Chip had never really noticed her until on that Sunday morning in June
it suddenly struck him that she was trying to get a word with him alone.
He had seen her, of course. She had been at Mountain Brook--which was
the name of Emery Bland's place in New Hampshire--every time he had gone
there; but, her quality being unobtrusive, he had paid her no attention.
Furthermore, both Bland and Mrs. Bland, being emphatic in personality
and talkative, he had been the more easily led to ignore this reticent
girl, whose function was apparently limited to seeing her aunt provided
with a shawl, or her uncle with a cigar, at the right opportunities. If
he thought of her at all, it was as of the living spirit of the
furniture. The tables and chairs became animate in her, and articulate;
but her claim to recognition had never gone beyond the necessity for a
hand-shake or a smile. When he did take her hand--on arriving, or on
coming down-stairs in the morning--he received an impression of
something soft and slim and tender; but the moment of pleasure was
always too fleeting for conscious registration. Similarly, when, from a
polite instinct to include her in the conversation, he smiled vaguely in
her direction, he received a look gentle and beaming and almost
apologetic in return; but it was never more to him than if the dimly
lustrous surfaces of Mrs. Bland's nice Sheraton had suddenly become
responsive. She made no demand; and he offered no more than she asked.
Perhaps the fact that the girl was not really the niece of either Mr. or
Mrs. Bland had something to do with his tendency to treat her as a
negligible quantity. Mrs. Bland had explained the situation to him
during his first visit to Mountain Brook.
"Lily isn't our niece at all," she had said, in a tone which seemed to
reproach Lily with an inadvertance. "She's no relation to us whatever.
We don't know who she is. She doesn't even know herself. Since you
insist," she continued, as though Chip had been pressing for
information, "we got her out of an orphanage, the year we built this
house. Mr. Bland seemed to think the house ought to have something young
in it; and so--"
"You might have had a dog," Chip said, dryly.
"You needn't laugh. It wasn't _my_ desire to adopt a child. I simply
yielded to Mr. Bland, as I do in everything. The only stipulation I made
was that she should call us uncle and aunt. I couldn't bear to be called
mother by a child who wasn't my own; but Mr. Bland is so odd that he
wouldn't have cared. I dare say you've noticed how odd he is."
Chip could see that Bland might be odd from his wife's point of view. He
was the self-made man who had shed the traces of self-making. Mrs. Bland
was fond of describing herself as a self-made woman; but the stages of
the process by which she had "turned herself out" were visible. She
would have been disappointed had it not been so. Having confessed from
youth upward that her ambition was "to make the most of herself," there
had never, in her case, been any question of the _ars celare artem_. She
belonged to a number of women's clubs of which the avowed object was
"self-improvement," and attended such classes on "current events" as
would keep her posted on the problems of the day without the bore of
reading the papers. As a self-made woman she also looked the part,
dressing for breakfast as she would like to be found in the afternoon,
with but slight variation for dinner. In her full panoply of plum or
dove color she suggested one of those knights eternally in armor who
decorate baronial halls. Chip considered it probable that Emery Bland
would never have chosen her as the life-long complement to himself had
he not taken that step while he was still an obscure "up-state" country
lawyer, and she the dignified young school-teacher who stood for
"cultivation" in their little town. Cultivation had always been to Mrs.
Bland what hunting is to the rider to hounds--the zest was in the chase.
The zest was in the chase, and the quarry but an excuse for the run.
Over hedges of lectures, and ditches of "talks," and through
turnip-fields of serious, ponderous women like herself, green even in
winter, and after being touched by frost, Mrs. Bland kept on in full
career, with "cultivation" scudding ahead like a fox she never caught a
glimpse of, and which her hounds tracked only by the scent. It was
splendid exercise, and helped her to feel in the movement. If she failed
to notice that her husband had long ago run the fleet animal to earth,
and affixed the mask as an adornment to his home, it was only because
their views of life were different.
No one would now suppose that there had been a time in Emery Bland's
life when it had been his aim also to "cultivate himself," and when he
had actually used the phrase. Between the debonair, experienced New York
lawyer, so much in demand for cases requiring discretion and so capable
of dealing with them--between him and the farmer's boy he had been there
was no more resemblance than between a living word and the dead root out
of which it has been coined. In Emery Bland's case the word was not only
living, but pliant, eloquent, and arresting to ear and eye. He was one
of those men who overlook nothing that can be counted as
self-expression, from their dress to the sound of their syllables.
Superficially genial, but essentially astute, he had made everything
grist that came to his mill, flourishing on it not only in the
financial sense, but also in that of character. It was said that he knew
as many life histories as a doctor or a priest, and generally the more
dramatic ones. The experience had clearly made him cynical, but tolerant
also, and human, with a tendency, as far as he was personally concerned,
to being morally strait-laced. He had seen so much of the picturesque
side of life that he could appreciate the prosaic, which, in Chip's
explanation, was why he could stand by Mrs. Bland. Other people's
surfeits of champagne and ortolans had assured his own taste for plain
roast beef. But he himself ordered the porcelain on which his simple
fare was served, and the wines by which it was accompanied, drunk from
fine old Irish or Bohemian glass.
Chip took this in by degrees. His first acquaintance with a man who was
to exercise some influence on his future was purely professional. He had
gone to him as an offset to Aunt Emily. If the results of this move were
indirect--since Aunt Emily had won the victory--they became apparent in
time. They became apparent when in Chip's bruised heart, where
everything healthy seemed to have been stunned, a slight curiosity began
to awaken concerning his new friend's personality.
He came to consider him a friend by accident--the accident of a club,
where, finding themselves sitting down to dine at the same moment, they
had taken the same table. Primarily, it was an opportunity to adjust
some loose ends of Chip's domestic affairs; incidentally, they stumbled
on a common hobby in Victorian English politics. There was no subject on
which Emery Bland was better informed, with a learning that covered the
whole long stretch from Lord Melbourne to Lord Salisbury, and which he
could garnish with anecdote _ad libitum_. It was a kind of conversation
of which Chip, who had been brought up partly in England, rarely got a
taste in New York, and for which Bland, on his side, didn't often find
an interested listener. Something like an intimacy thus sprang up, but
an intimacy of the kind common among men who have little or no point of
contact out of office hours or away from the neutral ground of the club.
Within these limits the meetings had already been numerous before it
occurred to Chip--more or less idly--that while Bland knew too much of
his sad background, he knew nothing of Bland's. An occasional reference
revealed the lawyer as a married man, but beyond that basic fact their
acquaintance had no more attachment to the main social structure of life
than a floating island of moss and flowers has to the system of
geological strata. It was Bland himself who took the first step in the
direction of closer association.
"Well, how are you getting on?"
He asked the question while slipping into the seat opposite Chip as the
latter lunched at the club, where they met most frequently.
"Oh, so so."
"H'm. So so. _That's_ what you call it."
The tone implied reproach or reproof or expostulation. Chip kept his
eyes on his knife and fork.
"Well, what do _you_ call it?"
"Oh, I'm not obliged to give it a name. I hear other people do that."
"And what do other people say--since you seem to want me to ask the
question?"
"I do. I think you ought to know. They say it's a pity."
Chip took on the defiant air of a bad boy. "They can say it--and go to
blazes."
"They'll say it, all right. Don't you worry about that. But I rather
think that you'll do the going to blazes--at this rate."
Chip raised his haggard eyes. "Well, why not? What is there any better
than blazes for me to go to? Besides, it isn't so awful--when you've got
nothing else."
"Oh, rot, Walker! I'm ashamed of you. I can imagine a man of your type
doing almost anything else but taking to drink."
Chip shrugged his shoulders with the habit acquired in French schools.
"On fait ce que l'on peut. I had three resources left to me--wine,
woman, and song. For song I've no ear; for woman--well, that's all over;
so it came down to Hobson's choice."
"Hobson's choice be blowed! Walker's choice! And you've just time enough
left to cast about for a set of alternatives. Why, I've seen scores of
men in your fix; and of some of them it was the salvation."
"And what was it of the others?"
"Hell. But it was a hell of their own making."
"All right. I'm willing to accept the word. It's a hell of _my_ own
making--but it's hell, just the same."
"But, good Lord! man, even if it is hell, you don't want to wallow in
it."
Chip smiled ruefully. "Oh, I like it. Kind of penance. I like it as
medieval sinners used to like a hair shirt."
"Yes; but the hair shirt was kept out of sight. You're parading your
penance, as you call it, before the world. See here, Walker, why don't
you come up and spend the weekend with me in New Hampshire? My wife
would like to have you. To-day is Friday, and I go up to-morrow morning.
A Sunday in the country would do you good."
Chip refused, but he long remembered why he retracted his refusal. It
was the look of his apartment when he returned to it that night. It was
an apartment in a house at the corner of Madison Avenue and a street in
the Thirties, dedicated to the use of well-to-do bachelors. It had been
a slight mitigation in the collapse of life as he had built it up, that
rooms in so comfortable a refuge should have been free for him. He had
furnished them with some care; and after his first distress had worn
off a little had found a measure of lawless satisfaction in a return to
the old unmarried ways.
But on this particular evening the aspect of the place appalled him from
the minute he turned his latch-key in the lock. Under the stimulus of
Bland's counsels he had come home early, which was in itself a mistake.
It was scarcely nine o'clock. There was an hour or an hour and a half to
pass before he could think of going to bed. Any such interval as that
was always the hardest feature in the day for him. But what smote him
specially now was the air of emptiness and loneliness. It met him as an
odor in the stale smell of the cigar he had smoked on coming up-town
from the office, and which still lingered in the rooms. He had forgotten
to open a window, and the house valet, whose duty it was to "tidy up,"
had evidently gone out.
In the small hall into which Chip entered there was a bookcase with but
two or three odds and ends of books in it, for his habits of reading had
dropped away from him with everything else. In the sitting-room one
brown shoe stood on the hearth-rug before the empty fireplace; the
other on the center-table, a collar and necktie beside it. The soiled
shirt he had thrown off lay on the couch, a sleeve dragging on the
floor. On the mantelpiece, which he had at first consecrated as a shrine
for the photographs of Edith and the children, and flanked by two silver
candlesticks like an altar, there had intruded an open box of perfectos,
an ash-tray that still held the butt-end of a cigar, and an empty
tumbler smelling of whisky. There were traces of cigar ashes
everywhere--on the arms of the easy-chairs, on the rugs, and on the
terra-cotta tiles of the hearth. For the rest the room was a litter of
newspapers, as the bedroom which opened off it was a litter of clothes.
He was not disorderly; he was only careless, and incapable of creating
order for himself. Disorder shocked him profoundly. He always sat down
in the midst of it, helpless, but with a sense of inner misery. And so
he sat down in it now. "My God!" he said to himself, summing up in the
ejaculation all the wretchedness he had wrought, or that had been
wrought, about him.
It was at such minutes that his mind reverted to Edith, with renewed
stupefaction over what she had done. Stupefaction was the word.
Reflection on the subject only left him the more hopelessly bewildered.
If she hadn't loved him her course might have been explicable. As it
was, he found himself driven to a choice between mental aberration on
her part and a witch's spell, inclining to the latter--with the witch in
the guise of Aunt Emily.
Not that he absolved himself. He made no attempt to do that. But he
looked upon his offense as of the kind that naturally calls for mercy
rather than severity. What was the letter of the contract in comparison
with the spirit?--and he had kept the spirit sacredly. Of course he had
done wrong. Who in thunder, he asked, impatiently, ever denied that? But
how many men had not done wrong in the same way? Very few, was his
answer. The answer was the essence of his defense--a defense which,
according to all the laws of human nature and common sense, Edith should
have accepted. That she shouldn't accept it, or couldn't, or wouldn't,
passed his comprehension.
As a rule, he tried not to think of it. He tried not to think of it by
filling up the time with something else. When there had been nothing
else to fill up the time he had stupefied himself with drink. He drank
at first, not because he liked drinking, but because it dulled his
brain, his heart. It didn't excite him; on the contrary, it brought him
to a state of lethargy which, if he was at the club, made him willing to
go home, or, if he was at home, made it possible for him to go to bed
and sleep. It was only within a month or so that he had begun to suspect
that other people noticed it; and even then he hadn't been sure until
Bland had told him so that day.
He had, consequently, come back to his room in the possession of his
faculties, but with a feeling of something unfulfilled that emphasized
his desolation. He perceived then that a habit was beginning to form in
him with a tenacity which it might be difficult to counteract. After
all, would anything be gained by counteracting it? He had known fellows
who drank themselves to death; and except in the last dreadful stages it
hadn't been so bad. They had certainly got their fun out of it, even if
in the end they paid high. He was paying high--and perhaps getting
nothing at all. Wouldn't it be better if he went off this minute
somewhere, and made a night of it?--made a night which would be but the
beginning of a long succession of nights of the same kind? Then when he
was ruined beyond recovery, or in his grave, Edith would know what she
had done to him. He had tried every other way of bringing it home to her
but that. That might succeed where argument had failed. She couldn't
have a mind so much astray as not to be sorry when she saw, or heard of,
the wreck she would have made of him.
It was worth thinking of, and he sat and thought of it. He tried to
conjure up the picture of himself as really besotted--he was not
besotted as yet, even when the worst was said!--degraded, revolting. He
rose to take a cigar, to help his imagination in the task to which he
had set it, but he remembered that the cigar suggested a whisky-and-soda
to go with it, and there was a bottle of Old Piper in the cupboard. He
fell back into his seat again with the longing unsatisfied, but he
continued his dream. It was so pleasant a dream--that is, there were so
many advantages to the course he thought of taking, that he ended by
springing to his feet and saying, almost aloud, "By God, I'll do it."
The resolution being formed, there was a large selection of ways and
means of putting it into execution. He could do this or that. He could
go here or there. It was a bewilderment of choice that saved him. He sat
down again.
No; when it came to the point he wasn't equal to it. It was not the end
he shrank from, but the means--the places to which he would have to go,
the people he would have to consort with. He knew just enough of them to
be sickened in advance. It was with a sense of fleeing to escape that he
hurried to the telephone and called up Emery Bland, asking to be allowed
to accept his invitation.
He arrived at Mountain Brook late on an afternoon in early June, just as
the sun, hovering above the point of its setting, was throwing an almost
horizontal light on the northern and western slopes of Monadnock. The
mountain raised its majestic mass as the last and successful effort of a
tumbling, climbing wilderness of hills. Scattered amid the
upward-sweeping stretches of maple and oak, groves of spruce and pine
had the effect of passing rain-clouds. In the clear air, against the
clear sky, every tree-top on the indented ridges stood out like a little
pinnacle, till with a long, downward curve, both gracious and grandiose,
the mountainside fell to the edge of a gem-like, broken-shored lake. It
was a world extraordinarily green and clean. Its cleanness was even more
amazing than its greenness. The unsullied freshness of a new creation
seemed to lie on it all day long. It was a world which suggested no past
and boded no future. Its transparent air, in which there was not a shred
of atmosphere, its high lights, and long shadows, and restful,
clambering woods, and singing birds, and sweet, strong winds were like
those of some perpetual, paradisical present, with no story to tell, and
none that would ever be enacted. It was a world in which Nature seemed
to hold herself aloof from man, refusing to be tamed by him, rejecting
his caress, keeping herself serene, inviolate, making his presence
incongruous with her sanctity.
It was this incongruity that struck Chip first of all. Not that there
were any of the unapproachable grandeurs of the Alps or the Selkirks,
nor anything that towered or terrified or overawed. All the hilly
woodland was smiling and friendly--but remote. Man might buy a piece of
ground and camp on it; but if he had sensibilities he would remain
conscious of an essence that eluded him, the real thing--withdrawn. He
could be on the spot, but he could never be of it--not any more than he
could give his dwelling the air of springing from the soil.
Chip noticed that, too--the intrusive aspect of any kind of roof that
man could make to cover him, unless it were a wigwam. Emery Bland had
tried to temper this resentment of the landscape to what was not
indigenous to itself by making the lines of his shelter as simple and as
straight as possible. He was from the first apologetic to the Spirit of
the Mountain, as who would say, "Hang it all, you've tempted me here,
but I'll outrage you as little as I can." So he perched his long, white
house, Italian in style if it had style at all, on the top of a knoll
whence he could look far into green depths, with nothing in the way of
excrescence but a tile-paved open-air dining-room at one end, and a
shady spot of similar construction at the other, getting his effects
from proportion. Something in the way of lawn and garden he was obliged
to have, and Mrs. Bland had insisted on a pergola. He fought the pergola
for a year or two, but Mrs. Bland had had her way. A country house
without a pergola, she said, was something she had never heard of. A
_sine quâ non_ was what she called it. So beyond the square of lawn with
its border of flowers the pergola stretched its row of trim white wooden
Doric pillars, while over the latticed roof and through it hung bine and
vine, grape, wistaria, and kadsu. Below the pergola the land broke to a
brook that gurgled through copses of alder, tangles of wild raspberry,
and clumps of blueberry and goldenrod, carrying the waters of the lake
to the Ashuelot, which bore them to the Connecticut, which swept them
southward, till quietly, and almost as unobserved by the human eye as
when they rose in the bosom of the hills, they fell into the sea.
As there was no other guest, Chip was allowed to do as he pleased. What
he pleased was chiefly to sit in the pergola, where the mauve petals of
the wistaria were dropping about him, and fill his gaze with the mystic
peace of the mountain. On Sunday morning the three Blands went to
church, leaving him in sole possession of this green, cool world, with
its quality of interpenetrating purity. He took a volume of some
ambassador's "Recollections" from his host's shelves of Victorian
memoirs; but he never opened it. He also took a cigar, but he didn't
smoke. He only looked--looked without effort, almost without
consciousness--up into the high wonderlands of peace, whence whatever
was brooding there seemed to steal into his soul and cleanse it. It was
this sense of cleansing that he carried back as a sort of possession to
New York--that and the fact imparted by Mrs. Bland during the afternoon,
regarded as unimportant, and yet retained, that Lily Bland was not their
niece.
He returned to Mountain Brook twice during that summer, and in June of
the following year. It was during this last visit that the girl who had
been to him hitherto no more than the living element of the background
gave him the impression that she was seeking an opportunity to speak to
him.
Throughout Saturday it had been an impression almost too faint to be
recorded; but it was significant to him that on Sunday morning she
didn't go to church. She shared the house with him, therefore, a fact of
which he was scarcely aware till he saw her in possession of the
pergola. With a book in her hand she had established herself in a chair
not far from that which by preference he had made his own. The act
roused his curiosity; but when he, too, had taken a book and strolled
out to join her, she didn't keep him in suspense.
She closed her novel as he approached, looking up at him with simple
directness. "I've something to tell you."
Behind the attention he gave to these words he registered the
observation that when you looked at her--which he had rarely done--you
saw she was pretty. Her white skin had a luminosity like that of satin,
and the mouth was sweet with a timid, apologetic tenderness. The glances
one got from her were almost too fleeting to show the color of the eyes,
but he knew they must be blue. Her hair had been striking to him from
the first, chiefly because it was of that hue for which there is no
English word, but which the French call _cendré_--ashen--something
between flaxen and brown, but with no relation to either--that might
have been bleached by a "treatment" only for its unmistakable gleam of
life. It waved naturally over the brows from a central parting, and
massed itself into a great coil behind. She was dressed simply in white
linen, with a belt of "watered" blue silk, and neat, pointed cuffs of
the same material.
Instinctively he knew that what she had to tell him must be important,
for otherwise she would not have come out of the shy depths into which,
like the Spirit of the Mountain, her life seemed to be withdrawn. What
it could be he was unable even to guess at. He smiled, however, and,
taking a casual tone so as not to strike too strong a note at first, he
said, as he sat down, "Have you?"
She continued to speak with the same simple directness. "It's about some
one you used to know."
He grew more grave. "Indeed? I should hardly have supposed that you
could know any one--whom I _used_ to know?"
"I do. I know--You won't mind my speaking right out, will you?"
"Of course not. Say anything you like."
"Well, I know Miss Maggie Clare."
"Great God!" He sank deeper into his wicker arm-chair, throwing one leg
over the other. He seemed to shrink away and to look up at her from
under his brows.
The shy serenity of her bearing was undisturbed. "I've got a message to
you from her."