Susan nodded.She, too, was gazing spellbound.Her beloved City of the Sun.
"But it is beautiful--beautiful beyond belief.And I have always heard that New York was ugly.""It is beautiful--and ugly--both beyond belief!" replied Susan.
"No wonder you love it!"
"Yes--I love it.I have loved it from the first moment I saw it.I've never stopped loving it--not even----" She did not finish her sentence but gazed dreamily at the city appearing and disappearing in its veils of thin, luminous mist.Her thoughts traveled again the journey of her life in New York.
When she spoke again, it was to say:
"Yes--when I first saw it--that spring evening--I called it my City of the Stars, then, for I didn't know that it belonged to the sun--Yes, that spring evening I was happier than I ever had been--or ever shall be again.""But you will be happy again "dear" said Clelie, tenderly pressing her arm.
A faint sad smile--sad but still a smile--made Susan's beautiful face lovely."Yes, I shall be happy--not in those ways--but happy, for I shall be busy....No, I don't take the tragic view of life--not at all.And as I've known misery, Idon't try to hold to it."
"Leave that," said Clelie, "to those who have known only the comfortable make-believe miseries that rustle in crepe and shed tears--whenever there's anyone by to see.""Like the beggars who begin to whine and exhibit their aggravated sores as soon as a possible giver comes into view,"said Susan."I've learned to accept what comes, and to try to make the best of it, whatever it is....I say I've learned.
But have I? Does one ever change? I guess I was born that sort of philosopher."She recalled how she put the Warhams out of her life as soon as she discovered what they really meant to her and she to them--how she had put Jeb Ferguson out of her life--how she had conquered the grief and desolation of the loss of Burlingham--how she had survived Etta's going away without her--the inner meaning of her episodes with Rod--with Freddie Palmer----And now this last supreme test--with her soul rising up and gathering itself together and lifting its head in strength----"Yes, I was born to make the best of things," she repeated.
"Then you were born lucky," sighed Clelie, who was of those who must lean if they would not fall and lie where they fell.
Susan gave a curious little laugh--with no mirth, with a great deal of mockery."Do you know, I never thought so before, but I believe you're right," said she.Again she laughed in that queer way."If you knew my life you'd think I was joking.
But I'm not.The fact that I've survived and am what I am proves I was born lucky." Her tone changed, her expression became unreadable."If it's lucky to be born able to live.
And if that isn't luck, what is?"
She thought how Brent said she was born lucky because she had the talent that enables one to rise above the sordidness of that capitalism he so often denounced--the sordidness of the lot of its slaves, the sordidness of the lot of its masters.
Brent! If it were he leaning beside her--if he and she were coming up the bay toward the City of the Sun!
A billow of heartsick desolation surged over her.
Alone--always alone.And still alone.And always to be alone.
Garvey came aboard when the gangway was run out.He was in black wherever black could be displayed.But the grief shadowing his large, simple countenance had the stamp of the genuine.And it was genuine, of the most approved enervating kind.He had done nothing but grieve since his master's death--had left unattended all the matters the man he loved and grieved for would have wished put in order.Is it out of charity for the weakness of human nature and that we may think as well as possible of it--is that why we admire and praise most enthusiastically the kind of love and the kind of friendship and the kind of grief that manifest themselves in obstreperous feeling and wordiness, with no strength left for any attempt to _do?_ As Garvey greeted them the tears filled Clelie's eyes and she turned away.But Susan gazed at him steadily; in her eyes there were no tears, but a look that made Garvey choke back sobs and bend his head to hide his expression.What he saw--or felt--behind her calmness filled him with awe, with a kind of terror.But he did not recognize what he saw as grief; it did not resemble any grief he had felt or had heard about.
"He made a will just before he died," he said to Susan."He left everything to you."Then she had not been mistaken.He had loved her, even as she loved him.She turned and walked quickly from them.She hastened into her cabin, closed the door and flung herself across the bed.And for the first time she gave way.In that storm her soul was like a little land bird in the clutch of a sea hurricane.She did not understand herself.She still had no sense that he was dead; yet had his dead body been lying there in her arms she could not have been more shaken by paroxysms of grief, without tears or sobs--grief that vents itself in shrieks and peals of horrible laughter-like screams--she smothered them in the pillows in which she buried her face.Clelie came, opened the door, glanced in, closed it.An hour passed--an hour and a half.Then Susan appeared on deck--amber-white pallor, calm, beautiful, the fashionable woman in traveling dress.
"I never before saw you with your lips not rouged!" exclaimed Clelie.
"You will never see them rouged again," said Susan.
"But it makes you look older."
"Not so old as I am," replied she.
And she busied herself about the details of the landing and the customs, waving aside Garvey and his eager urgings that she sit quietly and leave everything to him.In the carriage, on the way to the hotel, she roused herself from her apparently tranquil reverie and broke the strained silence by saying:
"How much shall I have?"
The question was merely the protruding end of a train of thought years long and pursued all that time with scarcely an interruption.It seemed abrupt; to Garvey it sounded brutal.
