PAGE 8
The Long Run
by
“His wife was absorbed in preparations for the journey. To move him was like mobilizing an army, and weeks before the date set for their departure it was almost as if she were already gone.
“This foretaste of separation showed us what we were to each other. Yet I was letting her go–and there was no help for it, no way of preventing it. Resistance was as useless as the vain struggles in a nightmare. She was Trant’s and not mine: part of his luggage when he travelled as she was part of his household furniture when he stayed at home….
“The day she told me that their passages were taken–it was on a November afternoon, in her drawing-room in town–I turned away from her and, going to the window, stood looking out at the torrent of traffic interminably pouring down Fifth Avenue. I watched the senseless machinery of life revolving in the rain and mud, and tried to picture myself performing my small function in it after she had gone from me.
“‘It can’t be–it can’t be!’ I exclaimed.
“‘What can’t be?’
“I came back into the room and sat down by her. ‘This–this–‘ I hadn’t any words. ‘Two weeks!’ I said. ‘What’s two weeks?”
“She answered, vaguely, something about their thinking of Spain for the spring–
“‘Two weeks–two weeks!’ I repeated. ‘And the months we’ve lost–the days that belonged to us!’
“‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m thankful it’s settled.’
“Our words seemed irrelevant, haphazard. It was as if each were answering a secret voice, and not what the other was saying.
“‘Don’t you feel anything at all?’ I remember bursting out at her. As I asked it the tears were streaming down her face. I felt angry with her, and was almost glad to note that her lids were red and that she didn’t cry becomingly. I can’t express my sensation to you except by saying that she seemed part of life’s huge league against me. And suddenly I thought of an afternoon we had spent together in the country, on a ferny hill-side, when we had sat under a beech-tree, and her hand had lain palm upward in the moss, close to mine, and I had watched a little black-and-red beetle creeping over it….
“The bell rang, and we heard the voice of a visitor and the click of an umbrella in the umbrella-stand.
“She rose to go into the inner drawing-room, and I caught her suddenly by the wrist. ‘You understand,’ I said, ‘that we can’t go on like this?’
“‘I understand,’ she answered, and moved away to meet her visitor. As I went out I heard her saying in the other room: ‘Yes, we’re really off on the twelfth.'”
IV
“I wrote her a long letter that night, and waited two days for a reply.
“On the third day I had a brief line saying that she was going to spend Sunday with some friends who had a place near Riverdale, and that she would arrange to see me while she was there. That was all.
“It was on a Saturday that I received the note and I came out here the same night. The next morning was rainy, and I was in despair, for I had counted on her asking me to take her for a drive or a long walk. It was hopeless to try to say what I had to say to her in the drawing-room of a crowded country-house. And only eleven days were left!
“I stayed indoors all the morning, fearing to go out lest she should telephone me. But no sign came, and I grew more and more restless and anxious. She was too free and frank for coquetry, but her silence and evasiveness made me feel that, for some reason, she did not wish to hear what she knew I meant to say. Could it be that she was, after all, more conventional, less genuine, than I had thought? I went again and again over the whole maddening round of conjecture; but the only conclusion I could rest in was that, if she loved me as I loved her, she would be as determined as I was to let no obstacle come between us during the days that were left.