Isolde's anguish mounted and mounted till it seemed as if it couldn't
mount any higher, and yet went on mounting. "Oh, well! She's toted it
up that you haven't got a home--that for three weeks after college
closes you'll be on the town--and so on."
"I see."
"All the same, come along. I'd just as soon. Dad won't be there hardly.
The old lady'll be booming about, but you needn't mind her. You'll have
your room and grub for those three weeks, and that's all you've got to
think about. Anyhow, it's bats in the attic with Hildred the minute it
comes to a lame dog."
While Guy's fat figure swayed over the piano, Isolde's great heart
broke. Tom went back to his room and wrote a second answer, regretting
that owing to the pressure of his engagements he would be unable....
And then there came another reaction. What did it matter if Hildred
Ansley _was_ opening the door out of pity? Pity was one of the
loveliest traits of character. Only a cad would resent it. He sent his
first reply.
Having done this, he felt it right to go and call on Mrs. Ansley. He
was sure she didn't want him in New Hampshire, but by taking it for
granted that she did he would discount some of her embarrassment.
As Mrs. Ansley was not at home Pilcher held out a little silver tray.
Tom understood that he should have had a card to put in it. A card was
something of which he had never hitherto felt the need. He said so to
Pilcher frankly.
Pilcher's stony medieval face, the face of a saint on the portal of
some primitive cathedral, smiled rarely, but when it did it smiled
engagingly.
"You'll find a visitin' card very 'andy, Mr. Tom, now that you're so
big. Mr. Guy has had one this long spell back."
It was a lead. In shy unobtrusive ways Pilcher had often shown himself
his friend. Tom confessed his yearning for a card if only he knew how
to order one.
"I'll show you one of Mr. Guy's. He always has the right thing. I'll
find out too where he gets them done. If you'll step in, Mr. Tom...."
As he waited in the dining room, with the good-natured Ansley ancestor
smiling down at him, there floated through Tom's mind a phrase from
the Bible as taught by Mrs. Tollivant. "The Lord sent His angel."
Wasn't that what He was doing now, and wasn't the angel taking
Pilcher's guise? When the heavenly messenger came back with the card
Tom went straight to his point.
"Pilcher, I wonder if you'd mind helping me?"
"I'd do it and welcome, Mr. Tom."
Mr. Tom told of his invitation to New Hampshire, and of his ignorance
of what to do and wear. If Pilcher would only give him a hint....
He could not have found a better guide. Pilcher explained that a few
little things had to be as second nature. A few other little things
were uncertain points as to which it was always permissible to ask. In
the way of second nature Tom would find sporting flannels and tennis
shoes an essential. So he would find a dinner-jacket suit, with the
right kind of shirt, collar, tie, shoes, and socks to wear with it. As
to things permissible to ask about, Pilcher could more easily explain
them when they were both in the same house. Occasions would crop up,
but could not be foreseen.
"The real gentry is ever afraid of showin' that they don't know. They
takes not knowin' as a joke. Many's the time when I've been waitin' at
table I've 'eard a born gentleman ask the born lady sittin' next to 'im
which'd be the right fork to use, and she'd say that she didn't know
but was lookin' round to see what other people done. That's what they
calls hease of manner, Mr. Tom."
Under the Ansley roof he would meet none but the gentry born. Any
one of them would respect him more for asking when he didn't know.
It was only the second class that bothered about being so terribly
correct, and they were not invited by Mrs. Ansley. In addition to
these consoling facts Tom could always fall back on him, Pilcher, as a
referee.
Being a guest in a community in which two years earlier he had been a
chauffeur Tom found easier than he had expected because he worked out a
formula. He framed his formula before going to New Hampshire.
"Servants are servants and masters are masters because they divide
themselves into classes. The one is above, and is recognized as being
above; the other is below, and is recognized as being below. I shall
be neither below nor above; or I shall be both. I will _not_ go into a
class. As far as I know how I'll be everybody's equal."
He had, however, to find another formula for this.
"You're everybody's equal when you know you are. Whatever you know
will go of itself. The trouble I see with the bumptious American, who
claims that he's as good as anybody else, is that he thinks only of
forcing himself to the level of the highest; he doesn't begin at the
bottom, and cover all the ground between the bottom and the top. I'm
going to do that. I shall be at home among the lot of them. To be at
home I must _feel_ at home. I mustn't condescend to the boys of two
years ago who'll still be driving cars, and I mustn't put on airs to
be fit for Mrs. Ansley's drawing-room. I must be myself. I mustn't
be ashamed because I've been in a humble position; and I mustn't be
swanky because I've been put in a better one. I must be natural; I must
be big. That'll give me the ease of manner Pilcher talks about."
With these principles as a basis of behavior, his embarrassments sprang
from another source. They began at the station in Keene. He knew he was
to be met; and he supposed it would be by Guy.
"Oh, here you are!"
She came on him suddenly in the crowd, tall, free in her movements,
always a little older than her age. If in the nearly two years since
their last meeting changes had come to him, more had apparently come
to her. She was a woman, while he was not yet a man. She was easy,
independent, taking the lead with natural authority. From the first
instant of shaking hands he felt in her something solicitous and
protective.
It showed itself in the little things as to which awkwardness or
diffidence on his part might have been presumed. So as not to leave him
in doubt of what he ought to do, she took the initiative with an air of
quiet, competent command. She led the way to the car; she told him to
throw his handbags and coat into the back part of it; she made him sit
beside her as she drove.
"No, I'm going to drive," she insisted, when he had offered to take the
wheel. "I want you to see how well I can do it. I like showing off.
This is my own car. I drove it all last summer."
They talked about cars and their makes because the topic was an easy
one.
Speeding out of Keene, they left behind them the meadows of the
Ashuelot to climb into a country with which Nature had been busy ever
since her first flaming forces had cooled down to form a world. Cooling
down and flinging up, she had tossed into the azoic age a tumble of
mountains higher doubtless than Andes or Alps. Barren, stupendous,
appalling, they would not have been easy for man, when he came, to live
with in comfort, had not the great Earth-Mother gone to some pains to
polish them down. Taking her leisure through eons of years, she brought
from the north her implement, the ice. Without haste, without rest, a
few inches in a century, she pushed it against the barrier she meant to
mold and penetrate.
As a dyke before the pressure of a flood, the barrier broke here, broke
there, and yet as a whole maintained itself. Heights were cut off
from heights. Valleys were carved between them. What was sharp became
rounded; what was jagged was worn smooth. The highest pinnacles crashed
down. When after thousands of years the glacial mass receded, only the
stumps were left of what had once been terrific primordial elevations.
Dense forests began to cover them. Lakes formed in the hollows. Little
rivers drained them, to be drained themselves by a nameless stream
which fell into a nameless sea. Through ages and ages the thrushes
sang, the wild bees hummed, and the bear, the deer, the fox, the lynx
ranged freely.
Man came. He came stealthily, unnoted, leaving so light a trace that
nothing remains to tell of his first passage but a few mysterious
syllables. The river once nameless became the Connecticut; the base of
a mighty primeval mountain bears the Nipmuck name Monadnock.
In this angle of New Hampshire thrust in between Massachusetts
and Vermont names are a living record. The Nipmuck disappeared in
proportion as the restless English colonists pushed farther and farther
from the sea. They came in little companies, generally urged by some
religious disagreement with those they had left behind. To escape
the "Congregational way" they fled into the mountains. There they
were free to follow the "Episcoparian way." As "Episcoparians" they
printed the map with names which enshrined their old-home memories.
Clustering within sight of the blue mass of Monadnock are neat white
towns--Marlborough, Richmond, Chesterfield, Walpole, Peterborough,
Fitzwilliam, Winchester--rich with "Episcoparian" suggestion.
In the early eighteenth century there came in another strain. Driven
by famine, a thousand pilgrims arrived in these relatively empty lands
from the North of Ireland, sturdy, strong-minded, Protestant. Grouping
themselves into three communities, they named them with Irish names,
Antrim, Hillsborough, Dublin. It was to Dublin that Tom and Hildred
were on the way.
The subject of cars exhausted, she swung to something else.
"You like the idea of going with Guy?"
"It's great."
"I like it too. I'd rather he was with you than with anybody. You
never make game of him, and yet you never humor him."
"What do you mean by that, that I never humor him?"
"Oh, well! Guy's standards aren't very high. We know that. But you
never lower yours."
"How do you know I don't?"
"Because Guy says so. Don't imagine for a minute that he doesn't see.
He likes you so much because he respects you."
"He respects a lot of other fellows too."
A little "H'm!" through pursed-up lips was a sign of dissent. "I
wonder. He goes with them, I know, and rather envies them, which is
what I mean by his standards not being very high; but--"
"Oh, Guy's all right. The fellows you speak of are sometimes a little
fresh; but he knows where to draw the line. He'll go to a certain
point; but you won't get him beyond it."
"And he owes that to you."
"Oh, no, he doesn't, not in the least."
"Well, _I_--" she held the personal pronoun for emphasis--"think he
does."
In this good opinion she was able to be firm because she seemed older
than he. In reality she was two years younger, but life in a larger
society had given her something of the tone of a woman of the world.
This development on her part disconcerted him. So long as she had been
the slip of a thing he remembered, prim, sedate, old-fashioned as the
term is applied to children, she had not been a factor in his relations
with the Ansley family. Now, suddenly, he saw her as the most
important factor of all. The emergence of personality troubled him.
Since she was obliged to keep her eyes on the turnings of the road, he
was able to study her in profile.
It was the first time he had really looked at a woman since he had
summed up Maisie in Nashua. That had been two months earlier. The
place which Maisie had so long held in his heart had been empty for
those two months, except for a great bitterness. It was the bitterness
of disillusion, of futility. Rage and pain were in it, with more of
mortification than there was of either. He would never again hear of
a cheap skate without thinking of the figure he had cut in the eyes
of the girl whom he thought he was honoring merely in being true. All
girls had been hateful to him since that day, just as all boys will be
to a dog who has been stoned by one of them. Yet here he was already
looking at a girl with something like fascination.
That was because fascination was the emotion she evoked. She was
strange; she was arresting. You wondered what she was like. You watched
her when she moved; you listened to her when she talked. Once you had
heard her voice, bell-like and crystalline, you would always be able to
recall it.
He noticed the way she was dressed because her knitted silk sweater was
of a pattern he had never seen before. It ran in horizontal dog-toothed
bands, shading from green to blue, and from blue to a dull red. Green
was the predominating color, grass-green, jade-green, sea-green,
sage-green, but toned to sobriety by this red of old brick, this
blue of indigo. Indigo was the short plain skirt, and the stockings
below it. An indigo tam-o'-shanter was pinned to her smooth, glossy,
bluish-black hair with a big carnelian pin. He remembered that he used
to think her Cambodian. He thought so again.
Having arrived at the house, they found no one but Pilcher to receive
them. Mrs. Ansley had gone out to tea; Mr. Guy had left word for Miss
Hildred to bring Mr. Tom to the club, where he was playing tennis.
"Do you care to go?"
Knowing that he couldn't spend three weeks in Dublin without facing
this invitation, he had decided in advance to accept it the first time
it came.
"If you go."
"All right; let's. But you'd like first to go to your room, wouldn't
you? Pilcher, take Mr. Whitelaw up. I'll wait here with the car. We'll
start as soon as you come down." Running up the stairs, he wondered
whether it would be the proper thing for him to change to his new white
flannels, when, as if divining his perplexity, she called after him.
"Come just as you are. Don't stop to put on other things. I'll go as I
am too."
This maternal foresight was again on guard as they turned from the road
into the driveway to the club.
"Do you want to come and be introduced to a lot of people, or would you
rather browse about by yourself? You can do whichever you like."
He replied with a suggestion. As a good many cars would be parked in
the narrow space of the club avenues, he thought she had better jump
out at the club steps, leaving him to find a space where the car could
stand. He would hang around there till Guy's game was over and the
party was ready to go home.
Having parked the car, he was in with the chauffeurs, some of whom
were old acquaintances. True to his formula, he went about among them,
shaking hands, and asking for their news. They were oddly alike, not
only in their dustcoats and chauffeurs' caps, but in features and cast
of mind.
"You got a job?" he was asked in his turn.
"Been taken on to travel with young Ansley. We stay here for three
weeks, and then go out west."
"Loot pretty good?"
"Oh, just about the same, and, of course, I get my expenses."
"Pretty soft, what?" came from an Englishman.
"Yes, but then it's only for the summer."
These duties done, he felt free to stroll off till he found a
convenient rock on which to sit by the lakeside. Lighting a cigarette,
he was glad of a half hour to himself in which to enjoy the scene. It
was a reposeful scene, because all that was human and sporting in it
was lost in the living spirit of the background.
It was what he had always felt in this particular landscape, and had
never been able to define till now--its quality of life. It was life of
another order from physical life, and on another plane. You might have
said that it reached you out of some phase of creation different from
that of Earth. These hills were living hills; this lake was a living
lake. Through them, as in the serene sky, a Presence shone and smiled
on you. He had often noticed, during the summer at the inn-club, that
you could sit idle and silent with that Presence, and not be bored. You
looked and looked; you thought and thought; you were bathed about in
tranquillity. People might be running around, and calling or shouting,
as they were doing now in the tennis courts on a ledge of the hillside
above him, not five hundred yards away, but they disturbed you no more
than the birds or the butterflies. The Presence was too immense, too
positive, to allow little things to trouble it. Rather, it took them
and absorbed them, as if the Supreme Activity, which for millions of
years before there was a man had been working to transform this spot
into a cup of overflowing loveliness, could use anything that came Its
way.
So he sat and smoked and thought and felt soothed. It was early enough
in the summer for the birds to be singing from all the wooded terraces
and the fringe of lakeside trees. Calls from the tennis courts, cries
from young people climbing on the raft in the lake or diving from the
spring-board, came to him softened and sweet. It was living peace,
invigorating, restful.