always in love – that love, in common with all other conditions, is subject to the forces which attract and repel, and that its equilibrium is maintained by a logical adjustment of opposites. To him Mariana's alienation betokened a fundamental failing in her nature, and with the thought he experienced a dull anger.

"I have felt so much in my life," continued Mariana, "that my capacity for sensations is lying fallow. The lack of ice in my tea and the heat in my room are of more importance than the excesses of affection. Were you ever that way?"

For a moment Algarcife did not reply; then he said, "You are very uncomfortable?"

"Yes."

"When we leave The Gotham it will be still worse. That room on Fourth Street is hellish."

"No doubt."

"How will you stand it?"

Mariana interlaced her fingers with impatient weariness and yawned.

"I don't know. As I stand it now, I suppose. We are poorer than ever, aren't we?"

"Poorer than ever."

She fingered her gown softly. "I suppose I shouldn't have bought this mourning," she said. "What a pity!"

When Anthony had gone she went out upon the fire-escape and looked down into the street below. The cry of a vender rolling his cart of over-ripe melons came up to her, and she followed his figure with curious intentness. From some indefinable cause, the vender suggested Signor Morani to her mind, and she recalled his warning, as she had recalled it in a different mood that rainy evening over a year ago. She realized now that Anthony's objection to her accepting Signor Morani's offer was still a canker within her heart. There remained, and there would always remain, the possibility that had she overruled his objection and entered into the engagement, Isolde might have been sent from the city, and might now be playing in some country meadow. The possibility, facing her as it did in all its ghastliness, produced a gnawing remorse, as invincible as a devil's thrust.

Upon this followed the conception that her marriage had doomed to failure not only her own life, but Anthony's; and there came a passionate regret for the part she had played in drawing him from his isolated abstraction into the turmoil of life and its passions. She blamed herself that she had gone to him that night, carrying the letter in her hand. She blamed herself that she had not resisted the appeal of her love, and, with a sudden pang, she realized all that the change had meant to him – the book that remained unwritten, the treadmill of uncongenial toil, the physical hardihood which was being slowly ground to dust. She realized this in its fulness, but with no determination of endeavor, no resolutions to battle more with fate. There was regret for the past, but there were no pledges for the future. The outcome was beyond her and beyond Anthony, this she knew. It was something to be left to the floodgates of hope that would be overborne by the press of time. In the lowered state of her vitality she felt almost indifferently her own inability to contest for larger measures of individual gain. She accepted destiny, and acquiesced, not in resignation, but in the apathy of one whom despair has drugged.

And above it all there rose the desire to escape, to be freed from it forever. "If he had never seen me!" she cried, passionately. "If he had never seen me!" Then colorless adumbrations of her own past blocked her horizon – and she confronted the ashes of her aspirations. She saw those illuminated dreams of her girlhood – the ideals which had crumbled at the corroding touch of care. She saw the demand for power which had been thwarted, the ambitions which had been undone, the cry for life more abundant which had been forced back upon her quivering lips. She saw herself walking day after day with empty arms along the way she had carried the child. She saw herself a drag upon her own existence and upon the existence of the man for whom she thought a love she had no power to feel. She saw the stretch of those monotonous and neutral-toned years, saw the sordid fight for bread, saw her sense of joy and beauty blunted, saw the masculine brain that was fitted to grasp universal laws decaying in the atmosphere of vulgar toil. And, woven and interwoven in her thoughts, was the knowledge that the affection to be invigorated by deprivations and to rise triumphant over poverty was not hers – that the love which in happier surroundings might have shown inviolable, which the great calamities of life might have left unassailed, had grown gray in the round of unsatisfied desires and victorious commonplaces. In the days to come, would not the jarring notes of their natures be exaggerated, the sympathetic ones suppressed? When old age came, as come it surely would, what would remain to them save a memory of discords and a present of unfulfilment? Was not death itself preferable to death in life?

Down on the sidewalk below a ragged urchin was turning somersaults in the shade. Suddenly, with a howl of delight, he pounced upon a half-rotten peach which a passer-by had thrown into the gutter. Mariana smiled faintly, left the fire-escape, and went in-doors.

A week later they gave up The Gotham and moved into the room on Fourth Street. Algarcife made an attempt to sell the greater part of his library before moving, but the price offered was merely nominal, and at the last moment his heart misgave him. So he hired a dilapidated van, and the books were transported to the new lodgings and stacked along the south wall.

When the hour came for their departure, it was with a feeling of despair that he took Mariana's bag and descended for the last time the steps of The Gotham. A black finality seemed looming beyond their destination.

At the entrance, Mr. Nevins, with tears in his eyes, grasped Anthony's hand, and Miss Ramsey fell upon Mariana's neck.

Mariana laughed a little desperately.

"It reminds me of the time I saw a family move to the poor-house," she said; "only their friends weren't quite so affectionate."

"But you will come back," insisted Mr. Nevins. "Surely you will come back when things look a little brighter."

"Which will be when the flames of spontaneous combustion illuminate this planet," remarked Ardly, cynically, but his eyes were sad as they rested upon Mariana.

"Or when a relation dies," said Mr. Nevins.

"How we shall miss you!" said Miss Ramsey.

Here Mr. Paul, who had sauntered up as if by chance, drew Algarcife aside.

"If you had only told me," he said, dryly. "I have a few thousands in bank, and I – "

Anthony caught his hand, but his voice was choked and he could only shake his head. Then Mariana said good-bye, and they left the house and ascended the steps to the platform of the elevated road.

As Mariana took her seat, she turned to the window and watched the little fire-escape upon the fourth story until The Gotham was lost to sight. Then she raised her veil and wiped a tear-drop from her eyelashes.

When the door was unlocked and she entered the new room, a fit of restlessness seized her. The barrenness of existence struck her with the force of a blow, and, with a swift return of impulse, she cried out in rebellion. The stale odor of cooking, which rose from the apartment below, the dustiness of the floor, the blackened ceiling, the hard and unyielding bed, gave her a convulsive shudder.

"I cannot bear it," she said. "I cannot bear it."

Algarcife left the window, where he had been standing, and came towards her. Between himself and Mariana a constraint had been growing, and he recalled suddenly the fact that their old warmth of intercourse had chilled into an indifferent reserve.

"It is bad," he said. "I am very sorry."

Mariana took off her hat and veil and laid them in one of the bureau drawers. The drawer creaked as she opened it, and the sound jarred upon Anthony's overwrought sensitiveness. He noticed suddenly that Mariana's expression had grown querulous, and that she had ceased to wear her hair becomingly.

"You can hardly think that I enjoy it," he added. "An existence composed of two-thirds nerves and one-third caffeine is hardly rose-color."

He looked gray and haggard, and the hand which he raised trembled slightly.

"Hardly," returned Mariana, shortly.

Both felt an instinctive desire to vent their wretchedness in words, and yet each felt an almost passionate pity for the other. The very pity emphasized the aggravation from which they suffered, and it was by a process of reflex action that, when goaded by thoughts of each other, they would strike out recklessly.

"No," repeated Mariana; "but it seems to be a case where two, instead of lessening the misery, increase the discomforts."

Immediately after supper she went to bed, tossing restlessly for hours because the mattress was uneven, the sheets coarse, and the lamp, by which Anthony worked, shining in her face.

When she finally fell asleep, it was with a sob of revolt.

CHAPTER XIX

Mariana's restlessness did not pass with the passing days. It developed until it gathered the force of a malady, and she lived in persistent movement, as if impelled by an invisible lash. As her aversion to their lodgings became more pronounced, her powers of endurance increased, and through the long, hot days she was rarely in-doors. Algarcife often wondered where she spent the morning and afternoon hours, but the constraint between them had strengthened, and he did not ask her. When breakfast was over, he would see her put on her hat, take her shabby black parasol, and go out into the street. At luncheon she would return, looking flushed and warm, as if from exercise in the summer sun; but when they had risen from the table she would move uneasily about, until, at last, she would turn in desperation and go out again. He seldom sought to detain her. Indeed, her absence was almost a relief, and he found it less difficult to work when the silence was unbroken by impetuous footsteps and the rustle of skirts.

Once he said: "It is too hot for you this afternoon."

And she answered: "No, I will go to a square."

He was silent, and she left in sudden haste.

That she walked miles in that fearful weather, driven on by sheer inability to rest, he realized pityingly. Occasionally he would go to the window as she descended the stairs, and the sight of the fragile, black-robed figure, making its rapid way through the fierce sunshine, would cause him a spasmodic contraction of pain. And yet the remembrance of her indifference would chill the words with which he greeted her return, and the knowledge that her heart had passed from him and was straining towards the outside world would veil his mental suffering in an assumption of pride. That Mariana's withered desires for the fulness of life had grown green again, he could but know. He had seen the agony inflicted upon her by every trivial detail of their lives – by the poorly cooked food, by the fly-specks upon the dishes, by the absence of a hundred superficial refinements. He had seen her flinch at the odors of stale vegetables, and set her teeth at the grating voices of the other lodgers. He had heard her moans in the night, rising from a wail for the small comforts of life to a wail for the child she had lost. He had marked every added line about her mouth, every bitter word that fell from her lips. And yet he had gone unswervingly on his way, and she had not known, but had thought him as pulseless to her presence as she to his.

"I am late," she said one day in September, coming in with more brightness than usual. "Have you had luncheon?"

"I waited for you," responded Anthony.

As she laid aside a roll of music she carried, he saw that it was the score of a light opera.

"You have been to Signor Morani's?" he asked.

"Yes, I have been taking lessons again."

Anthony glanced dubiously round.

"And you have no piano," he said. "You will miss it."

Mariana shook her head, and pushed away her tea with a gesture of disgust. "But I practise at Signor Morani's. He lets me use one of his rooms."

He noticed that she spoke cheerfully, and that a wave of her lost freshness had returned to her face. The instantaneous effect of her moods upon her appearance was an ever-recurring surprise to him. It was as if, by the play of her features, she unconsciously translated feeling into expression.

In a moment she spoke again.

"It is a part that I have been studying," she continued, "and I must commit the words to memory."

He picked it up. It was a serio-comic opera, entitled, "La Sorcière."

"Morani says that my voice has developed during the long rest. He was surprised when I sang."

"Was he?" asked Anthony, absently. He was wondering dully what would be the end of Mariana's ambitions – if there was any end for ambitions other than obliteration. Had fate anything to offer more durable than dust and ashes?

Mariana glanced about her and her face clouded. "It is that horrible cabbage again," she complained. "I believe those people down-stairs do nothing but fry cabbage. It makes me ill."

Anthony was recalled from his abstraction with a sense of annoyance.

"It seems to me," he retorted, sharply, "that, in our condition, to worry over a grievance of that order would be refreshing – when one's heels are hanging over the verge of starvation, it is a relief to be allowed to smell some one else's dinner."

"That depends upon what the dinner consists of," Mariana rejoined. "I may be reduced to living on dry bread, but I hope you will spare me the fried cabbage."

"You speak as if I had reduced you to this state for my own gratification." His temper was getting the better of him, and, with a snap, he set his teeth and was silent.

The mental distress, the stimulants he had used to spur a jaded brain into action, and his failing health had left him a prey to anger. An unexpected interruption, a jarring sound, a trivial mishap, were sufficient to cause him an outburst from which he often saved himself by flight.

Mariana replied tartly.

"I am sure I don't see how my objection to living upon fried cabbage could reflect upon you. I did not know you cared for it."

"You know I do not. But I don't see why you should make a fuss about a wholesome article of food."

"It is not wholesome. It is exceedingly indigestible."

"At any rate, it belongs to your neighbors. You aren't forced to eat it."

"No, but you implied that the time would come when I'd be glad to. I merely said it never would."

"Then let the cabbage be damned," said Algarcife.

"Gladly," responded Mariana, and they said no more.

Algarcife selected a manuscript from his desk and went out. He felt as if his nerves had quickened into ramifying wires through which a current of electricity was passing. He was not angry with Mariana. He was angry with no one, but he was racked by the agony of diseased sensibilities, and, though rationally he endeavored to be sympathetic in his bearing to his wife, his rational nature seemed ploughed by the press of his nerves, and for the first time in his life he found self-restraint beyond his grasp.

As he ascended the steps of the newspaper office where he was to leave the manuscript, he ran against a man whom he knew and who stared at him in astonishment.

"My God, Algarcife, you are a ghost! What have you been doing?"

"Wrestling with Providence," returned Algarcife, shortly. "Hardly a becoming job."

"Well, take my advice and leave off at the first round. If you don't mind the comparison, you bear a close resemblance to that Egyptian mummy in the museum."

"No doubt. But that Egyptian has a damned sight the best of it. He lived three thousand years ago."

And he passed on.

It was several nights after this that he started from a heavy sleep to find that Mariana had left his side. Rising upon his elbow, he glanced about the room, and saw her white-robed form revealed in nebulous indistinctness against the open window. Her head was resting upon her clasped hands and she was looking out into the night.