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Glory of Youth, a novel by Temple Bailey |
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Chapter 13. Her Letter To Anthony |
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_ CHAPTER XIII. HER LETTER TO ANTHONY Diana never forgot that ride in the dark to Harbor Light. It was a clear night, with the sea like a sheet of silver under the moon. The big building, which loomed up, at last, before her, seemed, with its yellow-lighted windows, like some monster of giant size, gazing wide-eyed upon the waters. The gardens, through which she passed, were heavy with the scent of hyacinths; the slight wash of the waves on the beach only emphasized the stillness. As she drove up to the doorway, two night nurses flitted through the corridor, ghost-like in their white uniforms. Then came Anthony. His face looked worn and worried. "We couldn't save her, Diana," he said, tensely. "Oh, the poor little thing!" "We made a fight for it. I sent for you because if she roused I wanted you to be there." "If you had telephoned sooner." "I could not. The change was very sudden." He flung himself into a chair. "Oh, what is all my skill worth, Diana, when I couldn't save that child?" She had seen him in such moods before, when he had felt powerless against all the opposing forces of disease and death. But she did not care that others should see him. It was enough that she should know that this great doctor Anthony had his weaknesses. The rest of the world should not know it. "Come out into the garden," she coaxed; "the air will do you good." As they walked up and down the garden paths he gave her more definite details. "She did not know that she was going. There was no reason to trouble her gentle soul with fears. And so, at last, when she drifted off into the silence, she was smiling." "And I am sure that she was still smiling when on the other side she found Love waiting." "How wonderfully you put it, Di." "It is not because I put it that way; it is because it is wonderful. Do you know, Anthony, that has always been my idea of heaven--as a place where Infinite Love waits. If that little child had lived she would have faced a future of loneliness--now she will never be lonely--never sick--never unhappy." "But she wanted to live." "But she didn't know life, Anthony--as some of us know it, as a place of unfulfilled dreams----" They had reached the beach, and the track of the moon spread out before them, ending only at the horizon. "She followed the path o' the moon," said Diana, softly, "a little white soul in a silver boat. Death is a great adventure, Anthony." "Sometimes I feel as if I were merely a longshoreman, who helps to load the boats as they start on that great adventure----" "What do you mean?" "Oh, we doctors see so much of pain which we cannot ease, so much misery which we cannot prevent. We see the innocent suffering for the guilty--the weak bearing the burdens which belong to the strong--and even if we try our hardest we can't change these things--and the boats still go sailing out to the Unknown----" "Anthony, I wish I might be sure of one thing----" "What, dear girl----?" "That you would never change your present point of view. So many doctors lose faith in human nature because they see only the diseased side, and their vision becomes distorted. And, losing their faith in man, they lose faith in God. The thing which has always made you, in my eyes, a great man as well as a great surgeon has been the fact that you have seemed to understand that you were working with Infinite Love toward the completion of a perfect plan; you have seemed to understand that life is good as long as it is lived wisely and well; that death is good when it ends suffering and sorrow. These things you have seen and known--I want you always to see and know them." "If any one could make me see and know them it is you, Diana." They were silent after that, and presently she said that she must go. Anthony took her home himself in his little car, and when at last they reached her door he said, gratefully: "What should I do without your friendship? At least I have that, Diana." She hesitated. "It must be a long distance friendship, Anthony." "What do you mean?" "I am going away." "Oh, why should you? We are self-controlled man and woman, not impulsive boy and girl. We have set our feet on a hard path. Why shouldn't we cheer each other along the way?" "I'm afraid it wouldn't be fair--to Bettina." "Why not? My friendship for you need deprive her of nothing." "I must think it over." "Don't think. Don't analyze at all. Just stay." A grave smile lighted his face. "I'm not making this as a selfish proposition, Diana. I shan't expect to absorb you, to take you away from other friendships. But I want you to be near me at such times as this; when my world was without a ray of light, you illumined it with your friendly taper." Diana climbed the steps in an uplifted mood. This, then, was the solution of the difficulty. She had been making high tragedy of the situation when it might be solved sensibly. She remembered a quotation which she had copied in her school note-book: "My friend is one with whom I can associate my choicest thought." Her friendship with Anthony could go on as before. She could be an inspirational force in his life. Had she the right to refuse? She found Bettina and Sophie sitting up for her. "Oh, you're back so soon," Bettina said. "Is she better? Is that little girl better?" Diana returned to realities with a shock. How selfish she had been! She had almost forgotten that poor little soul at the hospital. "No, she isn't better." She shrank from voicing the truth. "They couldn't save her, and before I reached there she was--gone." "_Dead!_" Bettina shuddered. "Oh, I think such things are dreadful; I don't see how Anthony stands it." "It has made him very miserable," Diana told her; "he hates to lose a case." "Then why does he do it?" Bettina demanded. "Why doesn't he give up his surgery? He has enough to do with his freaks at the sanatorium, and his sick people who need medicine." "Would you have a man give up a thing which he can do better than other men?" Sophie, looking on, wondered if there had ever been a greater contrast than these two women who faced each other in the rose-colored room. Diana, tall and pale, with wisps of hair flying a bit untidily from beneath her soft hat, yet still beautiful and with the light of high resolve shining in her steady eyes; Bettina, a little slender slip of a child, her fair shining braids falling below her knees, her eyes demanding why men and women should be dedicated to hardness. "I have been telling Bettina," Mrs. Martens interposed, gently, "that she will understand some day what such a man means to the world." For once in her life Diana, tired Diana, lost patience. "She ought to know what such a man means," she said. Bettina put her hands before her face and stood very still. "Oh, dear child," said Diana, remorsefully, "I shouldn't have said such a thing to you. I didn't mean it." Bettina's hands dropped straight at her sides. Her blue eyes were misty. "But it's true," she said. "I'm afraid--I'm afraid I'm not the wife for Anthony." Never had there been a truer saying. Yet the two older women stood abashed before the hurt look on the little white face. "He has always seemed to me to be the noblest man," Bettina went on. "I don't think I have ever felt that he was anything but great. You people, who have always had everything, can't understand what he seemed to me when he used to come when mother was ill. You can't understand what it meant when he came to me when I was almost dead with loneliness, and told me that he wanted to marry me--you can't understand how every night--I pray--on my knees, that I'll be good enough for him--you can't understand how grateful I am--and how I try to appreciate his work; but I'm made that way--to hate pain. I hate to know about it--to see it----" Again she shuddered. Diana drew her close. "Oh, you poor little thing," she said, "you poor little thing." When the dawn, not many hours later, peeped into the three rooms, it showed, in one, Sophie asleep beneath the picture of her lost lover. In another Bettina, asleep, with tears still on her lashes, and with the flashing rings rising and falling above her heart. In the third room it showed Diana, awake, after hours of weariness--writing a letter to Anthony. When Anthony had read that letter, he left the sanatorium and took a path which led him to the hills and into the hemlock forest. The walk up the hills was long, and the sun was hot, so that when he reached the depths of the wood he threw himself down with a grateful sense of the stillness which could not be disturbed by telephone or tap at the door. For a little while he lay with his eyes shut, steeping himself in that blessed silence. When at last he sat up, he took from his pocket Diana's letter, and read it again, passing his hand now and then nervously through his hair, until it stood up like the ruffled plumage of an eagle.
"It will be easier for me to talk with you in this way than face to face. When you are with me, my point of view seems to get mixed up with your point of view, and before I know it, I find myself making promises which I cannot keep, as to-night, when I almost said I would stay--and be your friend. "I have always been your friend, Anthony. Haven't I? Even when I was a little girl, and you were a big boy, you seemed to find something in me which made it worth while for you to leave the other big boys and stay with me and talk about my books. Will I ever forget how you read some of them aloud to me? I never open now my thumbed little copy of 'Cranford' without hearing your laughing voice stumbling over the mincing phrases, and as for 'Little Women,' I believe that I worshiped in you the personification of 'Laurie.' "But those were not the best times, Anthony. The best were when it was too dark to read, and I would curl up on the big bench by the side of the fire, and you would lie at full length on the hearth-rug, and the wind would blow and the waves would boom, and you would weave tales for me out of your wonderful wealth of boyish dreams. "Blessed memories! But even then I believe I resented your masterfulness a bit, Anthony. There was that time when you told me that I must get my lessons before you would finish the story which was so near the end. And I cried and coaxed, but you stood firm--and I respected you for it, and hated you and loved you in one breath. "Oh, my big boy Anthony! Shall I ever forget you, with your brown lock over your blue eyes, your unswerving honesty of purpose, your high ideals. When you came home from college, and I had just put up my hair, and lengthened my dresses, you started to kiss me, then stopped. 'I thought I could,' you said, with such a funny note of surprise in your voice, 'but there's something about you that sort of--holds me off, Di.' "I think then that I began to know my power over you. And how I have used it, Anthony! I have kept you single and alone all these years, because something in me would not yield to your kind of wooing. "If only you could have been a cave man and could have carried me off! So many women wish that of men, especially proud women. It isn't that we admire brutality, but we want to have all of our little feminine doubts and fears overcome by the man's decisive action. And you made the mistake of waiting patiently, asking me now and then, 'Will you?' instead of saying, 'You must.' "Yet while you could not win me, in other ways you dominated me. Do you remember the holidays when I came home from boarding-school, and you were interne at a hospital? You asked me to go to the theater with you, and at the last moment you were called to the operating room to help one of the surgeons. You telephoned that you'd send a carriage for me and my chaperon, but that you couldn't go;--and I wouldn't go either, but stayed at home and sulked, and looked at myself in the glass, now and then, to mourn over the fact that you couldn't see me in my pink organdie with the rosebuds. "But you wouldn't even apologize for what I called your neglect. I said I should never go with you. You said it wasn't neglect, and that I should go. And go I did, finally, as meekly as possible, and I wore the pink organdie and had a lovely time. "It's the memory of that night when you couldn't fit your plans to mine which has made me write this letter. When I came home from Harbor Light I found Bettina waiting up for me, and she broke down as the depressing realities of your work were forced upon her. I was very toploftical, Anthony--and was prepared to read her a sermon on the duties of a doctor's wife, when all at once I had a vision of myself in that rosebud organdie. I hated your work then, and I felt that you lacked something of devotion to me, to let it keep you from me. "But later I felt differently. The world began to call you a great man--and I began to see with clearer eyes what you were doing for the world. And so I helped you at Harbor Light, and saw you there at your best--with your forceful control of all those helpless people, with your steadiness of hand and eye, a king who ruled by virtue of his power over life and death. "It was in those days, I think, that I began to worship you. But I never called my worship love. I wanted to be Me, Myself, and somehow I felt that when I was once promised to you I should have no separate identity. It was the rebellion of a strong personality against a stronger one. I was not wise enough to see that you who protected others from the storms of life might want some little haven of your own--a haven which would be--Home. "But because you failed to be masterful in the one way which would have won me, because you said, always, 'Will you?' instead of, 'Come--let there be no more of this between you and me, Diana,' I went away, not understanding you, not understanding myself. "And over there with Sophie, I met Van Rosen. As I look back upon it, I do not wonder that he charmed me. He was different from our American men, a lover of pleasure. He typified the spirit of joy to me--there was never a moment when he had not some vivid plan for me. We did things of which I had always dreamed. "He gave a house party for me in his ancestral castle on the Rhine. And he proposed to me in an ancient chapel with the moonlight making the effigies of his old ancestors seem like living knights in golden armor. "It was all so picturesque that practical America--that you, oh, I must confess it, Anthony,--seemed miles away. It seemed to me that in my own country we lived dreary lives in a workaday atmosphere. It was only in that castle on the Rhine that there were people who knew how to play. So I became engaged, and through all those months, Van Rosen and I played together. "But I grew so tired of it, so deadly tired of it! Life seemed to have no meaning. And after a time I grew a little afraid. Van Rosen was different. I can't define exactly where the difference lay. But between us was the barrier of centuries of opposing traditions. I began to feel that as his wife I should be a Princess in name, but a slave in fact. Always laughing, always seeming to dance in the sunshine, he had a hardness which nothing could soften. I saw him now and then with those whom he considered his inferiors. I saw his treatment of his servants, his horses, his dogs. I heard him speak once to an old and dependent aunt, at another time to a young governess--and my cheeks burned--and I was afraid. "It came back to me then how you had always treated those who were weaker than yourself. You had always been a champion of old ladies and children. Every animal, from Peter Pan to your old fat horse--that old fat horse now is living in clover since you acquired your motor cars--adored and followed you. "And one day I told Van Rosen--that I couldn't marry him. You don't know how humble I felt to think that I might have hurt him. But in that moment his real self showed. He was angry, furiously angry, and I knew all at once that it was my money, and not me that he wanted. "And so I came back to you---- "But you had Bettina, and there was no place for me. No place for the little dark-eyed girl who had listened to the big boy on stormy nights, no place for the woman who had not known her own heart---- "And now you want me to be your friend. But I can't be your friend--Anthony. Friendship is for the man and woman who have never loved. A friendship which is the aftermath of love is the shadow after the substance. Can't you see that it is so? Can't you see that there would be just two things which might happen? If I stayed here and tried to be your friend, either I should knit myself to you by ties which should bind you to your wife, or we should drift apart, having the perfect memory neither of love nor of friendship. "Bettina is very young, but she has depths of which you have not dreamed, of which I had not dreamed, until I talked with her last night. I went up to her room, and we had a very sweet and tender confidence. It was almost dawn before I left her. She showed me much of her heart, as she will, I hope, some day show it to you---- "Hers is a little white soul, dear friend. On the surface she has her girlish petulances, her youthful prejudices. But these? Why, I had a thousand of them, Anthony. How I snubbed those poor students whom you brought with you one afternoon to tea because their elbows were shiny and their shoes rusty. I was such a little snob, Anthony. How I should welcome them now--those great doctors, who have done so much for humanity. "It is life which teaches us, dear friend. It will teach Bettina. And it must teach me this: To bear the hard things. Do you remember in those days when we read of knights on the battle-field that we loved those who died fighting? And how we hated those who ran away? Well, I'm going to fight--but my fight must begin by running away. "It isn't a battle which we can fight together. The two who must do things together are you and Bettina. Any friendship of ours would shut her out. That's the plain truth, and you and I are old enough to know it, Anthony. "There's much more that I could say to you. Much more. But you must read between the lines. All my days I shall have in my heart the memory of my dear--big boy. Some day when I am old and you are old, we can be friends. I'll look forward to that day, and it shall be my beacon light in the darkness. "It's good-bye, dear, for a long time--good-bye. "DIANA."
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