HE made his way diffidently through a long window to the lawn; where
he saw his sister, a glimmering, whitish shape in the heavily overgrown
garden, conversing with a figure without form or detail, by a trellis
sagging beneath a verdurous weight.
“Oh, Tony!” she called; “here's Mrs. Dreen.”
He leaned forward awkwardly, and grasped a slim, jewelled hand. “I
didn't know you were back from France,” he told the indistinct woman
before him.
“But you read that Mr. Dreen had resigned the consulship at Lyons,” a
delicate, rounded voice rejoined, “and you should have guessed that we
would come home to Ellerton. My dear Ellie,” she turned to the girl,
“you have no idea how delighted James is at being here once more. He has
given the farmer notice, and insists that he is going to cultivate his
own acres. He was up this morning at six; fancy, after France and
his late _déjeuner._ And Eliza adores it; she spends the day with a
gardener, planning flowerbeds.”
Anthony slipped into an easy posture on the thick, damp sod. Although
he had not seen Mrs. James Dreen since his childhood, when she had
accompanied her husband abroad to a consular post, he still retained
a pleasant memory of her magnetic and precise charm, the memory of her
harmonious personality, the beauty of her apparel and rings.
“How is Eliza?” he asked politely, and with no inward interest; “she
must be a regular beauty by now.”
“No,” Mrs. Dreen returned crisply, “she is not particularly goodlooking,
but she has always told me the truth. Eliza is a dear.” Anthony lit a
cigarette, and flipped the match in a minute gold arc, extinguished in
the night.
“I am decidedly uneasy about Eliza though,” she continued to Ellie; “to
tell the truth, I am not sure how she will take over here. She is a
serious child; I would say temperamental, but that's such an impossible
word. She is absolutely and transparently honest and outspoken--it's
_ghastly_ at times. The most unworldly person alive; with her thought
and action are one, and often as not her thoughts are appalling. All
that, you know, doesn't spell wisdom for a girl.”
“Yet James and I couldn't bear to... make her harder. A great deal of
care... If she is my daughter, Ellie, she is exquisite--so sensitive,
sympathetic...”
Anthony, absorbed in the misfortune that had overtaken the machine shop,
the impending, inevitable interview with his father, so justly rigorous,
hardly gathered the sense of Mrs. Dreen's discourse. Occasional phrases,
familiar and unfamiliar terms, pierced his abstraction.--“Colombin's.”
“James' siatica.” “Camille Marchais.” Then her words, centering about a
statement that had captured his attention, became coherent, significant.
“Only a small affair,” Mrs. Dreen explained; “to introduce Eliza to
Ellerton. Nothing on a large scale until winter.... Dancing, or rather
what goes down for dancing to-day. I am asking our old intimates, and
have written a few informal cards.”
An automobile drew up smoothly before the Balls; its rear light winked
like an angry red eye through the iron fence. Mrs. Dreen rose. In the
gloom her face was girlish; there was a blur of lace at her throat, a
glimmer of emeralds. “Mind you come,” she commanded Ellie. “And you too,
without fail,” to Anthony. “Now that Hydrangea House is open again we
must have our friends about us. Heavens! Howard Ball's children and
mine grown up!” She moved gracefully across to a garden gate. Anthony
assisted her into the motorcar; the door closed with a snap.
Ellie had sunk back into her chair, and was idly twisting her fingers
in the grass at her side. At her back the ivied wall of the house beyond
stirred faintly with sparrows. A misshapen moon swung apparently up from
and through the building frame opposite, and faint shadows unfolded on
the grass. Anthony flung himself moodily by his sister.
“Sam's taken his car from us,” he informed her; “that will about shut up
the shop.”
“Then perhaps you will bring back the screwdrivers.”
“To-morrow.”
“What are you going to do, Tony?”
“Tell me.”
“A big strong fellow... there mast be something.”
“Mother won't let me play ball in the leagues.”
“Perhaps she will; we'll talk to her; it's better than nothing.”
“I broke a box of rotten perfume at the drugstore, and owe the Doctor
four seventy.”
“It's too bad--father is never free from little worries; you are
always getting into difficulties. You are different from other boys,
Anthony--there don't seem to be any place in life for you; or you don't
make a place, I can't tell which. You have no constructive sense, and no
feeling of responsibility. What do you want to do with yourself?”
“I don't know, Ellie, honestly,” he confessed. “I try like the devil,
make a thousand resolutions, and then--I go off fishing. Or if I don't
things go to the rats just the same.”
“Well,” she rose, “I'm going up. Don't bother father about that money,
I'll let you have it. It's perfectly useless to tell you to return it.”
“I swear you will get it next week,” he proclaimed gratefully. “The
baseball association owes me for two games.”
“Haven't you promised it?”
“That's so!” he exclaimed ruefully. She laughed and disappeared into the
house.
V
A BLACK depression settled over him; life appeared a huge conspiracy
against his success, his happiness. The future, propounded by Ellie, was
suddenly stripped of all glamor, denuded of all optimistic dreams; he
passed through one of those dismaying periods when the world, himself,
his pretentions, were revealed in the clear and pitiless light of
reality. His friends, his circumstances, his hopes, held out no promise,
no thought of pleasure. Behind him his life lay revealed as a series
of failures, before him it was plotted without security. The plan, the
order, that others saw, or said that they saw, presented to him only a
cloudy confusion. The rewards for which others struggled, aspired, which
they found indispensable, had been ever meaningless to him--to money
he never gave a thought; a society organized into calls, dancing,
incomprehensible and petty values, never rose above his horizon.
He was happiest in the freedom of the open, the woods; in the easy
company of casual friends, black or white, kindly comment. He would
spend a day with his dogs and gun, sitting on a stump in a snowy field,
listening to the eager yelping in the distant, blue wood, shooting
a rare rabbit. Or tramping tirelessly the leafy paths of autumn. Or,
better still, swinging through the miry October swales, coonhunting
after midnight with lantern and climbers.
But now those pleasures, in anticipated retrospect, appeared bald,
unprofitable. Prolonged indefinitely, he divined, they would pall; they
did not offer adequate material, aim, for the years. For a moment he
saw, grinning hatefully at him, the spectre of what he might become; he
passed such men, collarless and unshaven, on the street comers, flinging
them a scornful salutation. He had paid for their drinks, hearkening
negligently to their stereotyped stories, secretly gibing at their
obvious goodfellowship, their eager, tremulous smiles. They had been, in
their day, great rabbit hunters... detestable.
The mood vanished, the present closed mercifully about him, leaving him
merely defiant. The townclock announced the hour in slow, jarring
notes. A light shone above from Ellie's room, and he heard his father's
deliberate footsteps in the hall, returning from the Ellerton Club,
where, as was his invariable nightly habit, he had played cooncan. The
moon, freed from the towering beams, was without color.
Anthony rose, and flung away a cold, stale cigarette; the world was just
like that--stale and cold. He proceeded toward the house, when he heard
footfalls on the pavement; in the obscurity he barely made out a man and
woman, walking so closely as to be hardly distinguishably separate. They
stopped by the fence, only a few feet from where he stood concealed in
the shadows, and the man took the woman's hands in his own, bending over
her. Then, suddenly, clasping her in his arms, he covered her upturned
face with passionate kisses. With a little, frightened gasp she clung
to his shoulders. The kisses ceased. Their strained, desperate embrace
remained unbroken.--It seemed that each was the only reality for the
other in a world of unsubstantial gloom, veiled in the shifting, silvery
mist of a cold and removed planet. The woman breathed with a deep,
sobbing inspiration; and, when she spoke, Anthony realized that he was
eavesdropping, and walked swiftly and cautiously into the house.
But the memory of that embrace; accompanied him up the stairs, into his
room. It haunted him as he lay, cool and nearly bare, on his bed.
It filled him with a profound and unreasoning melancholy, new to his
customary, unconscious animal exuberance. All at once he thought of the
redhaired girl who liked port wine; and, as he fell asleep, she stood
before him, leering slyly at the side of that other broken shape which
threatened him out of the future.