SALAD DAYS
The most desirable thing in life is to have the sense of doing your duty
without the trouble of doing it. Therefore days of preparation are
always delicious days. There is the mingling of repose with all the joys
of activity. To be planning to do things has in it more of triumph than
the actual doing. It carries the irradiating light of hope and purpose,
without the petty pin-prick of detail which comes when reality parodies
ideals.
Dick's first summer at home was a period of delight. He absorbed ideas
and so felt that he was doing something in this city of his birth which
now, in his manhood, came back to him as something new and strange. The
weeks drifted by and he seemed to drift with them, though both mind and
body were alert. All the things he learned and all the things he meant
to do were tripled and quadrupled in interest when he passed them on to
his two counselors-in-chief, Norris, solid and appreciative, Madeline,
even more believing and more sympathizing, but glorified by that charm
of sex which gilds even trifling contact of man and maid, making her
friendship not only gilt but gold.
So he spent his days in prowling about and meeting all sorts and
conditions of men, while Ellery slaved in a dirty and noisy office; but
when Saturday came and the _Star_ went to press at three, Norris, with
the blissful knowledge that there was no Sunday edition, would meet
Percival, stocked with a week's accumulation of experiences. In the
hearts of both would be deep rejoicing as, at week-end after week-end,
they stowed themselves in Dick's motor and betook themselves lakeward,
nominally to go to the Country Club and play golf, but with the
subconsciousness for both that the lake meant Madeline.
There were, to be sure, other people, girls agreeable, pretty and
edifying, men of their own type and age, older men who did less sport
and more business, but all of these were neither more nor less than a
many-colored background to the little three-cornered intimacy which, as
Dick said, "was the real thing."
It came to be understood that the three should spend their Sunday
afternoons together, not on the cool piazza, where intrusion in its
myriad forms might come upon them, but off somewhere, either on the
bosom of the waters or on the bosom of the good green earth, who
whispers her secret of eternal vitality to every one that lays an ear
close to her heart.
The season was like the placid hour before the world wakes to its daily
comedy and tragedy; and yet, with all its superficial serenity, this
summer carried certain undercurrents of emotion that hardly rose to the
dignity of discontent, but which, nevertheless, troubled the still
waters of the soul. At first Madeline half resented the continual
presence of Norris at these sacred conclaves. He seemed so much an
outsider. Dick she had known all her life and she could talk to him with
perfect freedom, but his friend often sat silent during their chatter,
as though he were an onlooker before whom spontaneity was impossible.
Yet as Sunday after Sunday the two young men strode up together, she
grew to accept Ellery. First he became inoffensive; then she became
aware that his eyes spoke when his lips were dumb; and finally, when
words did come, they were the words of a friend who understood moods and
tenses. In some ways it was a comfort to have this buffer between her
and Dick. It helped to prolong the period of uncertain certainty.
Dick never spoke of love, but the way was pointed not only by the easy
restfulness of their comradeship, but in the very atmosphere that
surrounded them. She read it half-consciously in the looks of father and
mother as they met and accepted Dick's intimacy in the house, in the
warmth of Mrs. Percival's motherly affection when Madeline ran in for
one of her frequent calls. Life was full of it, like the gentle
half-warmth that comes before the sun has quite peeped over the horizon
on a summer morning; and it was well that this dawn to their day should
be a long one. Madeline had been away the greater part of four years,
and she was now in no hurry to cut short her reunion with the old home
life. Dick, too, had his beginnings to make, man-fashion, and they ought
to be made before he took on himself the full life of a man. So she was
happily content to drift, conscious in a vague dreamy way that the drift
was in the right direction, feeling the situation without analyzing it.
It was a condition of affairs like Madeline herself, gently
affectionate, but not passionate or deeply emotional. She was not of the
type of women who rise up and control destiny.
Norris, for all his passive exterior, had undercurrents that were fervid
and powerful, and this first summer in the West, unruffled on its
surface, stirred them and sent his life whirling along their
irresistible streams. He never lost the sense that he was an outsider,
admitted on sufferance to see the happiness of others and allowed to
pick up their crumbs. If hard work, oblivion and lovelessness were to be
his lot, the hardest of these was lovelessness. Much as he loved Dick he
continually resented that young man's careless acceptance of the good
things of life, and most of all did his irritation grow at Percival's
way of taking Madeline for granted, enjoying her beauty, her sympathy,
the grace that she threw over everything, and yet, thought Ellery, never
half appreciating them. He himself bowed before them with an adoration
that was framed in anguish because these things were, and were not for
him. More and more cruel grew the knowledge that the currents of his
life were gall and wormwood, flowing through wastes of bitterness.
Yet, along with the new grief came a new awakening, at first dimly felt
by Madeline alone, then read with greater and greater clearness.
But of all undercurrents, Dick, prime mover and chief talker, remained
unconscious, absorbed in his own dawning career, delighting in his two
friends chiefly as hearers and sympathizers with his multitudinous
ideas.
So it happened that one August afternoon, when it was late enough for
the sun to have lost its fury, a not too strenuous breeze drove their
tiny yacht through a channel which stretched enticingly between a wooded
island and the jutting mainland.
"Let's land there," Madeline exclaimed suddenly. "It looks like a jolly
place."
She pointed toward a stretch of beach caught between the arms of trees
that came to the very water's edge, and enshrined in a great wild
grape-vine that had climbed from branch to branch until it made a
tangled canopy.
Dick turned sharply inward and ran their prow into the twittering sand.
"Thou speakest and it is thy servant's place to obey," he said.
"How does it feel to keep slaves? I've often wondered," Ellery said as
he jumped ashore and Dick began tossing him rugs and cushions.
"Very comfy, thank you, and not at all un-Christian," she answered
saucily. "Dick, don't throw the supper basket, under penalty of
liquidating the sandwiches. I think there's a freezer of ice-cream under
the deck, if you'll pull it out. Now, are you ready for me?"
She stepped lightly forward under Dick's guidance, took Ellery's
outstretched hands and sprang to the shore, where a kind of throne was
built for her against a prostrate log,--all this help not because it was
necessary, but as the appropriate pomp of royalty.
"I suspect," said Dick, looking about him with great satisfaction, "that
this was a favorite picnic place for Gitche Manito and Hiawatha, in the
morning of days."
"That shows how nature can forget," Madeline retorted. "Surely you know
the real story, Dick."
"I don't," said Ellery. "Tell it to me."
She snuggled comfortably down into her rugs.
"In early days, which is the western equivalent for 'once upon a time,'
a furious storm raged down the lake and tore the water into long
ribbons of purple and green. A beautiful girl stood, perhaps on this
very spot, with a savage who had rescued her from a sinking canoe and
brought her here, dripping but safe. Over there on the mainland her
father came running out of the woods in an agony of fear. He saw her
here, saw her signals, but the shriek of the storm and the roar of the
waters drowned out the words that she frantically screamed toward him.
He saw her point to the Indian, who was always feared, always counted
treacherous, and his dread of the hurricane changed to terror of the
savage. He raised his rifle and the girl's deliverer dropped dead at her
feet."
"Then fifty years went by, and this became a bower for the eating of
sandwiches," added Dick.
Norris was lying on his back and staring through the tangle of grape and
maple leaves at the flecks of blue beyond.
"That's a noble story," he said. "I didn't suppose this new land had any
legends. It all gives me the impression of being just old enough to be
big."
"Isn't that the conceit of the Anglo-Saxon? He calls this a new land
because he's lived here only about a half-century. Things did happen
before you were born, my dear boy," said Dick.
"Indeed! What things?" Norris asked placidly.
"Suppose you enlarge your mind by looking up the stories of the old
_coureurs du bois_ who used to stumble through these woods when they
were the border-land between Chippewa and Sioux." Dick threw a pebble at
Norris' face. "Suppose you go up to that inky stream in the north, which
twists mysteriously through the forests, black with the bodies of dead
men rotting in its mire. I don't wonder they thought the rough life more
fascinating than kings and courts. I'd like to have seen sun-dances and
maiden-tests; I'd like to have eaten food strange enough to be
picturesque, and to have found new streams and traced them to their
sources, and to have come unexpectedly on new lakes, like amethysts.
It's as much fun to discover as to invent. And then the Jesuit fathers,
half-tramp, half-martyr,--they were great old fellows."
"And the Frenchman--where is he?" said Madeline. "Gone, and left a few
names for the Swede and the American to mispronounce; but you may come
down later, Mr. Norris, and find how law and order, in our own people,
fought with savagery out here on the frontier. It's a thrilling story."
"You love it all and its legends, don't you?" Ellery looked from one to
the other.
"Don't you?" Madeline asked.
"By Jove, I do!" he cried, sitting suddenly upright as though stirred
with genuine feeling. "I love it without its legends. It does not seem
to me to have any past. It is all future. It makes me feel all future,
too."
"Do you know what's happened to you?" Dick laughed exultantly. "Gitche
Manito the Mighty has got you--the spirit of the West--which, being
interpreted, is Ozone."
"Something has got me, I admit," Norris cried. "What is it? What is it
that makes the sky so dazzling? What is it that makes the leaves fairly
radiate light? What is it that, every time you take a breath, makes the
air freshen you down to your toes? I feel younger than I ever did before
in all my life."
The other two were looking at him.
"Well, our height above the sea-level--" Dick began.
"Oh, rot!" Ellery exclaimed. "It's something more than air--it's
atmosphere. You feel here that it's glorious to work."
"You make me proud of you, old boy."
"It's funny how universally you fellows call me 'old boy'. I suppose I
was older than the rest of you. I had to take the responsibility for my
own life too soon and it took out of me that assurance that most of you
had--that complacent confidence that things would somehow manage
themselves. But I'm getting even now. I'm appreciating being young,
which most men don't."
"Bully for you!" Dick cried. "If you couldn't be born a Westerner, you
are born again one. I am moved to tell you something that gave me a
small glow yesterday. I met Lewis--the editor of the _Star_, you know,
Madeline--and he insisted on stopping me and congratulating me on having
brought Mr. Norris to St. Etienne; said he was irritated at first by
having a man forced on him by influence, when there was really no
particular place for him, but, he went on, 'Mr. Norris is rapidly making
his own place. We think him a real acquisition.'"
"Oh, pooh!" Norris lapsed sulkily into his usual quiet manner. "Of
course I can write better than I can talk. My thoughts are just slow
enough, I guess, to keep up with a pen."
Dick laughed softly as though he were pleased at things he did not tell.
Madeline, for the first time, gave her real attention to Mr. Norris,
whom she had not hitherto thought worth dwelling on--at least when Dick
was about. Never before had this young man talked about himself.
A silence fell.
"Was that a wood-thrush?" Norris asked, manifestly grasping at a change
of subject.
"I don't know, and I don't intend to know," Madeline cried, with such
unusual viciousness that the two men stared. "Poor birds!" she said.
"I've nothing against them, but I'm in rebellion against the bird fad.
I'm so tired of meeting people and having them start in with a gushing,
'Oh, how-de-do! Only fancy, I have just seen a scarlet tanager!' and you
know they haven't, and they wouldn't care anyway, and their mother may
be dying."
Ellery laughed, and Dick said:
"Well, what are you going to do about it?"
"I'm going to invent a fad of my own."
"Let us in on the ground floor."
"If you like. I'm learning the notes of the wind in the tree-tops. It
has such variety! No two trees sound alike. Hear that sharp twitter of
the maples? The oak has a deep sonorous song, and the elm's is as
delicate as itself. I believe I could tell them all with my eyes shut."
"One breeze with infinite manifestations. I suppose our souls twist the
breath of the spirit to our own likenesses in the same way," Ellery
said.
Madeline looked at him and he smiled.
"You're getting poetical, old codger," said Dick. "You must be in love."
Ellery blushed, but Dick went on, oblivious of byplay. "I move that we
celebrate the occasion by a cold collation. Last week, your mother
kindly made inquiries about my tastes that led me to infer that
everything I most affect is stowed away in that comfortable-looking
basket."
So they had supper, and Norris fished a volume of Shelley from his
pocket and read _The Cloud_, which Dick followed by a really funny story
from a magazine. They fell to talking about their own affairs, which to
the young are the chief interests. It takes years "that bring the
philosophic mind" to make abstractions stimulating. Finally they wafted
homeward under a sky dark at the zenith and becoming paler and paler,
violet, rose, wan white, with a line of intense violet along the
horizon, and, as they sailed, Madeline sang softly as one does in the
immediate presence of nature.
This was one day. On another Dick was full of his adventures of the
week. He was learning to know his St. Etienne in all its phases. He told
them of the lumber mills down by the river, where brawny men, primitive
in aspect, fought with a never-ending stream of logs which came down
with the current and raised themselves like uncanny water-monsters, up a
long incline, finally to meet their death at the hands of machinery that
ripped and snarled and clutched. Who would dream, to look at the great
commonplace piles of boards that lined the riverbank for miles, that
their birth-pangs had been so picturesque?
Or again, Dick told them of those other mills, which were the chief
foundation of St. Etienne's wealth, piles of gray stone, for ever
dust-laden and dingy, into which poured a never-ending stream of grain,
and out of which poured an equally unceasing stream of bags and barrels
laden with flour. Around the wide interiors wandered a few men, gray
too, who peeped now and then into caverns where hidden machinery did all
the work. Outside, locomotives whistled and puffed and snorted, as they
switched the miles of cars to and from the mills. Great vans rolled up
with their burdens of fresh empty barrels to be filled and rolled away
again.
It was the commonplace of daily toil, but Dick made it vivid, because it
was in him to see all things as the work of men, and whenever you catch
them doing real work, men are interesting.
Sometimes Dick had other stories to tell. In his collegiate days, he had
grown familiar with the typical slum and its problems. The class in
sociology had visited such. So he went to the slums of St. Etienne, and
behold, they were not slums at all, for the slum can not be grown, like
a mushroom, in a night. It must have a thousand nauseous influences
stagnating for a long time undisturbed. But here were meager little
wooden huts, flanked by rusting piles of scrap-iron, or flats along the
river-bottom where the high waters of spring were sure to send the
dwellers in these shabby apologies for homes scrambling to the roofs,
or drive them to the shelter of the neighboring brewery. Here as the
waters swept under the stony arches of the bridges, old women tucked up
their petticoats and fished for the richness with which a city befouls
its river. Here they made themselves neat woodpiles of the drift of the
sawmills, and turned an honest penny by exhibiting on their roofs gaudy
advertisements of plug-tobacco, that those who passed on the bridge
above might look down and read and resolve to avoid the brand thus
obnoxiously glorified.
Sometimes Dick had to relate a picturesque interview with a policeman
who unfolded to him unknown phases of life, for though he believed in
himself, Percival also believed in the other man, and therefore made him
a friend. Every one likes a jolly friendly prince, and that was Dick's
type.
Or he would dip into a police court where all the stages of wretchedness
were pitchforked into one another's evil-smelling company, so that it
ranged from the highest circle of purgatory to the lowest depths of
hell.
"Why do you go to such places, Dick? It's nauseating," Madeline
exclaimed.
"Why?" he demanded. "I suppose that sometime, when I've made over my
information into the neat systematic package that you prefer, I shall
start a soul-uplifting row. I look forward to that as my career. You
ought to get a career, Madeline."
"A career? I know the verb, but not the noun," she retorted saucily.
"I'm afraid mine is nothing but the trivial task, flavored with all the
flavors I like best."
Sometimes, when they went home together at night, Percival had stories
to unfold to Norris alone--stories he could not tell Madeline, of things
found in the mire, upon which the healthy happy world turns its back
when every night it goes "up town" to pleasant hearthstones and to
normal life. These were tales of foul sounds and foul air, where men and
women gathered and drank and gambled and laughed with laughter that was
like the grinning of skulls, hollow and despairing. They were stories of
girls with sodden eyes and men with wooden faces--of innumerable schemes
to suck money by any means but those of honor. And these were the phases
of his study that Dick looked upon with a kind of anguished fascination,
as more and more he saw how the hands stretched out of that mire
smirched the city which he hoped to serve.
Sometimes, and this was when they were with Madeline again, Ellery would
have his experience to tell, redolent of printer's ink, and full of the
interest of that profession which is never two days the same--stories of
how business toils and spins and is not arrayed like Solomon. Norris,
too, was beginning to run up against human nature both in gross and in
detail, and to know the world, from the fight last night in Fish Alley
up to the doings of statesmen and kings. Madeline had little to tell,
for she was living quietly at home, taking the housekeeping off her
mother's hands and driving her father to the morning train. She had few
episodes more exciting than an afternoon call or a moonlight sail. But
the young men brought her their lives, and when she had made her gay
little bombardment of comment, they felt as though some new light had
fallen upon familiar facts. The very simplicity of her thought put
things in the right relation and gave the effect of a view from a higher
plane.
There were many times when they did not discuss, but gave themselves to
the joy of young things. They sailed, and Madeline held the tiller;
and, when evening came on, they curled down with cushions in the bottom
of the boat and sang and chattered the twilight out. They played golf
and tennis, and the blood leaped in their veins, for whatever they did,
they did it with heart and soul. As for their relations with one
another, these were taken for granted, and what they meant, not one of
the three stopped to question. It was enough that they were sweet and
satisfying in silence.
Late in the season there came a Sunday, memorable to Ellery, when Dick
had gone away for some purpose, and, after a little self-questioning,
Norris ventured alone for his afternoon with Madeline. She welcomed him
with such serene unconsciousness that he wondered why he had hesitated.
"I'm not so good a sailor as Dick, Miss Elton," he said. "Will you trust
yourself with me?"
"Being an independent young woman, I'm willing to depend on you."
"A truly feminine position."
"It means that I am quite capable of seizing the helm myself if you
should fail me," she laughed.
"And I am masculine enough to determine that you shall get it only by
favor, not by necessity," he retorted.
"That suits me quite well," Madeline answered gravely.
"And you are not apprehensive of storms in the vague far-away?"
"Don't. I'm so contented with things as they are that I do not want to
think of far-aways or of anything that means change."
"You are satisfied with to-day?" he persisted.
"Perfectly."
Ellery flushed with traitorous rejoicing that Dick was absent. It was a
day of sunshine--not the ardent blaze of summer, but the crisp glow of
October that seems all light with little heat. The lake was so pale as
to be hardly blue, and girdled with soft yellow, touched only here and
there with the intenser red of the rock maples. Back farther from shore
rose the tawny bronze of oaks. The light breeze flung the _Swallow_
along with those caressing wave-slaps that are the sleepiest of sounds.
To sail under that sky, with Madeline leaning on her elbow near at hand,
they two separated from the rest of the world by wide waters, was like a
brief experience of Paradise. Ellery watched the light tendril of hair
that touched her cheek, lifted itself and touched again, near that
lovely curve above her ear. The cheek was warm and creamy but untouched
by deeper color. He fell into that mood of blessed silence that, as a
rule, comes only when one is solitary.
As they rounded at the dock he came back to himself with a sudden wonder
if she had missed the titillation of Dick's chatter, for she had been as
silent as he.
"I'm afraid I have been very dull. I enjoyed myself so much that I
forgot to try to amuse you."
"It's been a heavenly sail, exactly to match the day," Madeline answered
with a deep contented sigh that filled him with delight. "I was this
moment thinking what a comfort it was to know you well enough so that I
didn't have to talk. It's a test of comradeship, isn't it?"
As they smiled at each other, his heart leaped with the consciousness of
a bond below the surface.
He treasured this crumb of her kindness, not because she was niggardly,
but because there was little that belonged to him and to him alone.
Sometimes, in the rush and roar of the office, came the memory of her
eyes and her voice of assurance.
"What will our comradeship be like, when--when she is Dick's wife?" he
questioned himself, and then fell to work with fury.
Thus the delightful summer died into the past; there came a winter only
less good, with its dinners and dances, with quiet fireside evenings,
and yet another summer of the same close friendship that began to take
on the semblance of a permanent thing in life, all the richer as
experience grew deeper and knowledge wider and the best things dearer.
Whether they read or sang or discussed, though the world saw little
done, these three young people had the inestimable happiness of knowing
one another.