A SWOOP AND A SCRATCH
When Molly Stillwater heard that Margaret and her "wild man" had gone
into the woods for their honeymoon she said: "Rita's got to tame him and
train him for human society. So she's taken him where there are no
neighbors to hear him scream as--as--" Molly cast about in her stock of
slang for a phrase that was vigorous enough--"as she 'puts the boots'
to him."
It was a shrewd guess; Margaret had decided that she could do more
toward "civilizing" him in those few first weeks and in solitude than in
years of teaching at odd times. In China, at the marriage feast, the
bride and the groom each struggle to be first to sit on the robe of the
other; the idea is that the winner will thenceforth rule. As the Chinese
have been many ages at the business of living, the custom should not be
dismissed too summarily as mere vain and heathenish superstition. At any
rate, Margaret had reasoned it out that she must get the advantage in
the impending initial grapple and tussle of their individualities, or
choose between slavery and divorce. With him handicapped by awe of her,
by almost groveling respect for her ideas and feelings in all man and
woman matters, domestic and social, it seemed to her that she could be
worsted only by a miracle of stupidity on her part.
Never had he been so nearly "like an ordinary man--like a gentleman"--as
when they set out for the Adirondacks. She could scarcely believe her
own eyes, and she warmed to him and felt that she had been greatly
overestimating her task. He had on one of the suits he had bought ready
made that morning. It was of rough blue cloth--dark blue--most becoming
and well draped to show to advantage his lithe, powerful frame, its
sinews so much more manly-looking than the muscularity of artificially
got protuberances usually seen in the prosperous classes in our Eastern
cities. Grant had selected the suit, had selected all the suits, and had
superintended the fittings. Grant had also selected the negligee shirt
and the fashionable collar, and the bright, yet not gaudy, tie, and
Grant had selected the shoes that made his feet look like feet; and
Grant had conducted him to a proper barber, who had reduced the mop of
hair to proportion and order, and had restored its natural color and
look of vitality by a thorough shampooing. In brief, Grant had taken a
gloomy pleasure in putting his successful rival through the machine of
civilization and bringing him out a city man, agreeable to sight, smell
and touch.
"Now," said he, when the process was finished, "for Heaven's sake try to
keep yourself up to the mark. Take a cold bath every morning and a warm
bath before dinner."
"I have been taking a cold bath every day since I got my private
bathroom," said Joshua, with honest pride.
"Then you're just as dirty as the average Englishman. He takes a cold
bath and fancies he's clean, when in fact he's only clean-looking. Cold
water merely stimulates. It takes warm water and soap to keep a man
clean."
"I'll bear that in mind," said Craig, with a docility that flattered
Grant as kindly attentions from a fierce-looking dog flatter the timid
stranger.
"And you must take care of your clothes, too," proceeded the arbiter
elegantiarum. "Fold your trousers when you take them off, and have them
pressed. Get your hair cut once a week--have a regular day for it. Trim
your nails twice a week. I've got you a safety razor. Shave at least
once a day--first thing after you get out of bed is the best time. And
change your linen every day. Don't think because a shirt isn't downright
dirty that you can pass it off for fresh."
"Just write those things down," said Josh. "And any others of the same
kind you happen to think of. I hate to think what a state I'd be in if I
hadn't you. Don't imagine I'm not appreciating the self-sacrifice."
Grant looked sheepish. But he felt that his shame was unwarranted, that
he really deserved Craig's tactless praise. So he observed virtuously:
"That's where we men are beyond the women. Now, if it were one woman
fixing up another, the chances are a thousand to one she'd play the cat,
and get clothes and give suggestions that'd mean ruin."
It may not speak well for Arkwright's capacity for emotion, but it
certainly speaks well for his amiability and philanthropy that doing
these things for Craig had so far enlisted him that he was almost as
anxious as the fluttered and flustered bridegroom himself for the
success of the adventure. He wished he could go along, in disguise, as a
sort of valet and prime minister--to be ever near Josh to coach and
advise and guide him. For it seemed to him that success or failure in
this honeymooning hung upon the success or failure of Craig in
practising the precepts that for Grant and his kind take precedence of
the moral code. He spent an earnest and exhausting hour in neatly and
carefully writing out the instructions, as Craig had requested. He
performed this service with a gravity that would move some people to the
same sort of laughter and wonder that is excited by the human doings of
a trained chimpanzee. But Craig--the wild man, the arch foe of
effeteness, the apostle of the simple life of yarn sock and tallowed
boot and homespun pants and hairy jaw--Craig accepted the service with
heartfelt thanks in his shaking voice and moist eye.
Thus the opening of the honeymoon was most auspicious. Craig, too much
in awe of Margaret to bother her, and busy about matters that concerned
himself alone, was a model of caution, restraint and civility. Margaret,
apparently calm, aloof and ladylike, was really watching his discreet
conduct as a hawk watches a sheltered hen; she began to indulge in
pleasant hopes that Joshua's wild days had come to an abrupt end. Why,
he was even restrained in conversation; he did not interrupt her often,
instantly apologized and forebore when he did; he poured out none of his
wonted sophomoric diatribes, sometimes sensible, more often inane, as
the prattle of a great man in his hour of relaxation is apt to be. She
had to do most of the talking--and you may be sure that she directed her
conversation to conveying under an appearance of lightness many valuable
lessons in the true wisdom of life as it is revealed only to the
fashionable idle. She was careful not to overdo, not to provoke, above
all not to put him at his ease.
Her fiction of ill health, of threatened nervous prostration, also
served to free her from an overdose of his society during the long and
difficult days in that eventless solitude. He was all for arduous tramps
through the woods, for excursions in canoe under the fierce sun. She
insisted on his enjoying himself--"but I don't feel equal to any such
exertion. I simply must rest and take care of myself." She was somewhat
surprised at his simplicity in believing her health was anything but
robust, when her appearance gave the lie direct to her hints and
regrets. While he was off with one of the guides she stayed at camp,
reading, working at herself with the aid of Selina, revolving and
maturing her plans.
When she saw him she saw him at his best. He showed up especially well
at swimming. She was a notable figure herself in bathing suit, and could
swim in a nice, ladylike way; but he was a water creature--indeed,
seemed more at home in the water than on land. She liked to watch his
long, strong, narrow body cut the surface of the transparent lake with
no loss of energy in splashing or display--as easy and swift as a fish.
She began to fear she had made a mistake in selecting a place for her
school for a husband, "He's in his element--this wilderness," thought
she, "not mine. I'll take him back with everything still to be done."
And, worst of all, she found herself losing her sense of proportion, her
respect for her fashionable idols. Those vast woods, that infinite
summer sky--they were giving her a new and far from practical point of
view--especially upon the petty trickeries and posturings of the
ludicrously self-important human specks that crawl about upon the earth
and hastily begin to act queer and absurd as soon as they come in sight
of each other. She found herself rapidly developing that latent
"sentimentality" which her grandmother had so often rebuked and warned
her against--which Lucia had insisted was her real self. Her
imagination beat the bars of the cage of convention in which she had
imprisoned it, and cried out for free, large, natural emotions--those
that make the blood leap and the flesh tingle, that put music in the
voice and softness in the glance and the intense joy of life in the
heart. And she began to revolve him before eyes that searched hopefully
for possibilities of his giving her precisely what her nerves craved.
"It would be queer, wouldn't it," she mused--she was watching him
swim--"if it should turn out that I had come up here to learn, instead
of to teach?"
And he--In large presences he was always at his best--in the large
situations of affairs, in these large, tranquillizing horizons of
nature. He, too, began to forget that she was a refined, delicate,
sensitive lady, with nerves that writhed under breaks in manners and
could in no wise endure a slip in grammar, unless, of course, it was one
of those indorsed by fashionable usage. His health came flooding and
roaring back in its fullness; and day by day the difficulty of
restraining himself from loud laughter and strong, plebeian action
became more appalling to him. He would leave the camp, set off at a run
as soon as he got safely out of sight; and, when he was sure of
seclusion in distance, he would "cut loose"--yell and laugh and caper
like a true madman; tear off his superfluous clothes, splash and thresh
in some lonely lake like a baby whale that has not yet had the primary
lessons in how to behave. When he returned to camp, subdued in manner,
like a bad boy after recess, he was, in fact, not one bit subdued
beneath the surface, but the more fractious for his outburst. Each day
his animal spirits surged higher; each day her sway of awe and respect
grew more precarious. She thought his increasing silence, his really
ridiculous formality of politeness, his stammering and red-cheeked dread
of intrusion meant a deepening of the sense of the social gulf that
rolled between them. She recalled their conversation about his
relatives. "Poor fellow!" thought she. "I suppose it's quite impossible
for people of my sort to realize what a man of his birth and bringing up
feels in circumstances like these." Little did she dream, in her
exaltation of self-complacence and superiority, that the "poor fellow's"
clumsy formalities were the thin cover for a tempest of wild-man's wild
emotion.
Curiously, she "got on" his nerves before he on hers. It was through her
habit of rising late and taking hours to dress. Part of his code of
conduct--an interpolation of his own into the Arkwright manual for a
honeymooning gentleman--was that he ought to wait until she was ready to
breakfast, before breakfasting himself. Several mornings she heard
tempestuous sounds round the camp for two hours before she emerged from
her room. She knew these sounds came from him, though all was quiet as
soon as she appeared; and she very soon thought out the reason for his
uproar. Next, his anger could not subdue itself beyond surliness on her
appearing, and the surliness lasted through the first part of breakfast.
Finally, one morning she heard him calling her when she was about
half-way through her leisurely toilette: "Margaret! MARGARET!"
"Yes--what is it?"
"Do come out. You're missing the best part of the day."
"All right--in a minute."
She continued with, if anything, a slackening of her exertions; she
appeared about an hour after she had said "in a minute." He was ready to
speak, and speak sharply. But one glance at her, at the exquisite
toilette--of the woods, yet of the civilization that dwells in palaces
and reposes languidly upon the exertions of menials--at her cooling,
subduing eyes, so graciously haughty--and he shut his lips together and
subsided.
The next morning it was a knock at her door just as she was waking--or
had it waked her? "Yes--what is it?"
"Do come out! I'm half starved."
The voice was pleading, not at all commanding, not at all the
aggressive, dictatorial voice of the Josh Craig of less than a month
before. But it was distinctly reminiscent of that Craig; it was plainly
the first faint murmur, not of rebellion, but of the spirit of
rebellion. Margaret retorted with an icily polite, "Please don't wait
for me."
"Yes, I'll wait. But be as quick as you can."
Margaret neither hastened nor dallied. She came forth at the end of an
hour and a half. Josh, to her surprise, greeted her as if she had not
kept him waiting an instant; not a glance of sullenness, no suppressed
irritation in his voice. Next morning the knock was a summons.
"Margaret! I say, Margaret!" came in tones made bold and fierce by
hunger. "I've been waiting nearly two hours."
"For what?" inquired she frigidly from the other side of the door.
"For breakfast."
"Oh! Go ahead with it. I'm not even up yet."
"You've been shut in there ten hours."
"What of it?" retorted she sharply. "Go away, and don't bother me."
He had put her into such an ill humor that when she came out, two hours
later, her stormy brow, her gleaming hazel eyes showed she was "looking
for trouble." He was still breakfastless--he well knew how to manipulate
his weaknesses so that his purposes could cow them, could even use them.
He answered her lowering glance with a flash of his blue-green eyes like
lightning from the dark head of a thunder-cloud. "Do you know it is nine
o'clock?" demanded he.
"So early? I try to get up late so that the days won't seem so long."
He abandoned the field to her, and she thought him permanently beaten.
She had yet to learn the depths of his sagacity that never gave battle
until the time was auspicious.
Two mornings later he returned to the attack.
"I see your light burning every night until midnight," said he--at
breakfast with her, after the usual wait.
"I read myself to sleep," explained she.
"Do you think that's good for you?"
"I don't notice any ill effects."
"You say your health doesn't improve as rapidly as you hoped."
Check! She reddened with guilt and exasperation. "What a sly trick!"
thought she. She answered him with a cold: "I always have read myself to
sleep, and I fancy I always shall."
"If you went to sleep earlier," observed he, his air unmistakably that
of the victor conscious of victory, "you'd not keep me raging round two
or three hours for breakfast."
"How often I've asked you not to wait for me! I prefer to breakfast
alone, anyhow. It's the dreadful habit of breakfasting together that
causes people to get on together so badly."
"I'd not feel right," said he, moderately, but firmly, "if I didn't see
you at breakfast."
She sat silent--thinking. He felt what she was thinking--how common this
was, how "middle class," how "bourgeois," she was calling it.
"Bourgeois" was her favorite word for all that she objected to in him,
for all she was trying to train out of him by what she regarded as most
artistically indirect lessons. He felt that their talk about his family,
what he had said, had shown he felt, was recurring to her. He grew red,
burned with shame from head to foot.
"What a fool, what a pup I was!" he said to himself. "If she had been a
real lady--no, by gad--a real WOMAN--she'd have shown that she despised
me."
Again and again that incident had come back to him. It had been,
perhaps, the most powerful factor in his patience with her airs and
condescensions. He felt that it, the lowest dip of his degradation in
snobism, had given her the right to keep him in his place. It seemed to
him one of those frightful crimes against self-respect which can never
be atoned, and, bad as he thought it from the standpoint of good sense
as to the way to get on with her, he suffered far more because it was
such a stinging, scoffing denial of all his pretenses of personal pride.
"Her sensibilities have been too blunted by association with those
Washington vulgarians," he reasoned, "for her to realize the enormity of
my offense, but she realizes enough to look down at me more
contemptuously every time she recalls it." However, the greater the
blunder the greater the necessity of repairing. He resolutely thrust his
self-abasing thoughts to the background of his mind, and began afresh.
"I'm sure," said he, "you'd not mind, once you got used to it."
She was startled out of her abstraction. "Used to--what?" she inquired.
"To getting up early."
"Oh!" She gave a relieved laugh. "Still harping on that. How persistent
you are!"
"You could accomplish twice as much if you got up early and made a right
start."
She frowned slightly. "Couldn't think of it," said she, in the tone of
one whose forbearance is about at an end. "I hate the early morning."
"We usually hate what's best for us. But, if we're sensible, we do it
until it becomes a habit that we don't mind--or positively like."
This philosophy of the indisputable and the sensible brimmed the
measure. "What would you think of me," said she, in her pleasantest,
most deliberately irritating way in the world, "if I were to insist that
you get up late and breakfast late? You should learn to let live as well
as to live. You are too fond of trying to compel everybody to do as you
wish."
"I make 'em see that what I wish is what they ought. That's not
compelling."
"It's even more unpopular."
"I'm not looking for popularity, but for success."
"Well, please don't annoy me in the mornings hereafter."
"You don't seem to realize you've renounced your foolish idlers and all
their ways, and have joined the working classes." His good humor had
come back with breakfast; he had finished two large trout, much bread
and marmalade and coffee--and it had given her a pleasure that somehow
seemed vulgar and forbidden to see him eat so vastly, with such obvious
delight. As he made his jest about her entry into the working
classes--she who suggested a queen bee, to employ the labors of a whole
army of willing toilers, while she herself toiled not--he was tilted
back at his ease, smoking a cigarette and watching the sunbeams sparkle
in the waves of her black hair like jewels showered there. "You're
surely quite well again," he went on, the trend of his thought so hidden
that he did not see it himself.
"I don't feel especially well," said she, instantly on guard.
He laughed. "You'd not dare say that to yourself in the mirror. You have
wonderful color. Your eyes--there never was anything so clear. You were
always straight--that was one of the things I admired about you. But
now, you seem to be straight without the slightest effort--the natural
straightness of a sapling."
This was most agreeable, for she loved compliments, liked to discover
that the charms which she herself saw in herself were really there. But
encouraging such talk was not compatible with the course she had laid
out for herself with him. She continued silent and cold.
"If you'd only go to sleep early, and get up early, and drop all that
the railway train carried us away from, you'd be as happy as the birds
and the deer and the fish."
"I shall not change my habits," said she tartly. "I hope you'll drop the
subject."
He leaned across the table toward her, the same charm now in his face
and in his voice that had drawn her when she first heard him in public
speech. "Let's suppose I'm a woodchopper, and you are my wife. We've
never been anywhere but just here. We're going to live here all our
lives--just you and I--and no one else--and we don't want any one else.
And we love each other--"
It was very alluring, but there was duty frowning upon her yielding
senses. "Please don't let that smoke drift into my face," said she
crossly. "It's choking me."
He flung away the cigarette. "Beg pardon," he muttered, between anger
and humility. "Thought you didn't mind smoking."
She was ashamed of herself, and grew still angrier. "If you'd only think
about some one beside yourself once in a while," said she. "You quite
wear people out, with your everlasting thinking and talking about
yourself."
"You'd better stop that midnight reading," flared he. "Your temper is
going to the devil."
She rose with great dignity; with an expression that seemed to send him
tumbling and her soaring she went into the house.
In some moods he would have lain where he fell for quite a while. But
his mood of delight in her charms as a woman had completely eclipsed his
deference for her charms as a lady. He hesitated only a second, then
followed her, overtook her at the entrance to her room. She, hearing him
coming, did not face about and put him back in his place with one
haughty look. Instead, she in impulsive, most ill-timed panic, quickened
her step. When the woman flees, the man, if there be any manhood in him,
pursues. He caught her, held her fast.
"Let me go!" she cried, not with the compelling force of offended
dignity, but with the hysterical ineffectiveness of terror. "You are
rough. You hurt."
He laughed, turned her about in his arms until she was facing him. "The
odor of those pines, out there," he said, "makes me drunk, and the odor
of your hair makes me insane." And he was kissing her--those fierce,
strong caresses that at once repelled and compelled her.
"I hate you!" she panted. "I hate you!"
"Oh, no, you don't," retorted he. "That isn't what's in your eyes." And
he held her so tightly that she was almost crying out with pain.
"Please--please!" she gasped. And she wrenched to free herself. One of
his hands slipped, his nail tore a long gash in her neck; the blood
spurted out, she gave a loud cry, an exaggerated cry--for the pain,
somehow, had a certain pleasure in it. He released her, stared vacantly
at the wound he had made. She rushed into her room, slammed the door and
locked it.
"Margaret!" he implored.
She did not answer; he knew she would not. He sat miserably at her door
for an hour, then wandered out into the woods, and stayed there until
dinner-time.
When he came in she was sitting by the lake, reading a French novel. To
him, who knew only his own language, there was something peculiarly
refined and elegant about her ability at French; he thought, as did she,
that she spoke French like a native, though, in fact, her accent was
almost British, and her understanding of it was just about what can be
expected in a person who has never made a thorough study of any
language. As he advanced toward her she seemed unconscious of his
presence. But she was seeing him distinctly, and so ludicrous a figure
of shy and sheepish contrition was he making that she with difficulty
restrained her laughter. He glanced guiltily at the long, red scratch on
the pallid whiteness of her throat.
"I'm ashamed of myself," said he humbly. "I'm not fit to touch a person
like you. I--I--"
She was not so mean as she had thought she would be. "It was nothing,"
said she pleasantly, if distantly. "Is dinner ready?"
Once more she had him where she wished--abject, apologetic, conscious of
the high honor of merely being permitted to associate with her. She
could relax and unbend again; she was safe from his cyclones.