Even so, there were moments, there were hours when he was visited by the old sensation of something missing, as if he were part of a circle that was bent and distorted and broken in pieces. Life, as well as himself, seemed to be crippled, to have lost irrevocably a part of the whole. Still, in the solitude of the night, he would awake from his dream of a bliss that hovered near but never approached, and think, with a start of surprise, "If I awoke and found her beside me, would all the broken pieces come together again? Should I find that life was simple and right and natural and whole once more?" Then the dream, the surprise, the pang of expectancy, would fade and mingle and dissolve into emptiness. Like a man hopelessly ill who realizes that his malady is incurable, he would distract his mind with those blessed little things of life that bear thinking about. Well, he was used to it now, he would repeat again and again; he was used to the ache, the blankness, even to the stab of delight which pierced him in sleep. He had accepted the sense of something missing as a man accepts bodily disfigurement. After the first years of his loss, he was prepared, he felt, for all the malicious pranks grief can play on the memory. He was prepared even for those mocking resemblances that beckoned him in the street, for those arrowy glimpses of her in the faces of strange women, for that sudden wonder, poignant as a flame, "What if the past were a delusion! What if she were within reach of my arms!" No, it had been many years, thirty, almost forty years, since life had so mocked him.
He had fought through the war. Strange, how insignificant, how futile, any war appeared to him now! He could never, not even when he took an active part in one, understand the fascination war exercised over the human mind. Then, when it was over, he had let life have its way with him. Though the poet in him was lost, he became in later years a prosperous attorney, and a member in good standing, so long as one did not inquire too closely, of the Episcopal Church. . . .
Sitting there in the pale sunshine, so carefully brushed and dressed by his man Robert, he told himself that, in spite of the ugly twist in the centre, he had had a fair life. Nothing that he wanted, but everything that was good for him. Few men at eighty-three were able to look back upon so firm and rich a past, upon so smooth and variegated a surface. A surface! Yes, that, he realized now, was the flaw in the structure. Except for that one defeated passion in his youth, he had lived entirely upon the shifting surface of facts. He had been a good citizen, a successful lawyer, a faithful husband, an indulgent father; he had been indeed, everything but himself. Always he had fallen into the right pattern; but the centre of the pattern was missing. Once again, the old heartbreaking question returned. Why and what is human personality? An immortal essence? A light that is never blown out? Or a breath, a murmur, the rhythm of molecular changes, scarcely more than the roving whisper of wind in the tree-tops?
A multitude of women people the earth: fair women, dark women; tall women, short women; kind women, cruel women; warm women, cold women; tender women, sullen women—a multitude of women, and only one among them all had been able to appease the deep unrest in his nature. Only one unit of being, one cluster of living cells, one vital ray from the sun's warmth, only one ripple in the endless cycle of time or eternity, could restore the splintered roots of his life, could bring back to him the sense of fulfilment, completeness, perfection. A single personality out of the immense profusion, the infinite numbers! A reality that eluded analysis! And yet he had been happy as men use the word happiness. Rarely, since his youth, had he remembered that something was missing, that he had lost irrevocably a part from the whole, lost that sense of fulfilment not only in himself but in what men call Divine goodness. Irrevocably—but suppose, after all, the loss were not irrevocable!
Suddenly, without warning, a wave of joy rose from the unconscious depths. Suppose that somewhere beyond, in some central radiance of being, he should find again that ecstasy he had lost without ever possessing. For one heart-beat, while the wave broke and the dazzling spray flooded his thoughts, he told himself that he was immortal, that here on this green bench in the sun, he had found the confirmation of love, faith, truth, right, Divine goodness. Then, as swiftly as it had broken, the wave of joy spent itself. The glow, the surprise, the startled wonder, faded into the apathetic weariness of the end. He was only an old man warming his withered flesh in the April sunshine. "My life is nearly over," he thought, "but who knows what life is in the end?"
A cloud passed overhead; the changeable blue of the sky darkened and paled; a sudden wind rocked the buds on the tulip tree; and in the street, where life hurried by, a pillar of dust wavered into the air, held together an instant, and then sank down and whirled in broken eddies over the pavement.
PART THREE
THE ILLUSION
CHAPTER 1
Jenny Blair was coming to him through sunlight netted with shadows.
With an effort, General Archbald detached himself from the past, from the twisted fibres of buried hopes and fears and disappointments. For an instant, as he reached the surface of living, it seemed to him that he was suffocated by the thicker air of the actuality. Then, collecting his thoughts, he rose unsteadily and leaned on his stick. "An old mind is a wandering mind," he said aloud to William, who rose also and stood at attention. "The important thing is to hold the thread, to keep the connection." After that dim vista, the light of the present dazzled his eyes, and he blinked as he watched his grand-daughter come to him along the gravelled walk between plots of grass sprinkled with buttercups.
He saw her first as a small bright shape in living blue. Then, while she came nearer, he asked himself where was the fascination of youth, and why age had surrendered so completely to its arrogant power. Jenny Blair was lovely, as most budding things are lovely to old eyes; but she would never have been called a beauty, he told himself, by King Edward VII. Nor, indeed, by Prince Albert, who also admired queenliness. She lacked height; she lacked repose; she was entirely wanting in presence. Yet she walked well (happily the sheath skirt, so cramping to Isabella's voluptuous style, had gone out), and she was a pretty little thing in her way, fresh, sparkling, dewy with innocence. Women were wearing wide collars of white lawn, and her small ivory throat arched delicately from the sheer fabric. There was a wreath of cornflowers on her hat, and under the dipping brim of black straw her hair shone with the pale lustre of honey. A shallow face, vague and heart-shaped in contour, but with flashes of pure loveliness. Beneath the golden curve of her eyebrows, her yellow-hazel eyes, set wide apart, held the startled and expectant gaze of a child. More than any trait in her character or disposition, he recognized this look, curious, watchful, amazed, as an inheritance from his own youth. Nothing else in her features or expression belonged to his past. Even her colouring, with its honey-softness and transparent rose, had come from her mother's family (all the Wellfleets except Cora had that pale golden hair), and bore no kinship to the rich dusk of the Archbalds. But this startled wonder in her eyes, as if some winged thought were crying, "Let me out! Let me out!" never failed to appeal to his tenderness. That captive impulse, he assured himself, was not inherited from her mother.