IV (continued 2)

“It doesn't surprise me you are insulting,” she replied, “but I didn't expect it quite so soon. I thought you might hide what you really were a little longer; it seemed to me you might try to keep something. But I guess it's better to have it all done with at once, and to meet the worst.”

“You talk as though there were no one but you in this,” he said concisely; “and that I didn't matter. You'll find that I have a little to say. Here it is: I am tired of your suspicions and questions and insinuations. You haven't any idea of marriage except as a bed-room farce. You're so pure that you imagine more indecencies in a day than I could get through with in five years. If there were one I hadn't thought of, you'd have me at it in no time. It was pleasant at the Groves' because there was none of this infernal racket. Mrs. Grove, no—Savina, is a wise woman. I was glad to be with her, to get away—”

“Go back, then!” Fanny cried. “Don't bother about me and your home and the children. You brought me here, and made me have them, all the blood and tearing; but that doesn't matter. Not to you! I won't let you touch me again.”

“That needn't trouble you,” he assured her.

“Not ... when you have her ... to touch.” She could scarcely articulate, each word was pronounced as though it had cost a separate and strangling effort. “You vile, rotten coward!”

The flood of her hysteria burst so suddenly that, unprepared, he was overwhelmed with its storm of tears and passionate charges. “You ought to be beaten till you fell down. You wouldn't say these things to me, treat me like this, if I weren't helpless, if I could do anything. But I can't, and you are safe. I am only your wife and not some filthy woman in New York.” As she moved her head the streaming tears swung out from her face. “God damn you.” Her hand went out to the table and, rising, it held the heavy dull yellow paper cutter. Before he could draw back she struck him; the copper point ripped down his jaw and hit his shoulder a jarring blow.

In an instant of passion Lee Randon caught Fanny by the shoulders and shook her until her head rolled as though her neck were broken. Even in his transport of rage, with his fingers dug into her flesh, he stopped to see if this were true.

It wasn't. She swayed uncertainly, dazed and gasping, while her hair, shaken loose from its knot, slowly cascaded over one shoulder. Then stumbling, groping, with a hand on a chair, against the frame of the door, she went out of the room.

Lee's jaw bled thickly and persistently; the blood soaked, filled, his handkerchief; and, going to the drawer in the dining-room where the linen was kept, he secured and held against a ragged wound a napkin, He was nauseated and faint. His rage, killed, as it were, at its height, left him with a sensation of emptiness and degradation. The silence—after the last audible dragging footfall of Fanny slowly mounting the stairs—was appalling: it was as though all the noise of all the world, concentrated in his head, had been stopped at once and forever. He removed the sop from the cut, and the bleeding promptly took up its spreading over his throat and under his collar. That blow had killed a great deal: the Lee Randon married to Fanny was already dead; Fanny, too, had told him that she was dying, killed from within. It was a shame.

He was walking when it occurred to him that he had better keep quiet; if the blood didn't soon stop he should require help; he was noticeably weak. His feeling with regard to Fanny was confined to curiosity, but mainly his thoughts, his illimitable disgust, were directed at himself. His anger, returning like the night wind from a different direction, cut at himself, at the collapse of his integrity. He was, in reality, frightened at what had been no better than a relapse into a state of mania; he was shocked at the presence, however temporary, of a frenzy of madness.

Nothing had altered his attitude toward the woman who was his wife; all his active emotions for her had gone. Then his attention was drawn from his personality to his life, his surroundings; they were suffocating. Not to be borne! Nowhere could he discover a detail, an episode, that had the importance of reality. He had a sensation of being wrapped in a feather bed, the need to make a violent gesture—sending the white fluff whirling through space—and so be free to breathe. This house, the symmetrical copied walls, the harmonious rugs, symbols of public success and good opinion, the standard of a public approbation, exasperated him beyond endurance. He wanted to push the walls out, tear the rugs into rags, and scatter them contemptuously before the scandalized inertness of Eastlake. Lee had what was regarded as an admirable existence, an admirable family—the world imposed this judgment on him; and the desire, the determination, swept over him to smash to irremediable atoms what was so well applauded.

The thought fascinated him: to break his life wide open. He'd let it go, it was worthless to him, the companies and bonds and the woman and children, the jog-trotting on fenced roads, the vain pretentions of the country club, the petty grasping at the petticoats—where they were worn—of variety. Lee wished that he could do this in the presence of everyone he knew; he wanted to see their outraged faces, hear the shocked expressions, as he insulted, demolished, all that they worshipped. The blood, he found, had stopped; his hurt was relatively unimportant. The fever of rebellion, of destruction, increased in him until it was as violent, as blinding, as his earlier fury; and he went at once in search of Fanny.

She had undressed, and, in a nightgown effectively drawn with blue ribbons, she lay face down across the bottom of her bed. One shoulder, immaculately white except for the leaden bruises of his fingers, was bare, and an arm, from which her jewelled wrist watch had not been removed, was outstretched. He stood above her, but, breathing faintly, she made no sign of a consciousness of his presence.

“Fanny,” he began, speaking with an effort of calmness out of his laboring being, “this is all over for me. As I told you so many times, I've had too much of it. It's yours, anyhow, and the children are yours, and you may do what you like with the whole affair. I'm done.” Still she didn't move, reply. “I am going,” he said more impatiently, “tonight. I want you to understand that this is final. You were too good a wife; I couldn't keep even with you; and I can't say, now, that I want to. Everyone will tell you that I am no good—you see, I haven't the shadow of a cause for leaving—and the best thing you can do is believe them. If I had what was recognized as a reason for going, I'd stay, if that has any sense; you may put your own interpretation on it.”

She turned and half rose, regarding him from the edge of the bed. Her face, no longer brightly mottled, was sunken, and dull with despair. “I can't talk,” she said; “the words are all hard like stones down in my heart. You'll have to go; I can't stop you; I knew you had gone yesterday, or was it last week? I saw it was a hopeless fight but I tried, I had to; I thought your memory would help.”

“It wasn't Savina who did this,” he informed her; “I want you to realize that fully. Whatever happens, she is not to blame. All, all the fault is mine; it would take too long to explain, you wouldn't believe me—you couldn't—and so I am deserting you. That is the word for it, the one you will use.” Fanny gazed at him in a clouding perplexity.

“I can't think it's true.” Her voice was dazed. “A thing like this couldn't be happening to us, to me. It's only for a little, we are both cross—”

He cut her short with the assurance that what he said he meant. Sentimental indulgence, he felt, was dangerously out of place. She slipped back, supine, on the bed; and, with short sobs, she cried, “Go! Go! Go!”

In his room he methodically and thoughtfully assembled the necessities for his bag; he was arranging mentally the details of his act. Where, primarily, it affected Fanny and the children, his lawyers could handle it best; it was the present consequences to himself, the step immediately before him, that demanded consideration. But his deliberation was lost in the knowledge that he would go to New York where, inevitably, he should see Savina. No one could predict what would determine that; it would unfold, his affair with Savina must conclude, as it had begun—in obedience to pressures beyond their control. An increasing excitement flowed over him at the thought of being with her, possessing her, again. There was no doubt of that in his mind; he knew that Savina would come to him. She was far more ruthless in brushing aside artificial barriers, prejudices, than, until now, he. The figure of William Grove occupied him for a little, but he seemed insubstantial, not so much a being as a convention to be smashed in his own house.

Lee Randon decided not to speak again, to say good-bye, to Fanny. It would only multiply the difficulties of his leaving; she might have another attack of rage, or—worse—of affection. He was amazed at his lack of feeling, a little disturbed: perhaps there was something fatally wrong, lacking, about him, and he was embarked on the first violent stage of physical and mental degradation. It couldn't be helped, he told himself, once more down stairs, in the hall. Beyond, the stool lay where Fanny had kicked it; and he bent over to pick up the copper paper cutter from the floor. Putting it on the table, he reflected that Fanny would, in all probability, destroy it. His handkerchief, stiff, black with dried blood, was in the crystal ash holder with a mahogany stand; and that, as unnecessarily unpleasant, he hid in a pocket.

The electric globe in the floor lamp was yellow; it was nearly burned out and would have to be replaced. This had been his special corner, the most comfortable in the pen. But the pig, he remembered, had been slaughtered last week; and he wondered if the parallel he had established would hold true to the end. In the main aspect, he concluded, yes. But the pig had died without experiencing what was, undoubtedly, both the fundamental duty and recompense of living. The pig, happily or unhappily, had remained in ignorance of Cytherea and the delights of love; but, perhaps, if only for the moment, he had better call that passion; it was a word of clearer, more exact, definition.

He left the house walking, carrying his bag up the hill into Eastlake: a train left for the city at eleven-fifty-eight. Lee turned, beyond his property, and saw the light burning in what had been his and Fanny's room; the rest of the house, except for the glimmer below, was dark. The winter night was encrusted with stars. A piercing regret seized him—that he was past the middle of forty and not in the early twenties. To be young and to know Savina! To be young and free. To be young ... the increasing rapidity with which he went forward had the aspect of an endeavor to waste no more precious time.