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THE BRIMMING CUP
_Dorothy Canfield_
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY NEW YORK
1919
_By the same author_
THE SQUIRREL-CAGE
A MONTESSORI MOTHER
MOTHERS AND CHILDREN
HILLSBORO PEOPLE
THE BENT TWIG
THE REAL MOTIVE
FELLOW CAPTAINS
(_With Sarah N. Cleghorn_)
UNDERSTOOD BETSY
HOME FIRES IN FRANCE
THE DAY OF GLORY
THE BRIMMING CUP
ROUGH-HEWN
RAW MATERIAL
THE HOME-MAKER
MADE-TO-ORDER STORIES
HER SON'S WIFE
WHY STOP LEARNING?
THE DEEPENING STREAM
BASQUE PEOPLE
FABLES FOR PARENTS
SEASONED TIMBER
CONTENTS
CHAPTER Page
I. PRELUDE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
II. INTERLUDE . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
_PART ONE_
III. OLD MR. WELLES AND YOUNG MR. MARSH. 29
IV. TABLE TALK. . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
V. A LITTLE GIRL AND HER MOTHER. . . . 64
VI. THINGS TAKE THEIR COURSE. . . . . . 80
VII. THE NIGHT-BLOOMING CEREUS . . . . . 91
VIII. WHAT GOES ON INSIDE . . . . . . . . 115
IX. THE GENT AROUND THE LADY. . . . . . 130
X. AT THE MILL . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
_PART TWO_
XI. IN AUNT HETTY'S GARDEN. . . . . . . 179
XII. HEARD FROM THE STUDY. . . . . . . . 199
XIII. ALONG THE EAGLE ROCK BROOK. . . . . 215
XIV. BESIDE THE ONION-BED. . . . . . . . 224
XV. HOME-LIFE . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
XVI. MASSAGE-CREAM; THEME AND VARIATIONS 256
XVII. THE SOUL OF NELLY POWERS. . . . . . 266
_PART THREE_
XVIII. BEFORE THE DAWN . . . . . . . . . . 279
XIX. MR. WELLES LIGHTS THE FUSE. . . . . 285
XX. A PRIMAEVAL HERITAGE. . . . . . . . 294
XXI. THE COUNSEL OF THE STARS. . . . . . 302
XXII. EUGENIA DOES WHAT SHE CAN . . . . . 309
XXIII. MARISE LOOKS DOWN ON THE STARS. . . 323
_PART FOUR_
XXIV. NEALE'S RETURN. . . . . . . . . . . 331
XXV. MARISE'S COMING-OF-AGE. . . . . . . 338
XXVI. MARISE LOOKS AND SEES WHAT IS THERE 360
XXVII. THE FALL OF THE BIG PINE. . . . . . 367
XXVIII. TWO GOOD-BYES . . . . . . . . . . . 380
XXIX. VIGNETTES FROM HOME-LIFE. . . . . . 390
THE BRIMMING CUP
CHAPTER I
_PRELUDE_
SUNSET ON ROCCA DI PAPA
_An Hour in the Life of Two Modern Young People_
April, 1909.
Lounging idly in the deserted little waiting-room was the usual shabby,
bored, lonely ticket-seller, prodigiously indifferent to the grave
beauty of the scene before him and to the throng of ancient memories
jostling him where he stood. Without troubling to look at his watch, he
informed the two young foreigners that they had a long hour to wait
before the cable-railway would send a car down to the Campagna. His lazy
nonchalance was faintly colored with the satisfaction, common to his
profession, in the discomfiture of travelers.
Their look upon him was of amazed gratitude. Evidently they did not
understand Italian, he thought, and repeated his information more
slowly, with an unrecognizable word or two of badly pronounced English
thrown in. He felt slightly vexed that he could not make them feel the
proper annoyance, and added, "It may even be so late that the signori
would miss the connection for the last tramway car back to Rome. It is a
long walk back to the city across the Campagna."
They continued to gaze at him with delight. "I've got to tip him for
that!" said the young man, reaching vigorously into a pocket.
The girl's answering laugh, like the inward look of her eyes, showed
only a preoccupied attention. She had the concentrated absent aspect of
a person who has just heard vital tidings and can attend to nothing
else. She said, "Oh, Neale, how ridiculous of you. He couldn't possibly
have the least idea what he's done to deserve getting paid for."
At the sound of her voice, the tone in which these words were
pronounced, the ticket-seller looked at her hard, with a bold,
intrusive, diagnosing stare: "Lovers!" he told himself conclusively. He
accepted with a vast incuriosity as to reason the coin which the young
foreigner put into his hand, and, ringing it suspiciously on his table,
divided his appraising attention between its clear answer to his
challenge, and the sound of the young man's voice as he answered his
sweetheart, "Of course he hasn't any idea what he's done to deserve it.
Who ever has? You don't suppose for a moment I've any idea what I've
done to deserve mine?"
The ticket-seller smiled secretly into his dark mustache. "I wonder if
_my_ voice quivered and deepened like that, when I was courting
Annunziata?" he asked himself. He glanced up from pocketing the coin,
and caught the look which passed between the two. He felt as though
someone had laid hands on him and shaken him. "_Dio mio_" he thought.
"They are in the hottest of it."
The young foreigners went across the tracks and established themselves
on the rocks, partly out of sight, just at the brink of the great drop
to the Campagna. The setting sun was full in their faces. But they did
not see it, seeing only each other.
Below them spread the divinely colored plain, crossed by the ancient
yellow river, rolling its age-old memories out to the sea, a blue
reminder of the restfulness of eternity, at the rim of the weary old
land. Like a little cluster of tiny, tarnished pearls, Rome gleamed
palely, remote and legendary.
* * * * *
The two young people looked at each other earnestly, with a passionate,
single-hearted attention to their own meaning, thrusting away
impatiently the clinging brambles of speech which laid hold on their
every effort to move closer to each other. They did not look down, or
away from each other's eyes as they strove to free themselves, to step
forward, to clasp the other's outstretched hands. They reached down
blindly, tearing at those thorny, clutching entanglements, pulling and
tugging at those tenuous, tough words which would not let them say what
they meant: sure, hopefully sure that in a moment . . . now . . . with the
next breath, they would break free as no others had ever done before
them, and crying out the truth and glory that was in them, fall into
each other's arms.
The girl was physically breathless with this effort, her lips parted,
her eyebrows drawn together. "Neale, Neale dear, if I could only tell
you how I want it to be, how utterly utterly _true_ I want us to be.
Nothing's of any account except that."
She moved with a shrugging, despairing gesture. "No, no, not the way
that sounds. I don't mean, you know I don't mean any old-fashioned
impossible vows never to change, or be any different! I know too much
for that. I've seen too awfully much unhappiness, with people trying to
do that. You know what I told you about my father and mother. Oh, Neale,
it's horribly dangerous, loving anybody. I never wanted to. I never
thought I should. But now I'm in it, I see that it's not at all
unhappiness I'm afraid of, your getting tired of me or I of you . . .
everybody's so weak and horrid in this world, who knows what may be
before us? That's not what would be unendurable, sickening. That would
make us unhappy. But what would poison us to death . . . what I'm afraid
of, between two people who try to be what we want to be to each
other . . . how can I say it?" She looked at him in an anguish of endeavor,
". . . not to be true to what is deepest and most living in us . . . that
would be the betrayal I'm afraid of. That's what I mean. No matter what it
costs us personally, or what it brings, we must be true to that. We
_must!_"
He took her hand in his silently, and held it close. She drew a long
troubled breath and said, "You _do_ think we can always have between us
that loyalty to what is deep and living? It does not seem too much to
ask, when we are willing to give up everything else for it, even
happiness?"
He gave her a long, profound look. "I'm trying to give that loyalty to
you this minute, Marise darling," he said slowly, "when I tell you now
that I think it a very great deal to ask of life, a very great deal for
any human beings to try for. I should say it was much harder to get than
happiness."
She was in despair. "Do you think that?" She searched his face anxiously
as though she found there more than in his speech. "Yes, yes, I see what
you mean." She drew a long breath. "I can even see how fine it is of you
to say that to me now. It's like a promise of how you will try. But oh,
Neale, I won't _want_ life on any other terms!"
She stopped, looking down at her hand in his. He tightened his clasp.
His gaze on her darkened and deepened. "It's like sending me to get the
apples of Hesperides," he said, looking older than she, curiously and
suddenly older. "I want to say yes! It would be easy to say yes.
Darling, darling Marise, you can't want it more than I! But the very
intelligence that makes you want it, that makes me want it, shows me how
mortally hard it would be! Think! To be loyal to what is deepest and
most living in yourself . . . that's an undertaking for a life-time's
effort, with all the ups and downs and growths of life. And then to try
to know what is deepest and most living in another . . . and to try . . .
Marise! I will try. I will try with all my might. Can anybody do more
than try with all his might?"
Their gaze into each other's eyes went far beyond the faltering words
they spoke. She asked him in a low voice, "Couldn't you do more for me
than for yourself? One never knows, but . . . what else is love for, but
to give greater strength than we have?"
There was a moment's silence, in which their very spirits met flame-like
in the void, challenging, hoping, fearing. The man's face set. His
burning look of power enveloped her like the reflection of the sun. "I
swear you shall have it!" he said desperately, his voice shaking.
She looked up at him with a passionate gratitude. "I'll never forget
that as long as I live!" she cried out to him.
The tears stood in his eyes as in hers.
For the fraction of an instant, they had felt each other there, as never
before they had felt any other human being: they had both at once caught
a moment of flood-tide, and both together had been carried up side by
side; the long, inevitable isolation of human lives from birth onward
had been broken by the first real contact with another human soul. They
felt the awed impulse to cover their eyes as before too great a glory.
The tide ebbed back, and untroubled they made no effort to stop its
ebbing. They had touched their goal, it was really there. Now they knew
it within their reach. Appeased, assuaged, fatigued, they felt the need
for quiet, they knew the sweetness of sobriety. They even looked away
from each other, aware of their own bodies which for that instant had
been left behind. They entered again into the flesh that clad their
spirits, taking possession of their hands and feet and members, and
taken possession of by them again. The fullness of their momentary
satisfaction had been so complete that they felt no regret, only a
simple, tender pleasure as of being again at home. They smiled happily
at each other and sat silent, hand in hand.
* * * * *
Now they saw the beauty before them, the vast plain, the mountains, the
sea: harmonious, serene, ripe with maturity, evocative of all the
centuries of conscious life which had unrolled themselves there.
"It's too beautiful to be real, isn't it?" murmured the girl, "and now,
the peaceful way I feel this minute, I don't mind it's being so old that
it makes you feel a midge in the sunshine with only an hour or two of
life before you. What if you are, when it's life as we feel it now, such
a flood of it, every instant brimming with it? Neale," she turned to him
with a sudden idea, "do you remember how Victor Hugo's 'Waterloo'
begins?"
"I should say not!" he returned promptly. "You forget I got all the
French I know in an American university."
"Well, I went to college in America, myself!"
"I bet it wasn't there you learned anything about Victor Hugo's poetry,"
he surmised skeptically. "Well, how does it begin, anyhow, and what's it
got to do with us?"
The girl was as unamused as he at his certainty that it had something to
do with them, or she would not have mentioned it. She explained, "It's
not a famous line at all, nothing I ever heard anybody else admire. We
had to learn the poem by heart, when I was a little girl and went to
school in Bayonne. It starts out,
'Waterloo, Waterloo, morne plaine
Comme une onde qui bout dans une urne trop pleine,'
And that second line always stuck in my head for the picture it made. I
could see it, so vividly, an urn boiling over with the great gush of
water springing up in it. It gave me a feeling, inside, a real physical
feeling, I mean. I wanted, oh so awfully, sometime to be so filled with
some emotion, something great and fine, that I would be an urn too full,
gushing up in a great flooding rush. I could see the smooth, thick curl
of the water surging up and out!"
She stopped to look at him and exclaim, "Why, you're listening! You're
interested. Neale, I believe you are the only person in the world who
can really pay attention to what somebody else says. Everybody else just
goes on thinking his own thoughts."
He smiled at this fancy, and said, "Go on."
"Well, I don't know whether that feeling was already in me, waiting for
something to express it, or whether that phrase in the poem started it.
But it was, for ever so long, the most important thing in the world to
me. I was about fourteen years old then, and of course, being a good
deal with Catholics, I thought probably it was religious ecstasy that
was going to be the great flood that would brim my cup full. I used to
go up the hill in Bayonne to the Cathedral every day and stay there for
hours, trying to work up an ecstasy. I managed nearly to faint away once
or twice, which was _some_thing of course. But I couldn't feel that
great tide I'd dreamed of. And then, little by little . . . oh, lots of
things came between the idea and my thinking about it. Mother was . . .
I've told you how Mother was at that time. And what an unhappy time it
was at home. I was pretty busy at the house because she was away so
much. And Father and I hung together because there wasn't anybody else
to hang to: and all sorts of ugly things happened, and I didn't have the
time or the heart to think about being 'an urn too full.'"
She stopped, smiling happily, as though those had not been tragic words
which he had just spoken, thinking not of them but of something else,
which now came out, "And then, oh Neale, that day, on the piazza in
front of St. Peter's, when we stood together, and felt the spray of the
fountains blown on us, and you looked at me and spoke out. . . . Oh, Neale,
_Neale_, what a moment to have lived through! Well, when we went on into
the church, and I knelt there for a while, so struck down with joy that
I couldn't stand on my feet, all those wild bursts of excitement, and
incredulity and happiness, that kept surging up and drenching me . . . I
had a queer feeling, that awfully threadbare feeling of having been
there before, or felt that before; that it was familiar, although it was
so new. Then it came to me, 'Why, I have it, what I used to pray for.
Now at last I am the urn too full!' And it was true, I could feel, just
as I dreamed, the upsurging of the feeling, brimming over, boiling up,
brimming over. . . . And another phrase came into my mind, an English one.
I said to myself, 'The fullness of life.' Now I know what it is."
She turned to him, and caught at his hand. "Oh, Neale, now I _do_ know
what it is, how utterly hideous it would be to have to live without it,
to feel only the mean little trickle that seems mostly all that people
have."
"Well, I'll never have to get along without it, as long as I have you,"
he said confidently.
"And I refuse to live a _minute_, if it goes back on me!" she cried.
"I imagine that old folks would think we are talking very young,"
suggested the man casually.
"Don't speak of them!" She cast them away into non-existence with a
gesture.
They sank into a reverie, smiling to themselves.
"How the fountains shone in the sun, that day," she murmured; "the spray
they cast on us was all tiny opals and diamonds."
"You're sure you aren't going to be sorry to go back to America to live,
to leave all that?" asked the man. "I get anxious about that sometimes.
It seems an awful jump to go away from such beautiful historic things,
back to a narrow little mountain town."
"I'd like to know what right you have to call it narrow, when you've
never even seen it," she returned.
"Well, anybody could make a pretty fair guess that a small Vermont town
isn't going to be so very _wide_," he advanced reasonably.
"It may not be wide, but it's deep," she replied.
He laughed at her certainty. "You were about eleven years old when you
saw it last, weren't you?"
"No, you've got it wrong. It was when we came to France to live that I
was eleven, and of course I stopped going to Ashley regularly for
vacations then. But I went back for several summers in the old house
with Cousin Hetty, when I was in America for college, after Mother
died."
"Oh well, I don't care what it's like," he said, "except that it's the
place where I'm going to live with you. Any place on earth would seem
wide enough and deep enough, if I had you there."
"Isn't it funny," she mused, "that I should know so much more about it
than you? To think how I played all around your uncle's mill and house,
lots of times when I was a little girl, and never dreamed . . ."
"No funnier than all the rest of it," he demurred. "Once you grant our
existing and happening to meet out of all the millions of people in the
world, you can't think up anything funnier. Just the little
two-for-a-cent queerness of our happening to meet in Rome instead of in
Brooklyn, and your happening to know the town where my uncle lived and
owned the mill he left me . . . that can't hold a candle for queerness,
for wonderfulness, compared to my having ever laid eyes on you. Suppose
I'd never come to Rome at all? When I got the news of Uncle Burton's
death and the bequest, I was almost planning to sail from Genoa and not
come to southern Italy at all."
She shook her head confidently. "You can't scare me with any such
hideous possibilities. It's not possible that we shouldn't ever have
met, both of us being in the world. Didn't you ever study chemistry?
Didn't they teach you there are certain elements that just _will_ come
together, no matter how you mix them up with other things?"
He made no answer, gazing out across the plain far below them, mellowing
richly in the ever-softening light of the sunset.
She looked doubtfully at his profile, rather lean, with the beginning
already drawn of the deep American line from the Corner of the nose to
the mouth, that is partly humorous and partly grim. "Don't you believe
that, Neale, that we would have come together somehow, anyhow?" she
asked, "even if you had gone straight back from Genoa to Ashley? Maybe
it might have been up there after you'd begun to run the mill. Maybe I'd
have gone back to America and gone up to visit Cousin Hetty again."
He was still silent.
She said urgently, as if in alarm, "Neale, you don't believe that we
could have passed all our lives and never have _seen_ each other?"
He turned on her his deep-set eyes, full of tenderness and humor and
uncertainty, and shook his head. "Yes, dear, I do believe that," he said
regretfully. "I don't see how I can help believing it. Why, I hadn't the
faintest idea of going back to settle in Ashley before I met you. I had
taken Uncle Burton's mill and his bequest of four thousand dollars as a
sort of joke. What could I do with them, without anything else? And what
on earth did I want to do with them? Nothing! As far as I had any plans
at all, it was to go home, see Father and Mother for a while, get
through the legal complications of inheritance, sell the mill and house
. . . I wouldn't have thought of such a thing as bothering even to go to
Ashley to look at them . . . and then take the money and go off somewhere,
somewhere different, and far away: to China maybe. I was pretty restless
in my mind, pretty sure that nothing in our civilization was worth the
candle, you know, before you arrived on the scene to put everything in
focus. And if I had done all that, while you were still here in Rome,
running up and down your scales, honestly . . . I know I sound awfully
literal . . . but I don't see how we ever could have met, do you, dear?"
He offered her this, with a look half of apology, half of simple
courage.
She considered it and him seriously, studying his face and eyes,
listening retrospectively to the accent of his words, and immensely
astonished him by suddenly flashing a kiss on his cheek. "You're
miraculous!" she said. "You don't know how it feels; as though I'd been
floundering in a marsh, deeper and deeper, and then all at once, when I
thought I'd come to know there wasn't anything in the world _but_ marsh,
to come out on beautiful, fine, clean earth, where I feel the very
strength of ages under my feet. You don't _know_ how good it seems to
have a silly, romantic remark like what I said, answered the way you
did, telling the truth; how _good_ it feels to be pulled down to what's
what, and to know you can do it and really love me too."
He had been so startled and moved by her kiss that he had heard her
words but vaguely. "I don't seem to catch hold of all that. What's it
all about?"
"It's all about the fact that I really begin to believe that you will be
loyal and tell me the truth," she told him.
He saw cause for gravity in this, remembering the great moment so
shortly back of them, and said with a surprised and hurt accent, "Didn't
you believe me, when I said I would?"
She took up his hand in hers and said rapidly, "Dear Neale, I did
believe it, for just a moment, and I can't believe anything good of
anybody for longer than that, not _really_ in my heart of hearts. And
it's my turn to tell you some truth when I tell you about that unbelief,
what I've hardly even ever told myself, right out in words."
He was listening now, fixing on her a look of profound, intelligent
attention, as she went on, stumbling, reaching out for words, discarding
those she found, only her steady gaze giving coherence to her statement.
"You know, living the way I have . . . I've told you . . . I've seen a
great deal more than most girls have. And then, half brought up in France
with people who are clever and have their eyes wide open, people who
really count, I've seen how they don't believe in humans, or goodness, or
anything that's not base. They know life is mostly bad and cruel and
dull and low, and above all that it's bound to fool you if you trust to
it, or get off your guard a single minute. They don't _teach_ you that,
you know; but you see it's what they believe and what they spend all
their energies trying to dodge a little, all they think they can. Then
everything you read, except the silly little Bibliothèque-Rose sort of
thing, makes you know that it's true . . . Anatole France, and Maupassant,
and Schnitzler. Of course back in America you find lots of nice people
who don't believe that. But they're so sweet you know they'd swallow
anything that made things look pleasant. So you don't dare take their
word for anything. They won't even look at what's bad in everybody's
life, they just pretend it's not there, not in _their_ husbands, or
wives or children, and so you know they're fooled." She lowered her
voice, which faltered a little, but she still continued to look straight
into his eyes, "And as for love, why, I've just hated the sound of the
name and . . . I'm horribly afraid of it, even now."
He asked her gravely, "Don't you love me? Don't you think that I love
you?"
She looked at him piteously, wincing, bracing herself with an effort to
be brave. "I must try to be as honest as I want you to be. Yes, I love
you, Neale, with all my heart a thousand times more than I ever dreamed
I could love anybody. But how do I know that I'm not somehow fooling
myself: but that maybe all that huge unconscious inheritance from all my
miserable ancestors hasn't _got_ me, somehow, and you too? How do I know
that I'm not being fooled by Nature and fooling you with fine words?"
She hesitated, probing deep into her heart, and brought out now, like a
great and unexpected treasure, "But, Neale, listen! I _don't_ think that
about you! I don't believe you're being fooled. Why, I believe in you
more than in myself!" She was amazed at this and radiant.
Then she asked him, "Neale, how do _you_ manage about all this? What do
you feel about all the capacity for being low and bad, that everybody
has? Aren't you afraid that they'll get the best of us, inevitably,
unless we let ourselves get so dull, and second-rate and passive, that
we can't even be bad? Are you afraid of being fooled? Do you believe in
yourself at all?"
He was silent for some time, his eyes steadily fixed on some invisible
realm. When he spoke it was with a firm, natural, unshaken accent. "Why,
yes, I think it very likely that I am being fooled all the time. But I
don't think it matters the least bit in the world beside the fact that I
love you. That's big enough to overtop everything else."
He raised his voice and spoke out boldly to the undefined specter in her
mind. "And if it's the mating instinct you mean, that may be fooling
both of us, because of our youth and bodily health . . . good heavens!
Isn't our love deep enough to absorb that a million times over, like the
water of a little brook flowing into the sea? Do you think _that_, which
is only a little trickle and a harmless and natural and healthy little
trickle, could unsalt the great ocean of its savor? Why, Marise, all
that you're so afraid of, all that they've made you so afraid of, . . .
it's like the little surface waves . . . well, call it the big storm waves
if you want to . . . but nothing at all, the biggest of them, compared to
the stillness in the depths of the sea. Why, I love you! Do I believe in
myself? Of course I believe in myself, because I have you."
She drew a long sigh and, closing her eyes, murmured, "I feel as though
I were lifted up on a great rock." After a moment, opening her eyes, she
said, "You are better than I, you know. I'm not at all sure that I could
say that. I never knew before that I was weak. But then I never met
strength before."
"You're not weak," he told her; adding quaintly, "maybe a little
overballasted; with brains and sensitiveness and under-ballasted with
experience, that's all. But you haven't had much chance to take on any
other cargo, as yet."
She was nettled at this, and leaving her slow, wide-winged poise in the
upper airs, she veered and with swallow-like swiftness darted down on
him. "That sounds patronizing and elder-brotherish," she told him. "I've
taken on all sorts of cargo that you don't know anything about. In ever
so many ways you seem positively . . . naïve! You needn't go thinking that
I'm always highstrung and fanciful. I never showed that side to anybody
before, never! Always kept it shut up and locked down and danced and
whooped it up before the door. You know how everybody always thinks of
me as laughing all the time. I do wish everything hadn't been said
already so many times. If it weren't that it's been said so often, I'd
like to say that I have always been laughing to keep from crying."
"Why don't you say it, if that is what you mean?" he proposed.
She looked at him marveling. "I'm so fatuous about you!" she exclaimed;
"the least little thing you say, I see the most wonderful possibilities
in it. I know _you'd_ say what you meant, no matter how many thousands
had said it before. And since I know it's not stupidness in you, why, it
seems to me just splendidly and simply courageous, a kind of courage I'd
never thought of before. I see now, how, after all, those stupid people
had me beaten, because I'd always thought that a person either had to be
stupid so that he didn't _know_ he was saying something everybody else
had said, or else not say it, even if he wanted to, ever so much, and it
was just what he meant."
"Don't you think maybe you're too much bothered about other people,
anyhow?" he suggested, mildly; "whether they're stupid or have said
things or not? What difference does it make, if it's a question of what
you yourself feel? I'd be just as satisfied if you gave _all_ your time
to discovering the wonderful possibilities in what I say. It would give
me a chance to conceal the fact that I get all out of breath trying to
follow what you mean."
This surprised her into a sudden laugh, outright and ringing. He looked
down at her sparkling face, brilliant in its mirth as a child's, and
said seriously, "You must instantly think of something perfectly prosaic
and commonplace to say, or I shall be forced to take you in my arms and
kiss you a great many times, which might have Lord knows what effect on
that gloomy-minded ticket-seller back of us who already has his
suspicions."
She rose instantly to the possibilities and said smoothly, swiftly,
whimsically, with the accent of drollery, "I'm very particular about
what sort of frying-pan I use. I insist on having a separate one for the
_fritures_ of fish, and another for the omelets, used only for that: I'm
a very fine and conscientious housekeeper, I'd have you know, and all
the while we lived in Bayonne I ran the house because Mother never got
used to French housekeeping ways. I was the one who went to market . . .
oh, the gorgeous things you get in the Bayonne market, near enough
Spain, you know, for real Malaga grapes with the aroma still on them,
and for Spanish quince-paste. I bossed the old Basque woman we had for
cook and learned how to cook from her, using a great many onions for
everything. And I learned how to keep house by the light of nature,
since it had to be done. And I'm awfully excited about having a house of
my own, just as though I weren't the extremely clever, cynical,
disillusioned, fascinating musical genius everybody knows me to be: only
let me warn you that the old house we are going to live in will need
lots done to it. Your uncle never opened the dreadful room he called the
parlor, and never used the south wing at all, where all the sunshine
comes in. And the pantry arrangements are simply humorous, they're so
inadequate. I don't know how much of that four thousand dollars you are
going to want to spare for remodeling the mill, but I will tell you
now, that I will go on strike if you don't give me a better cook-stove
than your Uncle's Touclé had to work with."
He had been listening with an appreciative grin to her nimble-witted
chatter, but at this he brought her up short by an astonished, "Who had?
What had? What's that . . . Touclé?"
She laughed aloud again, delighted at having startled him into
curiosity. "Touclé. Touclé. Don't you think it a pretty name? Will you
believe me when I say I know all about Ashley?"
"Oh, go on, tell me!" he begged. "You don't mean to say that my Uncle
Benton had pep enough to have a scandal in his life?"
"What do _you_ know about your uncle?"
"Oh, I'd seen him a few times, though I'd never been up to Ashley. As
long as Grandfather was alive and the mill at Adams Center was running,
Uncle Burton used to go there to see his father, and I always used to be
hanging around Grandfather and the mill, and the woods. I was crazy
about it all, as a boy, used to work right along with the mill-hands,
and out chopping with the lumbermen. Maybe Uncle Burton noticed that."
He was struck with a sudden idea, "By George, maybe _that_ was why he
left me the mill!" He cast his eye retrospectively on this idea and was
silent for a moment, emerging from his meditation to say, wonderingly,
"Well, it certainly is _queer_, how things come out, how one thing hangs
on another. It's enough to addle your brains, to try to start to follow
back all the ways things happen . . . ways you'd never thought of as of
the least importance."
"Your Uncle Burton was of some importance to _us_," she told him. "Miss
Oldham at the _pension_ said that she had just met a new American, down
from Genoa, and when I heard your name I said, 'Oh, I used to know an
old Mr. Crittenden who ran a wood-working factory up in Vermont, where I
used to visit an old cousin of mine,' and that was why Miss Oldham
introduced us, that silly way, as cousins."
He said, pouncingly, "You're running on, inconsequently, just to divert
my mind from asking you again who or what Touclé is."
"You can ask and ask all you like," she defied him, laughing. "I'm not
going to tell you. I've got to have _some_ secrets from you, to keep up
the traditions of self-respecting womanhood. And anyhow I couldn't tell
you, because she is different from everything else. You'll see for
yourself, when we get there. If she's still alive." She offered a
compromise, "I'll tell you what. If she's dead, I'll sit down and tell
you about her. If she's still alive, you'll find out. She's an Ashley
institution, Touclé is. As symbolic as the Cumean Sybil. I don't believe
she'll be dead. I don't believe she'll _ever_ be dead."
"You've let the cat out of the bag enough so I've lost my interest in
her," he professed. "I can make a guess that she's some old woman, and I
bet you I won't see anything remarkable in her. Except that wild name.
Is it Miss Touclé, or Mrs. Touclé?"
The girl burst into laughter at this, foolish, light-hearted mirth which
drenched the air all about her with the perfume of young gaiety. "Is it
Miss Druid, or Mrs. Druid?" was all she would say.
She looked up at him, her eyes shining, and cried between her gusts of
laughter, as if astonished, "Why, I do believe we are going to be happy
together. I do believe it's going to be fun to live with you."
His appalled surprise that she had again fallen into the pit of
incredulity was, this time, only half humorous. "For God's sake, what
_did_ you think!"
She answered, reasonably, "Well, nobody ever is happy together, either
in books or out of them. Of all the million, million love-affairs that
have happened, does anybody ever claim any one to have been happy?"
His breath was taken away. He asked helplessly, "Well, why _are_ you
marrying me?"
She replied very seriously, "Because I can't help myself, dear Neale.
Isn't that the only reason you're marrying me?"
He looked at her long, his nostrils quivering a little, gave a short
exclamation which seemed to carry away all his impatience, and finally
said, quietly enough, "Why, yes, of course, if that's the way you want
to put it. You can say it in a thousand thousand different ways."
He added with a sudden fury, "And never one of them will come anywhere
near expressing it. Look here, Marise, I don't believe you have the
faintest, faintest idea how big this thing is. All these fool clever
ways of talking about it . . . they're just a screen set up in front of
it, to my mind. It's enough sight bigger than just you or me, or
happiness or unhappiness. It's the meaning of everything!"
She considered this thoughtfully. "I don't believe I really know what
you mean," she said, "or anyhow that I _feel_ what you mean. I have had
dreams sometimes, that I'm in something awfully big and irresistible
like a great river, flowing somewhere; but I've never felt it in waking
hours. I wish I could. It's lovely in dreams. You evidently do, even
awake."
He said, confidently, "You will, later on."
She ventured, "You mean, maybe, that I'm so shaken up by the little
surface waves, chopping back and forth, that I don't feel the big
current."
"It's there. Whether you feel it or not," he made final answer to her
doubt.
She murmured, "I wonder if there is anything in that silly,
old-fashioned notion that men are stronger than women, and that women
must lean on men's strength, to live?"
"Everybody's got to lean on his own strength, sooner or later," he told
her with a touch of grimness.
"You just won't be romantic!" she cried admiringly.
"I really love you, Marise," he answered profoundly; and on this
rock-like assurance she sank down with a long breath of trust.
* * * * *
The sun was dipping into the sea now, emblazoning the sky with a last
flaming half-circle of pure color, but the light had left the dusky
edges of the world. Already the far mountains were dimmed, and the
plain, passing from one deep twilight color to another more somber, was
quietly sinking into darkness as into the strong loving arms of ultimate
dissolution.
The girl spoke in a dreamy twilight tone, "Neale dear, this is not a
romantic idea . . . honestly, I do wish we could both die right here and
never go down to the plain any more. Don't you feel that? Not at all?"
His voice rang out, resonant and harsh as a bugle-note, "No, I do not,
not at all, not for a single moment. I've too much ahead of me to feel
that. And so have you!"
"There comes the cable-car, climbing up to get us," she said faintly.
"And we will go down from this high place of safety into that dark
plain, and we will have to cross it, painfully, step by step. _Dare_ you
promise me we will not lose our way?" she challenged him.
"I don't promise you anything about it," he answered, taking her hand in
his. "Only I'm not a bit afraid of the plain, nor the way that's before
us. Come along with me, and let's see what's there."
"Do you think you know where we are going, across that plain?" she asked
him painfully; "even where we are to _try_ to go?"
"No, I don't know, now," he answered undismayed. "But I think we will
know it as we go along because we will be together."
* * * * *
The darkness, folding itself like a velvet mantle about the far
mountains, deepened, and her voice deepened with it. "Can you even
promise that we won't lose each other there?" she asked somberly.
At this he suddenly took her into his arms, silently, bending his face
to hers, his insistent eyes bringing hers up to meet his gaze. She could
feel the strong throbbing of his heart all through her own body.
She clung to him as though she were drowning. And indeed she felt that
she was. Life burst over them with a roar, a superb flooding tide on
whose strong swelling bosom they felt themselves rising, rising
illimitably.
The sun had now wholly set, leaving to darkness the old, old plain,
soaked with humanity.
CHAPTER II
_INTERLUDE_
March 15, 1920.
8:30 A.M.
Marise fitted little Mark's cap down over his ears and buttoned his blue
reefer coat close to his throat.
"Now you big children," she said, with an anxious accent, to Paul and
Elly standing with their school-books done up in straps, "be sure to
keep an eye on Mark at recess-time. Don't let him run and get all hot
and then sit down in the wind without his coat. Remember, it's his first
day at school, and he's only six."
She kissed his round, smooth, rosy cheek once more, and let him go. Elly
stooped and took her little brother's mittened hand in hers. She said
nothing, but her look on the little boy's face was loving and maternal.
Paul assured his mother seriously, "Oh, I'll look out for Mark, all
right."
Mark wriggled and said, "_I_ can looken out for myself wivout Paul!"
Their mother looked for a moment deep into the eyes of her older son, so
clear, so quiet, so unchanging and true. "You're a good boy, Paul, a
real comfort," she told him.
To herself she thought, "Yes, all his life he'll look out for people and
get no thanks for it."
* * * * *
She followed the children to the door, wondering at her heavy heart.
What could it come from? There was nothing in life for her to fear of
course, except for the children, and it was absurd to fear for them.
They were all safe; safe and strong and rooted deep in health, and
little Mark was stepping off gallantly into his own life as the others
had done. But she felt afraid. What could she be afraid of? As she
opened the door, their advance was halted by the rush upon them of
Paul's dog, frantic with delight to see the children ready to be off,
springing up on Paul, bounding down the path, racing back to the door,
all quivering eager exultation. "Ah, he's going _with_ the children!"
thought Marise wistfully.
She could not bear to let them leave her and stood with them in the open
door-way for a moment. Elly rubbed her soft cheek against her mother's
hand. Paul, seeing his mother shiver in the keen March air, said,
"Mother, if Father were here he'd make you go in. That's a thin dress.
And your teeth are just chattering."
"Yes, you're right, Paul," she agreed; "it's foolish of me!"
The children gave her a hearty round of good-bye hugs and kisses,
briskly and energetically performed, and went down the stone-flagged
path to the road. They were chattering to each other as they went. Their
voices sounded at first loud and gay in their mother's ears. Then they
sank to a murmur, as the children ran along the road. The dog bounded
about them in circles, barking joyfully, but this sound too grew fainter
and fainter.
When the murmur died away to silence, there seemed no sound left in the
stark gray valley, empty and motionless between the steep dark walls of
pine-covered mountains.
* * * * *
Marise stood for a long time looking after the children. They were
climbing up the long hilly road now, growing smaller and smaller. How
far away they were, already! And that very strength and vigor of which
she was so proud, which she had so cherished and fostered, how rapidly
it carried them along the road that led away from her!
They were almost at the top of the hill now. Perhaps they would turn
there and wave to her.
No, of course now, she was foolish to think of such a thing. Children
never remembered the people they left behind. And she was now only
somebody whom they were leaving behind. She felt the cold penetrate
deeper and deeper into her heart, and knew she ought to go back into the
house. But she could not take her eyes from the children. She thought to
herself bitterly, "This is the beginning of the end. I've been feeling
how, in their hearts, they want to escape from me when I try to hold
them, or when I try to make them let me into their lives. I've given
everything to them, but they never think of that. _I_ think of it! Every
time I look at them I see all those endless hours of sacred sacrifice.
But when they look at me, do they see any of that? No! Never! They only
see the Obstacle in the way of their getting what they want. And so they
want to run away from it. Just as they're doing now."
She looked after them, yearning. Although they were so far, she could
see them plainly in the thin mountain air. They were running mostly,
once in a while stopping to throw a stone or look up into a tree. Then
they scampered on like squirrels, the fox-terrier bounding ahead.
* * * * *
Now they were at the top where the road turned. Perhaps, after all, they
_would_ remember and glance back and wave their hands to her.
* * * * *
Now they had disappeared, without a backward look.
* * * * *
She continued gazing at the vacant road. It seemed to her that the
children had taken everything with them.
* * * * *
A gust of icy wind blew down sharply from the mountain, still
snow-covered, and struck at her like a sword. She turned and went back
shivering, into the empty house.
PART I