The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and the Stories Read Online Free PDF

life again became a magical adventure. Even the placards in the shops shone with the light of paradise upon them. One caught and held his eye. Travel… Yes, he would travel; lose himself in India, China, the South Seas … Radiance from the most battered vehicle and the meanest pedestrian. Gladness flooded him. He was free.
    A year, thick with various adventures, had slid by since that spring day on which he had wrenched himself free. He had lived, been happy, and with no woman in his life. The break had been simple: a telegram hinting at prolonged business and indefinite return. There had been no reply. This had annoyed him, but he told himself it was what he had expected. He would not admit that, perhaps, he had missed her letter in his wanderings. He had persuaded himself to believe what he wanted to believe—that she had not cared. Actually, there had been confusion in his mind, a complex of thoughts which made it difficult to know what he really had thought. He had imagined that he shuddered at the idea that she had accepted the most generous offer. He pitied her. There was, too, a touch of sadness, a sense of something lost, which he irritably explained on the score of her beauty. Beauty of any kind always stirred him…. Too bad a woman like that couldn’t be decent. He was well rid of her.
    But what had she done? How had he taken it? His contemptuous mood visualized her at times, laughing merrily at some jest made by his successor, or again sitting silent, staring into the fire. He would be conscious of every detail of her appearance: her hair simply arranged, her soft dark eyes, her delicate chin propped on hands rivaling the perfection of La Gioconda’s. Sometimes there would be a reversion to the emotions which had ensnared him, when he ached with yearning, when he longed for her again. Such moments were rare.
    •  •  •
    Another year passed, during which his life had widened, risen, and then crashed….
    Dead? How could she be dead? Dead in childbirth, they had told him, both his mistress and the child she had borne him. She had been dead on that spring day when, resentful and angry at her influence in his life, he had reached out toward freedom—to find only a mirage; for he saw quite plainly that now he would never be free. It was she who had escaped him. Each time he had cursed and wondered, it had been a dead woman whom he had cursed and about whom he had wondered…. He shivered; he seemed always to be cold now….
    Well rid of her! How well he had not known, nor how easily. She was dead. And he had cursed her. But one didn’t curse the dead…. Didn’t one? Damn her! Why couldn’t she have lived, or why hadn’t she died sooner? For long months he had wondered how she had arranged her life, and all the while she had done nothing but to complete it by dying.
    The futility of all his speculations exasperated him. His old resentment returned. She
had
spoiled his life; first by living and then by dying. He hated the fact that she had finished with him, rather than he with her. He could not forgive her…. Forgive her? She was dead. He felt somehow that, after all, the dead did not care if you forgave them or not.
    Gradually, his mind became puppet to a disturbing tension which drove it back and forth between two thoughts: he had left her; she was dead. These two facts became lodged in his mind like burrs pricking at his breaking faculties. As he recalled the manner of his leaving her, it seemed increasingly brutal. She had died loving him, bearing him a child, and he had left her. He tried to shake off the heavy mental dejection which weighed him down, but his former will and determination deserted him. The vitality of the past, forever dragging him down into black depression, frightened him. The mental fog, thick as soot, into which the news of her death had trapped him,appalled him. He must get himself out. A wild anger seized him. He began to think of his own death, self-inflicted, with feeling