The hour between seven and eight was a lively one in the upper
corridor. There was only one bathroom on the second floor. Scores and
Miss Gold took their morning plunge in the lake, but the rest preferred
the less drastic shower, and there was a continual darting to and fro
of forms clad in bath-robe or kimono; the vanquished peeping through
door-cracks waiting for the bathroom door to open--signal for another
wild rush down the hall, a scuffle at the door, a triumphant slam and
hoot, and loud vituperations from the defeated. Mary cannily waited
until the last, and came down, clad in a white sweater and heavy white
tweed skirt, after the others had cleared the generous platter of ham
and eggs, and the mountain of corn bread was a hillock of crumbs.
"Oh, Mary!" said Mr. Dinwiddie, reprovingly, "and you as prompt as
royalty. In camp----"
"I've no thought of going without my breakfast," said Mary
unrepentantly. "Ring the bell, Din."
The men had risen, but Clavering alone had determination in his eye.
He pulled out a chair beside his own, and Mary accepted it gracefully,
waving a morning greeting to the others.
"How good of you to keep this chair for me, Mr. Clavering," she
murmured. "It is shocking of me to be so lazy."
"I'm sick of this game," growled Clavering. "If you act today----"
"Shh! I am sure you are going to take me out on the lake immediately
after breakfast."
His amiability was immediately restored, but his gaiety was somewhat
forced. "You are looking charming this morning, Miss Ogden. I wished
last night that there was a guitar or even a banjo in the camp, that I
might serenade beneath your window."
And Mary actually blushed. She had slept dreamlessly, and between the
light mountain air and her new rôle, she felt as light-hearted as Eva
Darling, who was holding Mr. Dinwiddie's hand openly.
"Oh, Excellence!" cried Mrs. Minor from the other end of the table.
"What do you say to having a picnic lunch? Didn't you tell me that you
knew of a lovely gorge about six miles from here? Steak broiled
between forked sticks! Potatoes roasted in the ashes! Flapjacks!
Heavenly."
"Anything you say," replied Mr. Dinwiddie rather tonelessly. "Want to
put it to the vote?"
"Let me answer for the crowd," commanded Todd. "It is our duty when in
the woods to eat our meals after as much unnecessary toil, and to enjoy
as much discomfort, as is humanly possible. Otherwise we might as well
stay in town. We'll hilariously tramp six miles with packs, sit on the
damp ground, extract earwigs, eat burnt steak and half-cooked potatoes,
and then tramp back again, our spirits gradually rising at the prospect
of a decent meal eaten in comfort----"
"Kill-joy!" cried Minor. "Don't we come to the woods to tramp? I want
to lose twenty pounds this trip, and if you don't you ought to. I vote
we make Rolly carry a sack of potatoes."
"It's agreed then?" asked Mr. Dinwiddie, veiling his hope that it was
not. But the assent was general. They were all as excited over the
prospect of a picnic as if they were slum children about to enjoy their
first charitable outing, and it was settled that they were to start at
ten o'clock. Mrs. Minor and Miss Gold went into the kitchen to help
Mrs. Larsing make sandwiches and salads, and the others ran down to the
lake.
L
Clavering had tied the boat to a tree in a little inlet far down the
lake, and they were walking through a wood of spruce trees and balsam.
There was no leafy curtain here, although they could see one swaying on
either side through open vistas between the rigid columns of the spruce.
A trail was hardly necessary for there was no undergrowth, and although
the trees were set close together they were easily circumnavigated.
It was some time since they had spoken. His face was graver than she had
ever seen it, and she waited for him to speak. She almost could feel
those unuttered words beating on the silence of the woods. There was
nothing else to break that silence but the faint constant murmur in the
tree-tops, and once, beyond that leafy curtain, the sudden trilling of a
solitary bird. Again, the tremendousness of this high isolation swept
over her. The camp and its gay party might have been on some far distant
lake.
He put his arm around her firmly. "I am not going to pretend any
further," he said. "It is too big for that. And you have never been
anything but Mary Ogden to me, except, perhaps, on that night I have
practically dismissed from my mind. I called you Mary Ogden to myself
until I learned your new name, and I don't think that name has ever come
into my thoughts of you. And although you slipped on another skin with
it you were always Mary Ogden underneath. You needed a new name for your
new rôle, but, like any actress on the stage, it had nothing to do with
your indestructible personality. I say this because I want you to
understand that although I cannot play up to your little comedy any
longer and go through the forms of wooing you as if you were a girl--I
shouldn't like you half as well if you were--I do not think of you or
wish you to think of yourself as anything but Mary Ogden."
He paused a moment, and she slipped her arm about him and they walked on
through the wood.
"I cannot go on with it because these days up here that we can spend
almost altogether alone, if we will, are too sacred to waste on an
amusing but futile game. Do you realize that we do not know each other
very well? I sometimes wonder if you know me at all. From the time I
fell in love with you until you promised to marry me, I was at one sort
of fever-pitch, and when I got to work on that play I was at another. No
writer while exercising an abnormal faculty is quite sane. His brain is
several pitches above normal and his nerves are like hot taut wires--that
hum like the devil. If this were not the case he would not be an
imaginative writer at all. But he certainly is in no condition to reveal
himself to a woman. I have made wild and sporadic love to you--sporadic
is the word, for between my work and your friends, we have had little
time together--and I don't think I have ever taken you in my arms with
the feeling that you were the woman I loved, not merely the woman I
desired. And I believe that I love you even more than I desire you. You
are all that, but so much--so much--more."
She had fixed her startled eyes on him, but he did not turn his head.
"There has always been a lot of talk about the soul. Sentimentalists
wallow in the word, and realists deride it. What it really is I do not
pretend to know. Probably as good a word as any--and certainly a very
mellifluous word--for some obscure chemical combination of finer essence
than the obvious material part of us, that craves a foretaste of
immortality while we are still mortal. Perhaps we are descended from the
gods after all, and unless we listen when they whisper in this
unexplorable part of our being, we find only a miserable substitute for
happiness, and love turns to hate. Whatever it is that golden essence
demands, I have found it in you, and if circumstances had been different
I should have known it long ago. I know now what you meant that night
when you told me you had spent many distracted years looking for what no
man could give you, and although I doubted at that time I could even
guess what your own mysterious essence demanded, I know now--still
vaguely, for it is something as far beyond the defining power of words as
the faith of the Christian. It can never be seen, nor heard, nor
expressed, but it is there. And only once in a lifetime does any one
mortal have it to give to another. A man may love many times, but he is
a god-man only once."
He held her more closely, for she was trembling, but he continued to walk
on, guiding her automatically through the trees, for his eyes were almost
vacant, as if their vision had been reversed.
"I have had some hours of utter despair, in spite of the double
excitement of these past weeks, for it has seemed to me that I was no
nearer to you than I had been in the beginning. There was a sense of
unreality about the whole affair. At first it seemed to me the most
romantic thing that could happen to any man, and it was incredible that I
had been chosen the hero of such an extraordinary romance--intensified,
if anything, by the fact that it was set in roaring New York, where you
have to talk at the top of your voice to hear yourself think. . . . But
that passed--in a measure. I was beset by the fear--at times, I mean: I
was not always in a state to look inward--that you were slipping away.
Not that I doubted for a moment you would marry me, but that your
innermost inscrutable self had withdrawn, and that you accepted what must
have appeared to be my own attitude--that we were merely two vital
beings, who saw in each other a prospect of a superior sort of sensual
delight----"
"That is not true," she interrupted him fiercely. "But you seemed to me
to be in that phase when a man can think of nothing else. If I hadn't
hoped--and believed--in you against all I knew of men, I'd never have
gone on with it."
"I'm sure that is true. I must have disappointed you horribly. You had
felt the bond from the beginning, and I can imagine what you must have
dreamed I alone could give you. The trouble was that I didn't realize
that I alone was in fault, at the time. That boiling pot in my brain was
making too much noise. But I can assure you that I have returned to
normal, and if I thought I couldn't satisfy you I'd let you go without a
word. But you know that I can, don't you?"
She nodded.
"What is it, I wonder?" He sighed. "I wish I knew. But it is enough to
feel. . . . You must understand that in spite of the erratic creature
you have known since you refused to marry me at once and left me with no
resource but to let that play boil out, I am man first and a writer
incidentally. I also have a stronger ambition to be your husband than to
write plays. If I don't strangle what talent I have it is because I must
have the money to be independent of newspaper work. Otherwise I should
have neither peace of mind nor be able to live abroad with you. I know
that you cannot be happy here, and I am not a victim of that ancient myth
that two people who love each other can be happy anywhere. Environment
is half the battle--for the super-civilized, at all events. But you
shall never have another dose of the writer. I'll write my plays in New
York and rush production. The greater part of the year I shall spend
with you in Europe, and I cannot think of anything I'd like more--why,
the very night I first saw you I was longing with all my soul to get out
of New York and over to the other side of the world---- Why, Mary! You
are not crying? You! I never believed you could----"
"I--I--did not believe it either. . . . But, are you sure? Could you
reconcile yourself? You seem so much a part of New York, of this strange
high-pitched civilization. If you are not sure--if you are only tired of
New York for the moment. . . . I--yes, I will! I'll give it all up and
live here. Of course I love New York itself--was it not my Mary Ogden
home? And there are delightful people everywhere. . . . No doubt my
dream of doing great things in Europe was mere vanity----"
"Do you believe that?"
"Perhaps not. But, after all, what I tried to do might be so easily
frustrated in that cauldron--why should I risk personal happiness--the
most precious and the rarest thing in life, for what may be a
chimera--wasted years and a wasted life. Why are we made as we are, if
to coax that hidden spark into a steady flame is not our highest destiny?
It certainly is our manifest right. . . . Dreams of doing great things
in this world are nine-tenths personal vanity. I believe that when we
leave this planet we go to a higher star, where our incompleteness here
will be made complete; and perhaps we are spared a term of probation if
we make ourselves as complete here as mortal conditions will permit.
And, possibly, once in a great while, two human beings are permitted to
effect that completeness together."
They were both in an exalted mood. The wood was very still, its beauty
incomparable. And they might already have been on another star.
Across that divine balsam-scented stillness came the deep imperative
notes of a bell.
Clavering twitched his shoulders impatiently.
"Let them go on their screaming picnic," he said. "We stay here. Did
you mean that, Mary?"
"Yes, I meant it. We will not go to Europe at all--except to visit my
Dolomites some day. When you are writing I'll come up here."
"I don't know that I shall ask that sacrifice of you. A part of your
brain is asleep now, but it is a very active and insistent part when
awake. In time you might revert--and resentment is a fatal canker; but
let's leave it open. It is generally a mistake to settle things
off-hand. Let them alone and they settle themselves."
"Very well. At all events, while we are here, I shall not give it
another thought. The present at least is perfect."
"Yes, it is perfect!" He put both arms about her. The past was a blank
to both. Their pulsing lips met in the wonder and the ecstasy of the
first kiss of youth, of profound and perfect and imperishable love. They
clung together exalted and exulting and for the moment at least they were
one.