The Long Run

“‘And it’s got to be that or nothing?’

“‘Oh, on both sides,’ she reminded me.

”’Not on both sides. It’s not fair. That’s why—’

“‘Why you won’t?’

“‘Why I cannot—may not!’

“‘Why you’ll take a night and not a life?’

“The taunt, for a woman usually so sure of her aim, fell so short of the mark that its only effect was to increase my conviction of her helplessness. The very intensity of my longing for her made me tremble where she was fearless. I had to protect her first, and think of my own attitude afterward.

“She was too discerning not to see this too. Her face softened, grew inexpressibly appealing, and she dropped again into that chair you’re in, leaned forward, and looked up with her grave smile.

“‘You think I’m beside myself—raving? (You’re not thinking of yourself, I know.) I’m not: I never was saner. Since I’ve known you I’ve often thought this might happen. This thing between us isn’t an ordinary thing. If it had been we shouldn’t, all these months, have drifted. We should have wanted to skip to the last page—and then throw down the book. We shouldn’t have felt we could trust the future as we did. We were in no hurry because we knew we shouldn’t get tired; and when two people feel that about each other they must live together—or part. I don’t see what else they can do. A little trip along the coast won’t answer. It’s the high seas— or else being tied up to Lethe wharf. And I’m for the high seas, my dear!’

“Think of sitting here—here, in this room, in this chair—and listening to that, and seeing the tight on her hair, and hearing the sound of her voice! I don’t suppose there ever was a scene just like it….

“She was astounding—inexhaustible; through all my anguish of resistance I found a kind of fierce joy in following her. It was lucidity at white heat: the last sublimation of passion. She might have been an angel arguing a point in the empyrean if she hadn’t been, so completely, a woman pleading for her life….

“Her life: that was the thing at stake! She couldn’t do with less of it than she was capable of; and a woman’s life is inextricably part of the man’s she cares for.

“That was why, she argued, she couldn’t accept the usual solution: couldn’t enter into the only relation that society tolerates between people situated like ourselves. Yes: she knew all the arguments on that side: didn’t I suppose she’d been over them and over them? She knew (for hadn’t she often said it of others?) what is said of the woman who, by throwing in her lot with her lover’s, binds him to a lifelong duty which has the irksomeness without the dignity of marriage. Oh, she could talk on that side with the best of them: only she asked me to consider the other—the side of the man and woman who love each other deeply and completely enough to want their lives enlarged, and not diminished, by their love. What, in such a case—she reasoned—must be the inevitable effect of concealing, denying, disowning, the central fact, the motive power of one’s existence? She asked me to picture the course of such a love: first working as a fever in the blood, distorting and deflecting everything, making all other interests insipid, all other duties irksome, and then, as the acknowledged claims of life regained their hold, gradually dying—the poor starved passion!—for want of the wholesome necessary food of common living and doing, yet leaving life impoverished by the loss of all it might have been.

“‘I’m not talking, dear—’ I see her now, leaning toward me with shining eyes: ‘I’m not talking of the people who haven’t enough to fill their days, and to whom a little mystery, a little manoeuvring, gives an illusion of importance that they can’t afford to miss; I’m talking of you and me, with all our tastes and curiosities and activities; and I ask you what our love would become if we had to keep it apart from our lives, like a pretty useless animal that we went to peep at and feed with sweetmeats through its cage?’

“I won’t, my dear fellow, go into the other side of our strange duel: the arguments I used were those that most men in my situation would have felt bound to use, and that most women in Paulina’s accept instinctively, without even formulating them. The exceptionalness, the significance, of the case lay wholly in the fact that she had formulated them all and then rejected them….

“There was one point I didn’t, of course, touch on; and that was the popular conviction (which I confess I shared) that when a man and a woman agree to defy the world together the man really sacrifices much more than the woman. I was not even conscious of thinking of this at the time, though it may have lurked somewhere in the shadow of my scruples for her; but she dragged it out into the daylight and held me face to face with it.

“‘Remember, I’m not attempting to lay down any general rule,’ she insisted; ‘I’m not theorizing about Man and Woman, I’m talking about you and me. How do I know what’s best for the woman in the next house? Very likely she’ll bolt when it would have been better for her to stay at home. And it’s the same with the man: he’ll probably do the wrong thing. It’s generally the weak heads that commit follies, when it’s the strong ones that ought to: and my point is that you and I are both strong enough to behave like fools if we want to….

“‘Take your own case first—because, in spite of the sentimentalists, it’s the man who stands to lose most. You’ll have to give up the Iron Works: which you don’t much care about—because it won’t be particularly agreeable for us to live in New York: which you don’t care much about either. But you won’t be sacrificing what is called “a career.” You made up your mind long ago that your best chance of self-development, and consequently of general usefulness, lay in thinking rather than doing; and, when we first met, you were already planning to sell out your business, and travel and write. Well! Those ambitions are of a kind that won’t be harmed by your dropping out of your social setting. On the contrary, such work as you want to do ought to gain by it, because you’ll be brought nearer to life-as-it-is, in contrast to life-as-a-visiting-list….’

“She threw back her head with a sudden laugh. ‘And the joy of not having any more visits to make! I wonder if you’ve ever thought of that? Just at first, I mean; for society’s getting so deplorably lax that, little by little, it will edge up to us—you’ll see! I don’t want to idealize the situation, dearest, and I won’t conceal from you that in time we shall be called on. But, oh, the fun we shall have had in the interval! And then, for the first time we shall be able to dictate our own terms, one of which will be that no bores need apply. Think of being cured of all one’s chronic bores! We shall feel as jolly as people do after a successful operation.’

“I don’t know why this nonsense sticks in my mind when some of the graver things we said are less distinct. Perhaps it’s because of a certain iridescent quality of feeling that made her gaiety seem like sunshine through a shower….

“‘You ask me to think of myself?’ she went on. ‘But the beauty of our being together will be that, for the first time, I shall dare to! Now I have to think of all the tedious trifles I can pack the days with, because I’m afraid—I’m afraid—to hear the voice of the real me, down below, in the windowless underground hole where I keep her….

“‘Remember again, please, it’s not Woman, it’s Paulina Trant, I’m talking of. The woman in the next house may have all sorts of reasons—honest reasons—for staying there. There may be some one there who needs her badly: