BREASTING THE GALE
In the radiant moonlight I saw the lithe muscles of the Jaguar grow taut
and stiff, and I felt rather than saw his long, strong hands clench
themselves. I was about to stretch out my arms and ward off something
that seemed like danger to Nickols, standing down at the bottom of the
steps, smiling up at us in the moonlight with his mocking, fascinating
smile, when suddenly the anger seemed to flow away from the body of the
parson and he smiled down into the upturned eyes with great gentleness
as we started down the steps together.
"I didn't interrupt the salvation of Charlotte's soul, did I?" Nickols
asked, as he took my outstretched hand in his left hand and raised it to
his lips as he held out his right to the Reverend Mr. Goodloe. So real
had been that fraction of an instant when I had stood between the two
men that I almost felt the sensation of alarm a second time as I saw
Nickols' slender, magical, artist's fingers laid in the slim, powerful
hand of the Reverend Mr. Goodloe, but the gentle voice reassured me as
the Harpeth Jaguar answered the intruder, or what he must have felt to
be the intruder, for I had something of that feeling myself at the
advent of my lover at the moment he had chosen for his arrival.
"The trouble began about apple dumplings and hard sauce," I said, as
quickly as my wits would act.
"How are you, Nickols Powers, since we separated 'somewhere in France,'
you with your sketch books and I with my hospital stretchers? I got a
dandy lung clip; did you bring away any lead?" And the parson's voice
was gentle and cordial and full of a laughing reminiscence.
"Didn't smell powder after I left you," answered Nickols, as we all
ascended the steps and stood in a group before the door. "I got my books
full of sketches of bits of treasures that the war might destroy, and
beat it back to civilization. Did the Madonna of the Red Cross you had
in tow come across as sentimentally as was threatened?" Nickols' voice
was as cordial as the Reverend Goodloe's, but something in me made me
resent the question and the manner it was asked.
"She was killed in a field hospital just a few weeks after we left
her--'somewhere in France.' She got God's welcome!" was the answer that
came to the laughing question in a quiet, reverent voice. And as he
spoke the parson started down the steps, then turned for his farewell.
"That--or sweet oblivion," said Nickols, as he came to the edge of the
steps and looked down at the Harpeth Jaguar coolly. I again got the
sense of danger from the tall, lithe figure that stood in the moonlight,
radiant before us in the shadow. "We'll contest that point warmly while
we contest the meeting house Charlotte writes me that you planted in our
garden--of Eden."
"I can contest--if I must," was the serene answer that came back at us
from over the white silk-clad shoulder. "Good night, both of you, and I
hope to see you both again soon. Smell the lilacs bursting bud in your
garden--of Eden!" With which farewell he left us to our greetings.
"That's some man to be lost in the ranks of the shibboleths," said
Nickols with generous ease, as we watched the last glint of the moon on
the yellow head disappearing around the corner. "Degrees from three old
colleges, millions, women lovers in millions, all thrown away to sing
psalms for a few rustics in little old Goodloets. Can you beat it? But,
blast him, he can't take away my loving welcome with his fatal beauty,"
and as he spoke, with a tender laugh Nickols held out his arms to me. I
went into them and he held me close.
"I couldn't stay away--with Goodloe and the meeting house in the ring
against me," he whispered, and he tried to raise my head for the kiss I
had been holding from him all the long winter of our engagement,
claiming to want it only under the roof of the Poplars. I burrowed my
face in his shoulder and held to him with such fervor that it was
impossible for him to raise my head.
"Not yet," was my muffled pleading.
"Again, damn that huge blond giant for being in the way of my getting my
own on the first-sight wave," said Nickols with a good-humored laugh, as
he pushed me from him. "Take your time. I like ripe fruit--and kisses.
Did you say Goodloe had come over to steal apple dumplings and you had
caught him in the act? I never was so hungry before and one of Mrs.
Dabney's apple dumplings with that hard sugar stuff smothered with
cream--well, of course I could wait until breakfast, but I'd be mighty
weak. Your night train carries no dining car."
"I feel sure that there is at least a half panful in the pantry; let's
go see," I answered with delight at the practical turn the scene had
taken, and I led him into the dark house, turned on one or two lights
and went with him back into the culinary department of the Poplars.
And as I had predicted so we found the larder supplied. With a huge
plate of the pastry encrusted apples, smothered with all the cream from
one of Mammy's pans of milk, and a tall bottle from the sideboard,
Nickols led the way out of the long windows onto the south balcony over
which the moon, now high in the heavens, poured the radiance of a
new-toned daylight. I followed him with some glasses and sugar and a
bowl of cracked ice that I had found in its usual place in the corner of
the refrigerator.
"Pretty good substitute for the affectionate sweet I thought of all the
way down from New York," said Nickols with an adorable laugh, as he
lifted the first spoonful, dripping with cream, to his mouth. Then with
the food almost bestowed he paused and looked out beyond the garden
toward the chapel, which loomed up gray and shimmering in the silver
light.
"Great heavens!" he ejaculated, and for a long minute the spoon was
poised while his eyes fairly devoured the scene spread out before him
against the background of Paradise Ridge.
"If you don't like it we can get rid of it," I said, as I poured his
drink over the ice tinkling against the side of the glass.
"Not like it!" exclaimed Nickols, as he rose with the spoonful of
dumplings dashed back into the plate. "That is the most wonderful and
beautiful landscape effect I have ever beheld. That is just what our
garden needed. I suppose I would have seen it and put some sort of a
pavilion there, but that squat and perfect old church would have been
beyond me."
"Oh, I'm glad!" I exclaimed, as he sank back on the step beside me, took
the glass from my hand, drank deeply and this time began a determined
attack upon the plate in his hand. And then as he ate I told him all
about father and his plans for the garden and his own improvement and to
what I hoped the work was leading him. But somehow I couldn't bring
myself to describe the scene which had that night been enacted in the
garden--I couldn't. "Oh, I am so glad you are not furious and will maybe
be willing to encourage him, even if it does mean to encourage the
Methodist Church and the minister thereof. You are wonderful, Nickols,"
I finished with a squeeze of his arm that very nearly jostled the cream
out of the spoon upon his gray tweed trousers.
"I'd be a wonderful ass not to take advantage of Judge Nickols Powers'
brain and money, plus Gregory Goodloe's brain and training and money
combined, to get a result that will be worth a hundred thousand dollars
to me and all the fame I can conveniently wear. Encourage 'em? Just
watch me! Only what the judge thinks will take two years can be done in
one season if we get experts down to do it, which we will. Trees two
hundred years old _can_ be moved for a few thousand dollars, as well as
plants in bloom that would require years to transplant. I know the man
to do it: Wilkerson of White Plains. I'll telegraph him in the
morning."
"He won't interfere with--with father, will he?" I asked anxiously.
"Not a bit--he'll just make what the judge and Gregory plan for year
after next, grow and bloom there in a couple of months. Wilkerson is not
a creator, he's just nature keyed up to the _n_th power. And also I'll
give him for a bait the Jeffries estate I was hesitating about making a
bid for. All the big fellows are after it. Old man Jeffries has made two
barrels of money in the last ten years in oil and he is going to build
an estate up on the Hudson that will make the world gasp. I hadn't put
in a bid, but this idea of the judge's and Greg's, with the whole
village grouped about it, has given me the keynote to win the thing from
the whole bunch of American architects. He wants the village built as
well as the estate. That American garden idea will bowl him over. He's
progressively and rabidly American. The bids don't close until December,
so I'll have time to get real photographs and sketches. Me for the
reformed judge and the parson!"
"This is the most wonderful thing I ever heard and I want father pushed
to the limit with the planning. I don't care where the parson comes in,
just so I don't have to join the church to get the garden," I said, as I
tinkled the ice in Nickols' empty glass, while he consumed the last bit
of cream from the empty plate.
"Oh, I'll join the church if it is needed to push the garden," said
Nickols with a laugh, as he lit a cigarette and puffed a smoke ring out
toward the gray little chapel. "Most people who join churches do it for
some kind of pull, social or business, or a respectability stamp or to
be white-washed. I'll put on a frock coat and pass the plate if it will
help the parson evolve another phase of gardenism."
"Billy gets home from his poker game at the Last Chance, down in the
Settlement, on Sunday morning, just in time to bathe and get into his
frock coat to perform that office," I said with a laugh that had a hint
of recklessness tinged with contempt.
"I'll see Billy through both ceremonials," said Nickols. "Has Billy come
into the fold?"
"He has! So have all the rest," I answered. "I am the only black sheep
and they are all backsliding down on me. I am getting, and will get,
the blame of it all as a corrupter of public morals."
"Why don't you join and then do as you please with the official stamp of
Christianity upon you?" Nickols asked, as he puffed comfortably away in
the moonlight.
One of the things that cause me the deepest hurt is to try to get
Nickols to look down into my depths and read one, just any one, of the
hieroglyphics there. I know each time I open my nature to him he is
going to turn aside, and yet I will try. As his arm stole around me I
made another one of the attempts that I always know beforehand are
doomed to failure.
"There is something in me, a quality of mind that seems to be judicial,
which insists that as a cold scheme for existence in this universe
nothing compares with that of life followed by eternal redemption
through personal effort interpreted by a mediator. The bare Christian
tenets have a nobility that it kills me to see belittled by the bored,
half-hearted observances of most of its protestants, who in turn are not
to be blamed for being half-hearted and bored by the dogmas and
restrictions and littleness with which the great bare scheme has been
enmeshed and clothed. The Methodist Church positively forbids Billy to
play poker or drink, but it just as positively forbids him to see
Pavlowa dance or Beerbohm Tree play Falstaff or Forbes Robertson
incarnate Hamlet. And look at its wretched machinery--they allow a young
man to give his life and expect inspiration from him at six hundred
dollars a year with a wife and two dozen children, which he has been
encouraged to bring down upon himself, dependent on that same six
hundred dollars. The great men who are expected to direct our spiritual
destinies don't get as much money as many ordinary grocers and certainly
not enough to support their obligations with dignity. What is true of
the Methodist Church is true of all the rest, in perhaps a greater
degree. So with their smallness and their pettiness and their befogging
stupidity I feel that they may be denying thinkers like you and me the
use of their scheme and we'll have to find another for ourselves if we
want immortality."
"Do we want that immortality?" asked Nickols easily. "This world is a
pretty good old place if you don't regard the 'shalt nots,' but isn't it
long enough to live the allotted time? What do we want to do it all
over again for, that is, provided we do all the pleasant things while we
have the chance? I don't want to see any play twice, even a masterpiece.
I wouldn't want to live again unless I had been a Christian in this life
and felt that I wanted to come back and do a lot of the things I had
just heard about and previously hadn't tried."
"Certainly I wouldn't want another life that is as unsatisfied as this,"
I murmured, more to myself than to Nickols.
"Do the things that satisfy," he urged again, and I could see a deviltry
dancing at me out of the corner of his eyes that I resented deeply
without exactly knowing why.
"Harriet Henderson can't get Mark Morgan's love or--his children, and
Nell Morgan is unattainable for Billy. Though they have all the world's
goods and go a pace that pleases them, they are unsatisfied. If they
don't get the new deal that immortality promises they lose the whole
thing," I answered straight out from the shoulder. "And what about those
who die in infancy and--and you and me?"
"If you'll just kiss me and hush preaching to me I'll be entirely
satisfied and ready to die as soon as I have lifted that fifty thousand
out of old Jeffries with the judge's and the Reverend Gregory's garden
and done a few more commissions. Try kissing me and see if you don't
feel more cheerful," Nickols answered with a laugh, as he drew me close
to him. I sadly shut up the doors of my depths, warded off the
kiss--why, I didn't know--and persuaded him to go up to his rooms which
I had seen Sallie and Dabney put in order that afternoon.
It was midnight when I parted with Nickols at the head of the old
winding stairs in the fragrant darkness, lit only by the silver light of
the night from a long window at the front of the hall. He held me close
for a half second as he whispered:
"Let me make you happy. I understand."
"I don't understand, and until I do I'd make you miserable, dear," I
whispered back as I drew myself out of his reluctant arms and went into
my own door.
Then for a long midnight hour I stood at my deep window and looked out
over the garden, past the squat steeple silvering beyond the lilac
hedge, to Paradise Ridge in the dim distance, and tried to read my own
hieroglyphics. I needed help. Nickols had come after me to Goodloets in
a spirit of gentle determination and I knew the fight would be to the
finish. And why should I fight? Any woman ought to be proud to marry
Nickols Morris Powers, especially a woman who had loved him since her
heart had been developed to the knowledge of love. Very unostentatiously
and with perfect good taste Nickols had let me see that Marie VanClive
with her Knickerbocker ancestry and her Manhattan land-grants fortune
was very decidedly interested in him in her cultured and perfected young
way, and young Mrs. Houston had herself shown me the same thing on one
of the week-end flights we had had on her yacht. And beyond all that my
own heart told me that Nickols was desirable. His gentleness and his
tenderness and his daring and his humor were irresistible to a woman.
And his lazy acquiescence in life was peaceful and inviting to my own
strenuosity. I felt as if I had always been an eagle breasting the gale
with no place to alight, and now Nickols was calling to me from an
eyrie on a mountain side to come and rest and be mated and comforted.
"I'm tired of loneliness and I think I'll drift and be happy," I
murmured, as I fell asleep with my back to the silver steeple against
the dim hills.