HOW A TRUCE WAS TROUBLESOME
In the days and nights that followed this interview I associated rather
more than usual with Jim. It seemed well to do so. I needed to learn
once more some of the magnificent belief that I had taught him in days
when my own was stronger. Close companionship with a dog of the truly
Greek spirit, under circumstances in which I now found myself, was bound
to be of a tonic value. I had seen, almost at the moment of Miss Kate's
disclosure, that a change was to come in our relations. Perhaps I was
wild enough at the moment to hope that it might be a change for the
better; but this was only in the first flush of it--of a moment ill
adapted for close reasoning. It took no great while to convince me that
the discovery in which we had cooperated was of a character necessarily
to put me from her even farther than she had at first chosen to put
me--and that was far enough, Heaven knows.
In effect I had given back her love to her, a love she had for ten years
unjustly doubted. That was the cold truth of it for one who knew women.
One who could doubt the tenth year as poignantly as she had doubted in
the first--would she not in bitterness regret her doubt ten other years,
and sweetly mourn her lost love still another ten? She who had let me be
little enough to her while she felt her wound--how much less could I be
when the hurt was healed? Before she might have been in want. At least
that was conceivable. Now her want was met. Not only was there this to
fill her heart, but remorse, the tenderest a woman may know, it seems to
me--remorse for undeserved suspicion.
In a setting less prosaic than Little Arcady, where events might be of a
story-fitness, that lover would have been alive by a happy chance,
estranged by the misunderstanding but splendidly faithful, and I should
have been helper and interested witness to an ideal reconciliation;
thereafter to play out my game with a full heart, though with an
exterior placidly unconcerned. But with us events halt always a little
short of true romance. They are unexcitingly usual.
I would have to play out my game full heartedly, nursing my powers of
belief back to their one-time vigor; nothing would occur to ease my
lot--not even an occasion to pretend that I gave my blessing to a
reunited and happy pair. Miss Kate could go on believing. Unwittingly I
had given her the stuff for belief. I, too, must go on believing, and
providing my own material, as had ever been my lot; all of which was why
my dog seemed my most profitable companion at this time. His every bark
at a threatening baby-carriage a block away, each fresh time he believed
sincerely that a rubber shoe was engaging in deadly struggle with him,
taxing all his forces to subdue it, each time he testified with
sensitive, twitching nostrils that the earth is good with innumerable
scents, each streaking of his glad-tongued white length over yellowing
fields designed solely for his recreation held for me a certain soothing
value. And when in quiet moments he assured me with melting gaze that I
was a being to challenge the very heart of love--in some measure, at
least, did my soul gain strength from his own.
To know as much as I have indicated had been unavoidable for one of any
intuitive powers. The change at once to be detected in Miss Kate's
manner toward me confirmed my divinations without enlarging them. Miss
Katharine Lansdale was gone forever; in her place was a Miss Kate,--even
a Little Miss to the eye,--who regarded me at first with an undisguised
alarm, then with a curious interfusion of alarm and shyness, a little
disguised with not a little effort. This was plain reading. She would at
first have distrusted me, apprehending I know not what rashness of
ill-timed and forever impossible declarations. As she perceived this
alarm to be baseless, for I not only refrained from intruding but I
ostentatiously let Miss Kate alone, shyness would creep into her
apprehension to make amends for its first crude manifestations.
As the days went by and I displayed still the fine sense to keep myself
aloof, to seek Miss Kate only in those ways that I sought her refreshing
mother, she let me discern more clearly her faith in my firmness and
good sense. To be plain, in reward for letting her alone, she did not
let me alone. And this reward I accepted becomingly, with a resolve--the
metal of which I hoped she would divine--never to show myself
undeserving of its benisons.
When I say that the young woman did not let me alone, I mean that she
seemed almost to put herself in my way; not obviously, true enough, but
in a degree palpable enough to one who had observed her first almost
shrinking alarm. And this behavior of hers went forward, at last,
without the slightest leaven of apprehension on her part, but her
shyness remained. It was so marked and so novel in her--with reference
to myself--that I could not fail to be sensible to it. It was as if she
divined that mad notions might still lurk within my untaught mind to be
reasons why she should fear me; but that her confidence in my
self-mastery could not, at the same time, be too openly shown.
Tacitly, it was as if we had treated together; a treaty that bound me to
observe a perpetual truce. My arms were forever laid down, and she, who
had once so feared me, was now free to wander when she would within the
lines of an honorable enemy. That she should walk there with increasing
frequency as the days passed was a tribute to my powers of restraint
which I was too wise to undervalue. I ignored the shyness of which she
seemed unable to divest herself in my presence. It would have been easy
not to ignore it, for there were times when, so little careful was she
to guard herself, that this shyness suggested, invited, appealed,
signalled; times when, without my deeper knowledge of her sex, I could
have sworn that the true woman-call rang in my ears. But a treaty is a
treaty, on paper or on honor, and ours would never be broken by black
treachery of mine, let her eyes fall under my own with never so
fluttering an allurement.
They were not bad days, as days go in this earth-life of too much exact
knowledge. Miss Kate rowed me over still waters and walked beside me in
green pastures. At times like these she might even seem to forget. She
would even become, I must affirm, more nearly Peavey than was strictly
her right; for it was plain that our treaty, must involve certain
stipulations of restraint on her part as well as on my own. The burden
was not all to be mine. But these moments I learned to withstand,
remembering that she was a woman. That was a circumstance not hard to
remember when she was by. It is probable that my heart could not have
forgotten it, even had my trained head learned blandly to ignore it.
Further to enliven those days, I permitted Jim to give her lessons in
believing everything. When I told her of this, she said, "I need them,
I'm so out of practice." That was the nearest we had come to touching
upon the interview of a certain afternoon. I should not have considered
this a forbidden topic, but her shyness became pitiful at any seeming
approach to it. "Jim will put you right again," I assured her. And I
believe he did, though it was not easy to persuade him that she could be
morally recognized when I was by. The occasion on which he first
remained crouching at her feet while I walked away was regarded by Miss
Kate as a personal triumph. She was so childishly open of her pleasure
at this that I did not tell her it was a mere trick of mine; that I had
told him to charge when he sprang up. She knew his eyes so little as to
think he displayed regard for rather than respect for my command. She
could not see that he begged me piteously to know _why_ he must crouch
there at a couple of strange inconsequential feet and see the good world
go suddenly wrong.
Still further, to make those days not bad days, Miss Kate would cross
our little common ground of an early evening to where I played the game
on my porch. Often I did this until dusk obscured the faces of the
cards. I faintly suspected in the course of these bird-like visits a
caprice in Miss Kate to know what it might be that I preferred to the
society of her mother on her own porch. She appeared to be more curious
than interested. She promptly made those observations which the
unillumined have ever considered it witty to make concerning those who
play at solitaire. But, finding that I had long ceased to be moved by
these, she was friendly enough to judge the game upon its merits. That
she judged it to be stupid was neither strange nor any reflection upon
the fairness of her mind. The game--in those profounder, rarer aspects
which alone dignify it--is not for women. I believe that the game of
cards to teach them philosophy under defeat, respect for the inevitable
and a cheerful manipulation of such trifling good fortune as may
befall--instead of that wild, womanish demand for all or nothing--has
yet to be invented. I predict of this game, moreover, if ever it be
found, that it will be a game at which two, at least, must play. Rarely
have I known a woman, however rigid her integrity otherwise, who would
not brazenly amend or even repeal utterly those decrees of Fate which
are symbolized by the game. She desires intensely to win, and she will
not be above shifting a card or two in contravention of the known rules.
Far am I from intimating that this puts upon her the stigma of moral
delinquency. It is mere testimony, rather, to her astounding capacity
for self-deception. And this I cannot believe to be other than gracious
of influence upon the intricate muddle of human association.
Miss Kate was finely the woman at those times when she deigned for a ten
minutes to overlook my playing of the game. Before I had half finished,
on the first occasion, she had mastered its simple mechanism; and before
I had quite finished she sought to practise upon it those methods of the
world woman in games of solitaire. She would calmly have placed a black
nine on a black ten.
"But the colors must alternate," I protested, thinking she had forgotten
this important rule.
"Of course--I know that perfectly well--but look what a fine lot of
cards that would give you. There's a deuce of hearts you could play up
and a three of spades, and then you could go back to crossing the colors
again, right away, you know, and you'd have that whole line running up
to the king ready to put into that space."
I looked at her, as she would have glided brazenly over that false play
to rejoice in the true plays it permitted. But I did not speak. There
are times, indeed, when we most honor the tongue of Shakspere by
silence; emergencies to which words are so inadequate that to attempt to
use them were to degrade the whole language.
At the last I was brought face to face with a most intricately planned
defeat; a defeat insured by one spot on a card. Had the obstructive card
been a six-spot of clubs instead of a seven-spot, victory was mine. I
pointed this out to Miss Kate, who had declined a chair at the table and
had chosen to stand beside my own. I showed her the series of plays
which, but for that seven-spot, would put the kings in their places at
the top and let me win. And I was beaten for lack of a six.
That she had grasped my explanation was quickly made plain. Actually
with some enthusiasm she showed me that the much-desired six of clubs
lay directly under the fatal seven.
"Just lay the seven over here," she began eagerly, "and there's your
black six ready for that horrid red five that's in the way--"
"But there isn't any 'over here,'" I exclaimed in some irritation.
"There can only be eight cards in a row--that would make nine."
"Yes, but then you could play up all the others so beautifully--just
see!"
"Is this a game," I asked, "or a child's crazy play?"
"Then it's an exceedingly stupid game if you can't do a little thing
like that when it's absolutely necessary. What is the _sense_ of it?"
Her eyes actually flashed into mine as she leaned at my side pointing
out this simple way to victory.
"What's the sense of any rules to any game on earth?" I retorted. "If I
hadn't learned to respect rules--if I hadn't learned to be thankful for
what the game allows me, however little it may be--" I paused, for the
water was deeper than I had thought.
"Well?"
"Well--well _then_--I shouldn't be as thankful as I am this instant
for--for many things that I can't have more of."
She straightened herself and favored me with a curious look that melted
at last into a puzzling smile.
"I don't understand you," she said. With a shade more of encouragement
in her voice I had been near to forgetting my honor as a truce-observing
enemy. I was grateful, indeed, afterwards, that her wish to understand
me was not sufficiently implied to bring me thus low.
"Neither do I understand the morbid psychology that finds satisfaction
in cheating at solitaire," I succeeded in saying. "I never can see how
they fix it up with themselves."
"I believe you think and talk a great deal of foolishness," said Miss
Kate, in tones of reproof; and with this she was off the porch before I
could rise.
She wore pink, with bits of blue spotting it in no systematic order that
I could discern, and a pink rose lay abashed in her hair.