A Charmed Life Read Online Free Page B

there was. There lay the bleakness; for them, as they were constituted, through all eternity, this had been the optimum—there was no beyond. There was nothing.
    And if this, thought Martha trenchantly, was “maturity,” she did not care for it; she would almost rather be dead. It had occurred to her more than once, as a speculation, that perhaps she was dead. This was what she would have said, probably, if she had sat by as a commentator and watched herself crawl back here, but, not being a commentator, Martha still had hope. She was just the opposite of John; she would not admit that she had hope, while he would not admit that he despaired. She was afraid to. She feared that this hope might be an illusion, which she had in common with every wreck and derelict who had floated up on the beach. It might be nothing more than the old “free will” of the philosophers, which was a part of the apparatus of consciousness and told nothing one way or the other about reality.
    To think that such a hope was still alive in the twenty-one chronic town drunkards, in the barbital addict and the three village idiots, no doubt, as well as in all the beached failures and second-raters of the twenties and thirties, was ludicrous from the outside—Martha could assure them of that—but nobody could see himself from the outside, not even Martha at her most objective, when she seemed to be straining out of the window of her nature, to catch a glimpse of John and herself in the round.
    Martha heaved a sigh. She yawned from hunger. The more one knew, the less one could predict, it seemed. In human life, as in palmistry, no sign had a fixed meaning. In the workshop, last week, they had found an old book of the hand, which Martha said, after study, was just as reliable as psychoanalysis; you could make palmistry match your life just as well as Freud’s theories, assuming you thought you knew what your life was. John’s right hand, for instance—his “made” hand—had no fate line, which could mean that he had entrusted his fate to Martha—they had both seen this, wryly smiling, the minute he stretched out his palms to her. They had found poor Barrett, too, in both their hands, with the bad-luck sign around him, which made Martha say—a thing she half believed—that Barrett was the reason they had not been able to have a child yet, though the doctor had found nothing wrong. It was a punishment laid on her. If she had decreed that they should kidnap Barrett, John, she knew, would have done it; he had had faith in her nobility of purpose.
    A deeper sigh escaped her. Then she stiffened on the sofa. She had heard a stirring from the bedroom. There was a loud yawn, a creaking of bedsprings, a slow, dragging step. Her heart bounded. She declined to be hurt because he had slammed the door. Indeed, she had almost forgotten it, which was the way all their quarrels ended nowadays. Another sign—but how to read it? She went quickly to meet him in the kitchen. As he came out of the bedroom door, his hair was rumpled and his face was creased, but his high, boyish color had come back. Evidently he had been sleeping. This at once relieved and slightly irritated her. She looked at his hand; the blood had soaked through the bandage, but the actual bleeding had stopped. “You’re better,” she said gaily.
    “It still hurts,” he protested. “But you’re better,” she repeated. “You looked awful before. You glistened like a sweating piece of store cheese.” She smiled, trying to cajole him, as if the “old” John of an hour before were a trying guest they had got rid of and were now ready to discuss. He flexed his hand and made a rueful face. Martha looked at him in alarm. “It really hurts?” she cried, with a shiver of sympathy. And all at once she was flooded with penitence. “Do you think you cut a tendon?” she timidly asked. But John seemed to read her thoughts, which were rushing ahead to death and judgment. “Don’t be a