Endless time! Matthew laughed and wept. Endless time! He was almost thirty. In a few years he would be forty, and creative life, real life, would be gone; gone forever. But he knew; he saw it all; he faced grimly and without flinching the terrible truth that for seven months he had sought to hide and veil away from himself. Kautilya did not plan for him in her life. Almost she did not want him, although perhaps this last fact she had not quite realized. She had tried him and his people and found them wanting. It was a sordid mess, sordid and mean, and she was unconsciously drawing the skirts of her high-bred soul back from it. She missed—she must miss—the beauty and wealth, the high courtesy and breath of life, which was hers by birth and heritage. And she must have searched in vain and deep disappointment in this muck of slavery, servility, and make-believe, for life. She had bidden him drain the cup. He would.
More and more was he convinced that the parting of himself and Kautilya was forever; that he must look this eventuality squarely in the face. And looking, he was sure that he had found himself. With his new physical strength had come a certain other strength of soul and purpose. Once he had sought knowledge and fame; once he had sought wealth; once he had sought comfort. Now he would seek nothing but work, and work for work’s own sake. That work must be in large degree physical, because it was the physical work of the world that had to be done as prelude to its thought and beauty. And then beyond and above all this was the ultimate emancipation of the world by the uplift of the darker races. He knew what that uplift involved. He knew where he proposed to work, despite the ingenuity of Kautilya’s argument. He did not yet see how physical toil would bring the spiritual end he sought, save only in his own soul. Perhaps—perhaps that would be enough. No, no! he still rejected such metaphysics.
Meantime one step loomed closer and clearer. He would follow the word of Kautilya, because there was a certain beauty and completeness in her desire that he offer himself back to Sara. He saw that it would not be a real offer if it were not really meant. First, of course, Sara must see him as he was and realize him; a man who worked with his hands; a man who did his own thinking, clear and straight, even to his own hurt and poverty. A man working to emancipate the lowest millions. And, because of this and for his own salvation, certain cravings for beauty must be satisfied: simple, clear beauty, without tawdriness, without noise and meaningless imitation. Seeing him thus, perhaps, after all, in her way, in her singular, narrow way, Sara might realize that she had need of him. It was barely possible that, with such love as still oozed thinly in the hard crevices of her efficient soul, she loved him. Very well. If she wanted him as he was, realizing that he had loved someone else as he never could love her, well and good. He would go back to her; he would be a good husband; he would be, in the patois of the respectable, “true,” but in a higher and better sense, good.
Matthew saw, too, with increasing clearness, something that Kautilya, he thought, must begin to realize, and that was that her freedom from him and his people—her freedom from this entanglement from which the thoughtful Japanese and Indians had tried to save her—would mean an increased and broader chance for her own work in her own world. And she had a work if she could return to it untrammeled by the trademark of slavery and degradation. She had tried to see a way in America for herself and Matthew to tread together. But all this was self-deception.
Matthew saw clearly, however, that he must give Kautilya no inkling of his own understanding and interpretation of herself. He knew that in her high soul there was that spirit of martyrs which might never let her surrender him voluntarily, that she would seek to stand by him just as long as it seemed the honorable thing to do. And so he would not “wince nor cry aloud,” but he would “drain the cup.”
That night he telephoned the maid at Sara’s house, and learning that Sara was in, went down to see her. It was a hard journey. It was like walking back in time. He went through all the writhings of that period of groping revolt and yearning. He walked up the steps with the same feeling of revulsion and entered that prim and cold atmosphere, that hard, sharp grinding of life. He rang the bell. The maid stared, grinned, and fidgeted.
“Yes—she’s in—but I don’t think—she said never to—”
She wanted Matthew to push past and go in unannounced, and he meant to, but he couldn’t. He stood hesitating.
Sara’s clear voice came from within:
“Who is it, Eliza?”
“It is Matthew Towns,” said Matthew. “I would like—”
There were quick steps. The maid withdrew. The door banged in his face.
Matthew wrote to Kautilya nothing of this, but only to continue that argument about work and wealth and race. He said:
“Art is long, but industry is longer. Revolution must come, but it must start from within. We must strip to the ground and fight up. Not the colored Farm but the white Factory is the beginning; and the white Office and the Street stand next. The white artisan must teach technique to the colored farmer. White business men must teach him organization; the scholar must teach him how to think, and the banker how to rule. Then, and not till then, will the farmer, colored or white, be the salt of the earth and the beginning of life.”
Then in a postscript he added:
“I have had notice of Sara’s action for divorce. I shall go in person to the hearing and answer, and I shall assent to whatever she may wish. I hope sincerely you are well. I have feared you might be sick and keep it from me. But even in sickness there is one consolation. Life at its strongest and longest is short. Bad as it is and beautiful as it has been for us, it is soon over. I kiss the little fingers of your hand.”
Kautilya replied with a little note that came in early March, scribbled on wrapping-paper, with uncertain curves:
“Matthew, I am afraid. Suddenly I am desperately afraid. Just what I fear I do not know—I cannot say. Perhaps I am ill. I know I am ill. Oh, Matthew, I am afraid. Life is a terrible thing. It looms in dark silence and threatens. It has no bowels of compassion. Its hidden soul neither laughs nor cries—it just is, is, is! I am afraid, Matthew—I am in deadly fear. The terror of eternal life is upon me—the Curse of Siva! Come to me, Matthew, come! No, no—do not come until I send. I shall be all right.”
Matthew’s heart paused in sudden hurt. He knew what must have happened: the Great Decision must be made. She had been summoned to India and must go. He started to pack his suitcase. He telephoned about trains. Then he hesitated. “No, no—do not come until I send.” That was her decision. Against her will he must not go. But perhaps already she had changed her mind. Perhaps she was physically ill. Perhaps already Death, cloaked in black, stood in the shadows behind her writhing bed! Or, worse, perhaps she was going away and could not pause to say goodbye.
He telegraphed—“May I—” No, he tore that up: “Shall I come?”
The answer came in a few hours.
“No, all is well. I have been very ill, but I am better and I shall be out soon in the sweet springtime. I am going to walk and sew; I am going to be happy: infinitely happy. I want to see the heavy earth curling up before the shining of my plowshare. I want to feel the gray mule dragging off my arms, with the sky for heaven and the earth for love. I want to see seed sink in the dead earth. How can you say that life is short? Life is not short, my darling Matthew, it is endless. You and I will live for a thousand years and then a thousand years more; and then ten thousand years shall be added to that. Oh, man of little faith! Do you not see, heart of me, that without infinite life, life is a joke and a contradiction? Wish and Will are prisoned and manacled in Fact, whatever that fact may be; but with life built on life here on earth, now and not in your silly Christian parlor heaven, the tiny spark that is God thrills through, thrills through to triumph in a billion years; so vast, and vaster, is the Plan.”
Matthew humored her mood. She saw the end of their earthly happiness here in time, and she was straining toward eternity. He could not deceive himself or her, and he wrote with a certain sad smile in his heart:
“Infinite and Eternal? Yes, dear Princess of the Winds; the Moonlight Sonata, snow on a high hill, the twitter of birds on boughs in sunlight after rain, health after sickness—God! are not these real, true, good, beautiful, infinite, eternal? Whether Immortal Life, dearest and best, is literal truth or not, I do not care. No one knows whether anything in life or larger than life bursts through to some inconceivable triumph over death. None knows, none can know. But, ah, dear heart, what difference? There is, after all, sunrise and rain, starlight, color, and the surge and beat of sound. And on that night when my body kissed yours, a billion years lived in one heartbeat. What more can I ask? What more have I asked or dreamed, Queen of the World, than that? Already I am Eternal. In thy flesh I have seen God.”
And Kautilya answered:
“I know, I know, heart’s-ease, but that is not enough: back of it all, back of the flesh, the mold, the dust, there must be reality; it must be there; and what can reality be but Life, Life Everlasting? If we, we our very selves, do not live forever, Life is a cruel joke.”
Yes, Life was a cruel joke, and Matthew turned to write of everyday things:
“As I sat last night huddled over my supper—a very greasy pork chop, sodden potatoes, oleomargarine, soggy cornbread, partly cooked cabbage, and weak, cold coffee—as I sat in my grimy overalls and guzzled this mess, someone came and sat at my table with its dirty oilcloth cover. I did not look up, but a voice, a rather flat, unusual voice, ordered rice. ‘Just rice.’ Then I looked up at a Chinese woman, and she smiled wanly back.
“ ‘I prefer,’ she said, ‘don’t you, the cuisine of the Lützower Ufer?’
“It was one of our Chinese friends. I was glad and ashamed to see her. She seemed to notice nothing—made no comment, asked no awkward questions. Principally she talked of China.
“ ‘Oh, China, China, where shall we find leaders! They rise, they fall, they die, they desert. The men who can do, the men of thought and knowledge, the men who know technique, the unselfish and farseeing—how shall we harness these to the greatest chariot in the world and not have them seduced and stolen by Power, Pleasure, Display, Gluttony? Oh, I know it is the old story of human weakness, but if only we had a little more strength and unity now and then at critical moments, we could climb a step and lift the sodden, smitten mass.
“ ‘There was Chiang Kai-Shek, so fine and young a warrior! I knew him well. I saw once his golden face alight with the highest ideals, his eyes a Heaven-in-Earth. Today, what is he? I do not know. Perhaps he does not. Oh, why was it that Sun Yat Sen must die so soon? But’—she rose from the half-eaten, mushy rice—‘we must push on always—on!’ And then pausing she said, timidly, ‘And you, my friend. Are you pushing—on?’
“I hesitated and then arose and stood before her: ‘I am pushing—on!’ I said. She looked at me with glad eyes, and touching her forehead, was gone. And I was right, Kautilya, I am pushing on.”
And turning from Kautilya’s sealed letter, he took another sheet and laboriously wrote a long letter to Sara, saying all there was to be said; explaining, confessing, offering to return to her if she wanted him, but on the conditions which she must already know. He received no answer. Yet once again he wrote and almost pleaded. Again he had no word.