第43章 SAILORMAN(4)

Latimer found that to love a woman like Helen Page as he loved her was the best thing that could come into his life.But to sit down and lament over the fact that she did not love him did not, to use his favorite expression, "tend toward efficiency." He removed from his sight the three pictures of her he had cut from illustrated papers, and ceased to write to her.

In his last letter he said: "I have told you how it is, and that is how it is always going to be.There never has been, there never can be any one but you.But my love is too precious, too sacred to be brought out every week in a letter and dangled before your eyes like an advertisement of a motor-car.It is too wonderful a thing to be cheapened, to be subjected to slights and silence.If ever you should want it, it is yours.It is here waiting.But you must tell me so.I have done everything a man can do to make you understand.But you do not want me or my love.

And my love says to me: 'Don't send me there again to have the door shut in my face.Keep me with you to be your inspiration, to help you to live worthily.' And so it shall be."When Helen read that letter she did not know what to do.She did not know how to answer it.Her first impression was that suddenly she had grown very old, and that some one had turned off the sun, and that in consequence the world had naturally grown cold and dark.She could not see why the two hundred and forty-nine expected her to keep on doing exactly the same things she had been doing with delight for six months, and indeed for the last six years.Why could they not see that no longer was there any pleasure in them? She would have written and told Latimer that she found she loved him very dearly if in her mind there had not arisen a fearful doubt.Suppose his letter was not quite honest?

He said that he would always love her, but how could she now know that? Why might not this letter be only his way of withdrawing from a position which he wished to abandon, from which, perhaps, he was even glad to escape? Were this true, and she wrote and said all those things that were in her heart, that now she knew were true, might she not hold him to her against his will? The love that once he had for her might no longer exist, and if, in her turn, she told him she loved him and had always loved him, might he not in some mistaken spirit of chivalry feel it was his duty to pretend to care? Her cheeks burned at the thought.It was intolerable.She could not write that letter.And as day succeeded day, to do so became more difficult.And so she never wrote and was very unhappy.And Latimer was very unhappy.But he had his work, and Helen had none, and for her life became a game of putting little things together, like a picture puzzle, an hour here and an hour there, to make up each day.It was a dreary game.

From time to time she heard of him through the newspapers.For, in his own State, he was an "Insurgent" making a fight, the outcome of which was expected to show what might follow throughout the entire West.When he won his fight much more was written about him, and he became a national figure.In his own State the people hailed him as the next governor, promised him a seat in the Senate.To Helen this seemed to take him further out of her life.She wondered if now she held a place even in his thoughts.

At Fair Harbor the two hundred and forty-nine used to joke with her about her politician.Then they considered Latimer of importance only because Helen liked him.Now they discussed him impersonally and over her head, as though she were not present, as a power, an influence, as the leader and exponent of a new idea.They seemed to think she no longer could pretend to any peculiar claim upon him, that now he belonged to all of them.

Older men would say to her: "I hear you know Latimer? What sort of a man is he?"Helen would not know what to tell them.She could not say he was a man who sat with his back to a pine-tree, reading from a book of verse, or halting to devour her with humble, entreating eyes.

She went South for the winter, the doctors deciding she was run down and needed the change.And with an unhappy laugh at her own expense she agreed in their diagnosis.She was indifferent as to where they sent her, for she knew wherever she went she must still force herself to go on putting one hour on top of another, until she had built up the inexorable and necessary twenty-four.

When she returned winter was departing, but reluctantly, and returning unexpectedly to cover the world with snow, to eclipse the thin spring sunshine with cheerless clouds.Helen took herself seriously to task.She assured herself it was weak-minded to rebel.The summer was coming and Fair Harbor with all its old delights was before her.She compelled herself to take heart, to accept the fact that, after all, the world is a pretty good place, and that to think only of the past, to live only on memories and regrets, was not only cowardly and selfish, but, as Latimer had already decided, did not tend toward efficiency.

Among the other rules of conduct that she imposed upon herself was not to think of Latimer.At least, not during the waking hours.Should she, as it sometimes happened, dream of him--should she imagine they were again seated among the pines, riding across the downs, or racing at fifty miles an hour through country roads, with the stone fences flying past, with the wind and the sun in their eyes, and in their hearts happiness and content--that would not be breaking her rule.If she dreamed of him, she could not be held responsible.She could only be grateful.