Читать книгу Ellen Levis - Elsie Singmaster - Страница 6

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It was not because of ingratitude or altogether because of forgetfulness that Stephen Lanfair had neglected his friend. Their association had continued as long as circumstances made the seeing of one another possible. When the longed-for interneship was won, Levis had been for two years out of the Medical School and Stephen was preoccupied with the straight, dark gaze and free and saucy manners of Hilda Fell. After Hilda had seen him, she had, for reasons as yet unexplained by psychologists, forsworn all other company. He was awkward, he knew none of the lively give-and-take of her set, he was grave in manner and thought; but she would have no other. Her passion for him assumed an ominous intensity; she was happy only when she had before her a definite prospect of meeting him, she was unhappy when the character of the meeting was such that she must share his attention with others.

Mayne related frankly the history of his family, but Stephen found in that no impediment to marriage. The insanity appeared—at least he received that mistaken impression—invariably in early youth. Apparently Hilda's mind was sound. Her education had not been of a very solid quality; in fact, she could do little more than write a presentable note and she did that as seldom as possible, and of general information she had none. But Stephen believed that association with him would largely supplement her knowledge. He believed that Mayne had not given her the proper sort of education and that she would learn from him with delight. He could not know or dream that the slightest opposition, even the thwarting of her whims, would reveal her fundamental instability. Until now life had brought everything to her; it had demanded no adaptations on her part.

He explained to her new and interesting cases which came under his eye, entirely unaware that all her enthusiasm for his profession had its origin in his arm across her shoulders. It was when he was discussing his work that Stephen was at his best.

His marriage, consummated at the end of his course, seemed to him an incredible piece of good fortune. A poor man from a little coal region town, he had none of the wealth or influence which he had always supposed must, even in America, be the contribution of the bridegroom to an alliance with a name so important. He visited before his graduation the gray house in Harrisburg and saw in the city the solid business block, and outside the city some of the farms which poured their revenues into Hilda's lap. He believed himself to be lifted by fortune high above the average of mankind; not only above the great level mass at the bottom of the social pyramid and the dull, superimposed layer which he had learned to call bourgeois, but also above the stratum of educated men and women who lacked comfortable wealth, and above the stratum of rich men and women who had no intellectual pleasures. He had, he believed for a month after he was married, everything.

He began then dimly to discern the chasm which divided him from Hilda. His keen mind, delivered from its first blindness, could no longer fail to see that her ignorance was not the result of a poor education, but of natural inability to learn. She failed to grasp the simplest of scientific principles; she could not understand the structure of the eye or remember its chief parts; she made Stephen ridiculous by misquoting him.

He dwelt a little longer in the paradise which he had created for himself. It was absurd to require in an exquisite creature like Hilda the interests natural to an older woman or to a student. Compared with the young women whom he had known in the University, she was immeasurably attractive and she could not be expected to possess every perfection.

It was not long, however, before he understood clearly that her dullness to the passion of his life, his profession, was due not only to ignorance but to indifference. Their first quarrel was precipitated by his announcement of his plans for the future.

"New York is the place for us to live. Each country has one center; England has London, France has Paris, and the United States has New York." Stephen often spoke in this sententious fashion in his youth. "There the world currents—"

"But we are not going to live in New York," said Hilda quickly.

"Why not?"

"Because I don't want to. I'll go there for a few weeks as often as you like in the winter, but I'm going to live in my own house. In New York you're nobody unless you're worth millions and millions; in Harrisburg you can be somebody for a good deal less than that."

"In Harrisburg!" Stephen was not aware of his absurdity until Hilda pointed it out to him.

"I should think that any one who had lived in Chestnut Ridge with a breaker before the door would find Harrisburg heaven!"

Stephen flushed. He had poured out to her in a moment of unique confidence a description of Chestnut Ridge. With it he had told her not only about his father's life, but about his death, and it was unfeeling to recall the conversation in this scornful fashion.

"I have my living to earn!"

"Your living!" repeated Hilda. She uttered a delicate and good-natured pleasantry. "I thought you married me for that!"

Stephen made no answer. After a while, when he could go without seeming to be angry, he left her on the porch of the hotel where they were spending their honeymoon and went to walk alone. He was shocked, amazed, even appalled.

Once more and only once he broached the subject.

"I am exceedingly anxious to do well in my profession, Hilda," he said earnestly. "New York is the only place where a man can really have a brilliant success."

Hilda shook her head.

"I've made my plans."

In the end, after six months abroad, Stephen hung out his sign upon the Manning Street wing of Hilda's house and there practiced his profession for seven or eight months in the year. The other months he spent in her train, journeying from one fashionable American and European resort to the other. During these excursions he was idle except for stolen visits to clinics and lectures, and he was constantly unhappy. He still had faith in his own powers and he realized that his best years were passing and that other men and even younger men were winning honors which should have been his. He knew that Hilda believed that she had made generous concessions in allowing him to practice at all. He knew that her friends—though her associates could scarcely be called friends, so light were the ties that bound them—thought him exceedingly lucky, but he believed that his colleagues held him to be a fashionable quack. He held himself to be the most unhappy of men.

Further opposition to his wife's decisions was impossible. He learned before the second month of his married life had come to a close that a woman given to hysteria could not be argued with, could not be made to see reason. His ambition was, he knew now, stronger than his affection and he would never be able to gratify it. He came to envy quiet, poor men like Edward Levis, especially those who remained unmarried, who could live their lives in freedom.

He had one or two grossly unpleasant quarrels with Hilda. Once, after she had laughed at his awkwardness in the presence of an acquaintance, he took her to task for a habit which he found more and more odious.

"The boys at the University used to say that you smoked cigarettes, but I never believed them."

They were alone in his bedroom—whose bare floors and almost blank walls acted as sounding-boards for Hilda's shrill denunciation of his prudishness. Terrified, he closed the door quickly.

Within a year her malady took a not uncommon form. He had been, he realized when the ugly scene was over, very stupid not to have recognized earlier the obsessive jealousy and rage which she must have felt for some time, but he had not dreamed that the young nurse in his office, who was pretty, but ignorant of everything outside her profession, could have attracted more than a casual glance. When Hilda began to accuse him, he listened dumfounded, on his cheek a gray paleness which added ten years to his age.

As he listened to her coarse tirade, the shrill accents seemed to ring like an unpleasant soprano aria against a clearly accented rhythmic bass, the voice of Professor Mayne. He had received the impression from Mayne that the family malady never appeared after early youth, but had he understood him aright? Horrified he looked into an abyss to whose precipitous wall he had come blindly, but with the blindness of a madman or a fool.

"But, Hilda," he said slowly, "I am married to you."

Hilda uttered a laugh which expressed hideously a variety of emotions—mollification, for his dismay was disarming; amusement, for his innocence was laughable, and even a little shame. Stephen's mind was clean; he looked at her as his good father might have looked.

For a short time she seemed a little disturbed; she regarded him with uneasy inquiry as though she suspected his horror and his inability to forget her outbreak. But he found presently that she watched the coming and going of his patients and that she interrogated his employees with such clever slyness that they did not know they were being questioned. Her jealousy noted only the women with whom he was connected professionally, especially those who were alone with him in his office, and between them, young, middle-aged, or old, she did not distinguish. His dismay at her ignorance had not escaped her; it was the center of her consciousness, the idée fixe of her madness. She misinterpreted the present and falsified the past, ascribing to Stephen infidelities in the days of their courtship. Her obsession was hideous, but by no means unprecedented; frequently the newspapers rejoiced in the airing of similar or more sordid cases. Recently an innocent patient waiting in a doctor's office had been shot dead by a suspicious wife.

Mayne, hearing his story from a terrified Stephen, grew white, then shook his head. He laid the case before his intimate friend Dr. Good, who was an alienist and brought him once or twice to Harrisburg to spend the night. It might be necessary eventually to have Hilda go—Dr. Good always put his prescriptions as delicately as possible—to a sanatorium, but there was no immediate danger. Mayne breathed more freely, and only Stephen knew by what eternal vigilance over himself and her the peace was kept, or apprehended the unpleasant and even perilous results which might follow upon its breaking.

His life was not entirely without pleasures, unhappy as it appeared to him. After the first rush of Hilda's fashionable acquaintances, who came filled with curiosity and went away baffled and irritated by his gravity and silence, there applied a more desirable clientèle. He treated the poor in the city hospital, serving them with a pleasure which he did not analyze, but which had its source partly in the satisfaction of returning some of the service which hundreds of working men and women poured out upon Hilda and her kind, and partly in a deep and unrecognized discontent with his own life. He thought often of his father with a childish turning to the one human being who had loved him deeply and unselfishly. He believed that he still regarded his father's devotion to others with impatience, his life, based upon a simple and childlike sense of duty, as wasted. He did not know that unhappiness had begun to alter the opinions which were the product of youth and good health and material prosperity.

He performed cures which astonished himself. A Mrs. Fetzer, a plain little Pennsylvania German woman, suffered at the hands of a drunken husband a gunshot wound in her face, and he was called to the hospital when it seemed that the sight of both eyes was lost. A nurse, Miss Knowlton, who had frequently attended his patients, faced him one day with defiance and told him that she was going blind and that according to half a dozen doctors there was no help for her. A Miss MacVane came to his office and laid her case before him—she was a private secretary with no other means of support than her own earnings, and her eyes were failing.

He saved one of Mrs. Fetzer's eyes and found for her a place in his house, of which she gradually took entire charge in a manner which suggested now a guardian angel, now a watchful dragon. He cured Miss Knowlton and she replaced a younger nurse in his office. Miss MacVane became his secretary; she could not be entirely cured, but with expert treatment and unremitting watchfulness she might retain a measure of vision for a long time.

He thought, grimly contemplating his assistants, that Hilda could find no fault with these ladies. Fetzer, as Hilda called her after an English fashion, was irremediably disfigured; the insertion of an artificial eye was out of the question and she wore a black patch. Miss Knowlton was tall, her features were large, her red hair was no Titian glory, but was thin and pale, and she had pale blue eyes and skin without color. Miss MacVane was short and heavy and her dim vision increased her natural awkwardness. All three women were of the type by which the world's tasks are accomplished, who take little or no recreation, who do without all luxuries, who desire apparently but one reward, the consciousness of duty done.

Stephen's sense of safety, however, was founded upon a mistaken analysis of Hilda's jealousy. He did not realize that she attributed to him no lust of the eyes, that she believed that it was intellect only which attracted him. She hated Miss Knowlton and Miss MacVane and every one with whom he talked about his profession. She hated even Fetzer, though she could not do without her.

He had begun, not without a chastening recollection of his first contribution, to send articles to medical magazines, and he believed that if he could have a year uninterrupted by idle journeying he could produce a valuable work on infectious diseases of the eye. When his first article was finished he thought of sending a copy to Edward Levis, but Levis seemed as far away as his father, and he could not renew the acquaintance in so informal a way. He would some day—no, soon—look him up.

Life had still other satisfactions. A sense of his own ignorance and lack of early opportunity kept him constantly seeking for education. He was interested in art and music and in sciences other than his own and he tried constantly to increase his information about them. During his early married life he had bought a small original painting and Hilda had expressed her approval—it was, she said, a more becoming fad for a gentleman than diseases. He had then ceased to buy pictures until his own income warranted it.

He might have found congenial friends—the city was not inhabited entirely by men and women of Hilda's type—but he knew that his friends could not be hers. It was better to avoid all social connections than to rouse groundless but hideous suspicion.

As the years passed it seemed likely that Hilda's malady would grow no worse. Her uncle felt no more anxiety, and Stephen relaxed into a certain peace of mind. He became thirty-five, then forty. He believed that the course of his life was laid out, and that, unsatisfying as it was, it was still happier than that of the mass of mankind. There were moments when he said to himself that there was no reason for his existence or that of any one else, that human life was ephemeral and purposeless; but he put aside quickly all metaphysical speculation because it recalled his father's last hours and the deep concern in his sunken eyes.