"My mind is full of other plans. Marriage is for most girls, but
not for all."
Enid had taken off her hat. In the low evening light Claude
studied her pale face under her brown hair. There was something
graceful and charming about the way she held her head, something
that suggested both submissiveness and great firmness. "I've had
those far-away dreams, too, Enid; but now my thoughts don't get
any further than you. If you could care ever so little for me to
start on, I'd be willing to risk the rest." She sighed. "You know
I care for you. I've never made any secret of it. But we're happy
as we are, aren't we?"
"No, I'm not. I've got to have some life of my own, or I'll go to
pieces. If you won't have me, I'll try South America,--and I
won't come back until I am an old man and you are an old woman."
Enid looked at him, and they both smiled.
The mill house was black except for a light in one upstairs
window. Claude sprang out of his car and lifted Enid gently to
the ground. She let him kiss her soft cool mouth, and her long
lashes. In the pale, dusty dusk, lit only by a few white stars,
and with the chill of the creek already in the air, she seemed to
Claude like a shivering little ghost come up from the rushes
where the old mill-dam used to be. A terrible melancholy clutched
at the boy's heart. He hadn't thought it would be like this. He
drove home feeling weak and broken. Was there nothing in the
world outside to answer to his own feelings, and was every turn
to be fresh disappointment? Why was life so mysteriously hard?
This country itself was sad, he thought, looking about him,-and
you could no more change that than you could change the story in
an unhappy human face. He wished to God he were sick again; the
world was too rough a place to get about in.
There was one person in the world who felt sorry for Claude that
night. Gladys Farmer sat at her bedroom window for a long while,
watching the stars and thinking about what she had seen plainly
enough that afternoon. She had liked Enid ever since they were
little girls,--and knew all there was to know about her. Claude
would become one of those dead people that moved about the
streets of Frankfort; everything that was Claude would perish,
and the shell of him would come and go and eat and sleep for
fifty years. Gladys had taught the children of many such dead
men. She had worked out a misty philosophy for herself, full of
strong convictions and confused figures. She believed that all
things which might make the world beautiful--love and kindness,
leisure and art--were shut up in prison, and that successful men
like Bayliss Wheeler held the keys. The generous ones, who would
let these things out to make people happy, were somehow weak, and
could not break the bars. Even her own little life was squeezed
into an unnatural shape by the domination of people like Bayliss.
She had not dared, for instance, to go to Omaha that spring for
the three performances of the Chicago Opera Company. Such an
extravagance would have aroused a corrective spirit in all her
friends, and in the schoolboard as well; they would probably have
decided not to give her the little increase in salary she counted
upon having next year.
There were people, even in Frankfort, who had imagination and
generous impulses, but they were all, she had to admit,
inefficient--failures. There was Miss Livingstone, the fiery,
emotional old maid who couldn't tell the truth; old Mr. Smith, a
lawyer without clients, who read Shakespeare and Dryden all day
long in his dusty office; Bobbie Jones, the effeminate drug
clerk, who wrote free verse and "movie" scenarios, and tended the
sodawater fountain.
Claude was her one hope. Ever since they graduated from High
School, all through the four years she had been teaching, she had
waited to see him emerge and prove himself. She wanted him to be
more successful than Bayliss AND STILL BE CLAUDE. She would have
made any sacrifice to help him on. If a strong boy like Claude,
so well endowed and so fearless, must fail, simply because he had
that finer strain in his nature,--then life was not worth the
chagrin it held for a passionate heart like hers.
At last Gladys threw herself upon the bed. If he married Enid,
that would be the end. He would go about strong and heavy, like
Mr. Royce; a big machine with the springs broken inside.