PAGE 16
The Long Run
by
“As the idea came to me it was as if some ironic hand had touched an electric button, and all my fatuous phrases had leapt out on me in fire.
“Of course she had known all along just the kind of thing I should say if I didn’t at once open my arms to her; and to save my pride, my dignity, my conception of the figure I was cutting in her eyes, she had recklessly and magnificently provided me with the decentest pretext a man could have for doing a pusillanimous thing….
“With that discovery the whole case took a different aspect. It hurt less to think of Paulina–and yet it hurt more. The tinge of bitterness, of doubt, in my thoughts of her had had a tonic quality. It was harder to go on persuading myself that I had done right as, bit by bit, my theories crumbled under the test of time. Yet, after all, as she herself had said, one could judge of results only in the long run….
“The Trants stayed away for two years; and about a year after they got back, you may remember, Trant was killed in a railway accident. You know Fate’s way of untying a knot after everybody has given up tugging at it!
“Well–there I was, completely justified: all my weaknesses turned into merits! I had ‘saved’ a weak woman from herself, I had kept her to the path of duty, I had spared her the humiliation of scandal and the misery of self-reproach; and now I had only to put out my hand and take my reward.
“I had avoided Paulina since her return, and she had made no effort to see me. But after Trant’s death I wrote her a few lines, to which she sent a friendly answer; and when a decent interval had elapsed, and I asked if I might call on her, she answered at once that she would see me.
“I went to her house with the fixed intention of asking her to marry me–and I left it without having done so. Why? I don’t know that I can tell you. Perhaps you would have had to sit there opposite her, knowing what I did and feeling as I did, to understand why. She was kind, she was compassionate–I could see she didn’t want to make it hard for me. Perhaps she even wanted to make it easy. But there, between us, was the memory of the gesture I hadn’t made, forever parodying the one I was attempting! There wasn’t a word I could think of that hadn’t an echo in it of words of hers I had been deaf to; there wasn’t an appeal I could make that didn’t mock the appeal I had rejected. I sat there and talked of her husband’s death, of her plans, of my sympathy; and I knew she understood; and knowing that, in a way, made it harder…. The door-bell rang and the footman came in to ask if she would receive other visitors. She looked at me a moment and said ‘Yes,’ and I got up and shook hands and went away.
“A few days later she sailed for Europe, and the next time we met she had married Reardon….”
VI
It was long past midnight, and the terrier’s hints became imperious.
Merrick rose from his chair, pushed back a fallen log and put up the fender. He walked across the room and stared a moment at the Brangwyn etching before which Paulina Trant had paused at a memorable turn of their talk. Then he came back and laid his hand on my shoulder.
“She summed it all up, you know, when she said that one way of finding out whether a risk is worth taking is not to take it, and then to see what one becomes in the long run, and draw one’s inferences. The long run–well, we’ve run it, she and I. I know what I’ve become, but that’s nothing to the misery of knowing what she’s become. She had to have some kind of life, and she married Reardon. Reardon’s a very good fellow in his way; but the worst of it is that it’s not her way….
“No: the worst of it is that now she and I meet as friends. We dine at the same houses, we talk about the same people, we play bridge together, and I lend her books. And sometimes Reardon slaps me on the back and says: ‘Come in and dine with us, old man! What you want is to be cheered up!’ And I go and dine with them, and he tells me how jolly comfortable she makes him, and what an ass I am not to marry; and she presses on me a second helping of poulet Maryland, and I smoke one of Reardon’s cigars, and at half-past ten I get into my overcoat, and walk back alone to my rooms….”