THE STONE THREAT.
When Claire awoke she stared around her for a few minutes before the
events of their frantic struggle came back to her. Her eyes strayed to
the figure before the fireplace. Idly she noted the lustrous, wavy black
hair and deep brown eyes protected by unusually heavy lashes. It was
clearly the face of a thinker, a dreamer, yet there was something
sensual about the mouth, potentially voluptuous, abandoned, and
suggestive of tremendous passion that slumbered close beneath the brain
that was so actively awake. Claire ached, and her body tingled with the
unaccustomed warmth. She lay quiet, looking at the fire, her mind still
uncertain in its action, weaving sharp, dynamic images about this new
personality. While his appearance gripped and awed her strangely, at the
same time she felt drawn to him. She turned and threw out her hand. Her
host closed his book and looked up, smiling.
"Ah, _la señora se siente mejor_?" His deep, rich voice, although
lighter than Lawrence's, was full of music, but she did not understand
his words. Her blank expression told him, and he smiled again.
"I remember, you spoke English," he said with only the slightest accent.
"Are you better, _madame_?"
She answered his warm smile and said weakly: "Much better, thank you!"
"And your husband?" Claire saw that he was looking beyond her, and she
turned to find Lawrence at her side. Instinctively she resented his
being there. The warm blood rushed to her face.
"He--oh--he will be all right, I trust!" she stammered falteringly, and
her host looked puzzled. Her impulse was to tell him that Lawrence was
not her husband, but she thought better of it and said nothing about the
relationship.
"He had a long, desperate struggle to bring me here," she said instead.
"You see, I broke my ankle and he had to carry me."
"Oh!" The man rose, his face filled with respect as he looked at
Lawrence asleep beside her.
"From where did he carry you?" he asked.
"From the coast," she shuddered. "It has been terrible!"
His face expressed utter amazement as he repeated: "From the coast? It
is a miracle!"
She made no reply, for Lawrence stirred and tried to sit up.
"You'd better lie still," the stranger said kindly. "You deserve rest,
my friend." Then, as to himself, he added: "It is the first miracle in
which I can believe."
Claire stared at him, and he laughed softly. "Pardon, _madame_! I am an
unhappy seeker after truth," he apologized, throwing a log on the fire.
For Lawrence and Claire the days that followed were uneventful days of
recovery from their hardship. Slowly both of them grew stronger and
resumed their normal habits of thought and speech. Their host was a
gentle nurse, kindly and considerate. Claire assumed her wonted attitude
of the cultured woman, a guest in the house of a friend, and the
Spaniard met her with the polished courtesy of a cosmopolitan. Lawrence,
too, became the usual man that he was, careless of little niceties,
indifferent to form, but a charming companion and a delightful guest.
From the first he and Philip became intensely interested in each other.
They discovered early that each was a thinker and a searcher in his own
way for the one great solution of life.
During the first half-hour Claire had demanded of their rescuer where
they were and how soon they could get back to civilization. Philip had
laughed gently.
"You are on the borders of Bolivia," he told her, "and the nearest
railroad is two hundred miles away. It is impossible to get out until
spring. Long ere this snow will have barred the way through the one pass
that leads out and we are prisoners--the three of us. You will have to
accept the hospitality of Philip Ortez until the spring."
Lawrence had accepted the verdict with calm indifference.
"Oh, well," he said, "it's hard on you, but as far as I'm concerned, one
place is as good as another."
"I shall enjoy your company," their host laughed.
After voicing polite thanks, Claire, in her own thought, had rebelled
against the situation vehemently. She wanted to get home, she wanted to
get away from everything that suggested her last weeks of suffering, she
wanted to get away from these men. Her heart leaped to the
ever-recurring dream of the husband, whose arms should take her up and
hold her warmly against the memory of their separation.
"Then there is no way out?" she asked again.
"None, _madame_," and Philip Ortez bowed. "You will have to be the guest
of a humble mountaineer."
"I shall enjoy it, I am sure," she answered. "It is simply a woman's
natural desire for home which leads me to ask again."
His eyes clouded. Claire somehow found herself fancying a tragic mystery
in the life of this man, and then rebuked herself for romancing.
Certainly, such fancies were not her habit, and she wondered why they
were occurring to her.
The cabin stood on the very edge of the forest through which Lawrence
had carried Claire the last morning of their long march. Protected by
its pines, the little house fronted on a small lake, a place where the
river which they had followed widened to a half-mile, and stayed thus
with scarcely any current save directly through the center. All around
the lake the forest stretched its massed green, and here Philip trapped.
The lake, in its turn, provided him with fish.
The week after their arrival snow had heaped itself into the ravine and
piled up high around the cabin. Ice was beginning to form on the edge of
the lake, and their host was preparing for his winter's work. They were
too weak to go with him, and he left them in possession of the cabin.
At first there had been an unaccountable awkwardness between Lawrence
and Claire, and it had left a reserve which was difficult to overcome.
Lawrence had explained their situation to Philip; the Spaniard had been
apologetically gracious, but there was something in Claire's nature that
made her wish that Lawrence had never been thought of as her husband.
Dressed in Philip's clothes, and in the presence of a roof and fire, she
felt a desire to be free from the memory of the days when she had clung
about Lawrence's neck, and, above all, she felt that she was not able to
meet him with understanding. His blindness in these surroundings seemed
to set a sudden and impassable barrier between them, and made her ill at
ease when she was alone with him.
Lawrence was irritated that she should so immediately react into what he
called the old conventional habit toward blind people, and keep it
standing like a stupid but solid wall between all their talk. Now that
she was no longer dependent on him, she appeared to him more attractive.
He thought of her husband, and wondered if Claire's attitude toward
himself was tempered with the thought of the man at home. "Surely," he
told himself, "she can't be allowing that to come between us, for it is
so obviously quite unnecessary." Then he began to wonder how much of her
life was centered about her husband. What sort of man was he, and did
she love him devotedly? As he thought, there crept into his feeling a
sense of irritation against the unknown man who was obstructing his
friendship with the woman he had carried half through the Andes
Mountains.
Then the longing for his work came over him, and there were times when
he felt he must do something. He spoke needlessly sharp words to
Claire. Though she concealed her anger, there grew between them a
continuous straining born out of mutual misunderstanding and a great
submerged tangle of emotions.
One morning when Ortez in snow-shoes and fur had gone for the day to
look after his traps, Claire washed up the tin dishes they used, and sat
down before the fire opposite Lawrence. His head was in his hands and
his face was somber.
"You look sad this morning," she said casually.
"Do I?" he answered. "I'm not--especially. I was just planning a piece
of work, dreaming it out in outline."
She looked at him thoughtfully. His forehead was high and broad, she
thought, and his hands-- Their days in the wilderness rushed back over
her. She was angry at the memories they brought her, and doubly angry at
Lawrence, as if he only were responsible.
"It's inconceivable," she said calmly, "that you, without seeing, can
really carve anything true to form and line." In her voice was
incredulity and unbelief.
He rose suddenly, his face white, and said, with an intensity that
startled her: "That sentiment is as familiar to me as my name. I have
heard it from sight-bigoted people from the days when I made my first
attempt to go back to my school work. I am rather weary of it."
She sat staring at him for a moment, then she laughed. She could not
have told why she did it, and she was instantly sorry. The blood rushed
to his face.
"I shall create that which will forever assure you that I can carve true
to the most familiar form and line you know," he said fiercely.
Her face was as crimson as his now, though she felt ice cold.
"What do you mean?" she demanded, her voice unsteady.
He laughed bitterly. In his own heart a fierce volcanic surge was raging
which he did not attempt to control.
"Do you think that I, trained as I am to gather fact from touch, could
carry you through weeks of hell in my arms, against my breast, and not
know you, you as you are, Claire Barkley? I shall carve you, you with
your cold reserve suppressing the emotional chaos within you, and you
will not fail to recognize yourself."
Claire gripped the chair arms. Anger, fear, doubt, then the knowledge
that he could do as he said, swept over her in rapidly succeeding waves,
and gathered at last into a steel hate that she felt must last through
eternity.
"You, you would do that, after I guided you here! You would take
advantage of what I could not help, and--and--" she choked, and then
said swiftly--"so, under your indifferent exterior you used your touch
that way these days! Oh, you--you beast!"
Lawrence laughed coolly. "I could no more help it than I can avoid being
here."
"Lies!" she exclaimed. "A gentleman could help it!"
"Perhaps, but not an artist."
"And what of beauty, of your boasted purity of art, is there in that?"
"All," he said calmly. "If you knew, oh, if I could make you see what
every artist knows"--he was talking passionately now, his face illumined
in spite of his blind eyes--"you would realize, that I could not help
it, that I glory in it, and that it was and is the way of art."
He rose and walked the floor, pouring out his creed in a stream of
burning words. "I am a machine, a sensitive thing that registers what it
feels and knows, that is all. You touch me, my brain registers that
touch, and something in me, the will to live, the desire to create, the
insistent shout for expression says, 'Take that and carve it in stone.'
If I could see, if I were not blind, I would have been a painter. I
would have painted you, almost naked as you were, your eyes filled with
the hunger for life, your face tense with racing thoughts, I would have
painted you fully, all of you, as you were in night-gown and skirt there
in that forest, and you would have shouted to all the world from my
canvas, 'Look at me, I am the primitive, the wild, the passionate, the
tender, the selfish and unselfish living woman. See me as I am,
cultured, refined, educated, elemental withal, and the emblem of
humanity as it is, still stained with the traditional mud of
superstition and blood that marks its origin. Oh, I would have painted
you so, and now I shall carve you so!"
He stopped, and Claire looked at him wildly, her eyes aflame with hate
and admiration.
"You would use another human being that way?" she gasped.
"I would use any one, I would, I will, at any cost to them, to me, if
the outcome be a piece of art, a work that in its truth, its immortal
beauty, shall stand a lasting testimony that I, Lawrence Gordon, have
mastered blindness and registered life correctly."
A great light swept over her mind; that was the key to him. He would
sacrifice himself to conquer blindness--but would he, she wondered, and
instantly her thought found expression.
"Would you crush yourself to create that mastery of blindness?"
He laughed. "I have, I am doing it," he said. "I would go through all
the torment of the world if I might create something lasting, true, and
beautiful."
Claire leaned forward, her lips apart, her eyes bright. That she hated
this man she was sure, yet all her woman's soul was awed by what she now
saw behind his mask of blindness. Then a new thought came to her.
"Might it not be," she asked subtly, "if you hold suffering to be the
key to beauty that you would profit more at last by denying the impulse
to create the thing you are planning?"
He laughed again. "I hold that pain is only the spur to progress. I care
nothing for the sentimentalism you are talking now. I carried you
through the wilderness, I suffered and bore it, I staggered through
nights and days with your warm body against mine that I might live, and
now--now I know the value of life, I understand as never before the pain
our fathers paid. I know the bitter animal war against environment,
evolution whipped into action by pain, hunger, fear of death, and I
shall carve that, all that, into the statue of one woman."
"And what of me, me and you as such, Claire and Lawrence, who were there
through that struggle in the wilderness?" The speech leaped from
somewhere in her being before she knew it, and with it came knowledge
that stung her into tearful self-hate.
"We shall go back to our old lives, I suppose, and live them out."
It was what she had expected him to say, yet the calm matter-of-fact
statement hurt her as nothing he had ever said before.
Lawrence dropped into the arm-chair again, and rested his head on his
hand. He was calmer now, and, reviewing in his mind what he had said, he
was beginning to ask himself why had he given way to this sudden
resentment against Claire. If she doubted him because he was blind, was
that any more than others had done? He had never burst out against them.
What was the matter with him? He surveyed the whole trend of his life up
to this minute: how he had broken at late adolescence from a glowing
idealist to a wanderer through varying paths of thought; always stirred,
stimulated, and swept on by contact with other people, books he had
read, women for whom he had occasional fancies of love, until gradually
he settled into his assured manner. It was exercise he needed, that and
work.
He asked himself if he seriously loved Claire, and answered
unequivocally that he did not. He wanted her friendship very much,
indeed, but love, not at all. If she had been single, perhaps--but no,
he did not care about her that way, that was all. He had been too long
shut up here in the cabin with her and without work. He must get some
wood and amuse himself carving things with Ortez's knife; it would be
good practise, and, at the same time, relieve his nerves. He was sorry
he had let himself go; Claire must not be hurt.
"Claire," he said quietly, "if I wounded you, if I said things I ought
not, pardon me! I am getting nervous doing nothing, and I am not myself
these days."
She laughed calmly. "Oh, very well!" she said. "I wonder that we don't
come to blows, cooped up here as we are. I think next time Philip makes
his rounds I'll go with him."
"It would be a good thing," answered Lawrence. "I'd like it myself."
Claire did not keep up the talk. She, too, was thinking fast, and facing
new problems that demanded her attention. She was surprised to find that
her resentment toward Lawrence was completely gone. What would her
husband think of him? What would he do when she returned, when she told
him of her journey with this blind man through weeks and weeks of
wilderness when they were almost naked. She stopped, that was what
Lawrence had said, 'almost naked.' Her flesh tingled as she saw the
picture which he said he would like to paint of her.
What would she, Claire Barkley, do if such a picture were painted? She
buried her face deep in her hands, but in her heart she knew that she
would respect the man who painted it. And if Lawrence carved her so in
stone, and did it as he thought he could--she pondered over that for
some time.
"I think," she said aloud, and Lawrence raised his head, "that if I were
to stay shut up here alone as Philip does, I should go crazy before
spring."
"It all depends on how your mind is occupied," he laughed.
She blushed guiltily, and was glad he could not see her face.
TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK. Don't forget this magazine
is issued weekly, and that you will get the
continuation of this story without waiting a month.
WHAT LIBERTY BONDS MEAN
PATRIOTISM, VICTORY, THE SOUNDEST INVESTMENT IN THE
WORLD, A PERFECT MEANS OF SAVING
BUY ALL YOU CAN
Claire
by Leslie Burton Blades
THE BLIND LOVE OF A BLIND HERO
_BY A BLIND AUTHOR_
This story began in the All-Story Weekly for October 5.