LATER, engaged in repairing a shelf--at a super-union scale--for his
mother, he heard the steam shriek of a calliope announcing the parade.
From a window he could see the thronged sidewalks, the crudely fantastic
figures of the clowns, enveloped in a dusty haze of light. His thoughts
withdrew from that vapid spectacle to the rapt contemplation of Eliza
Dreen. He pictured Eliza and himself in the dramatic situations which
diversified the moving pictures of his nightly attendance: he rescued
her from the wiles of Mexicans, counts, weirdly-wicked Hindoos; now
he dragged her from the chimney into which she had been bricked by
a Brotherhood of Blood; now, driving a monoplane above the hurtling
express that bore her toward a fiendish revenge, he descended to halt
the train at a river's brink while the bridge sank dynamited into the
swirling stream--“Mercy, Tony!” his mother's practical voice rent the
resplendent vision; “don't crush your greatuncle's epaulets.”
After the midday meal a minute review of the places where Eliza might
be found discovered the Ellerton Country Club to hold the greatest
possibility. Anthony was a virtual stranger to that focus of the
newer Ellerton; except for the older enthusiasts who played golf every
afternoon that it was humanly possible to remain outside it was the
stronghold of the species Anthony had encountered in the dressing room
at the Dreens' dance. The space at the back of the drugstore where he
had lounged held unbroken the elder tradition of Ellerton. There he
had cultivated a mild contempt for the studied urbanity, the formally
organized converse and games, of the Club. But as a setting for Eliza it
gained a compelling attraction. And, in his freshly-ironed flannels, he
ordered his steps toward that goal. The Club House overhung the rolling
green of the golf links; from a place of vantage he saw that Eliza was
not on the veranda; at one end a group of young men were drinking--teal
Beyond his father and three companions, followed by caddies, rose above
a hill. His father grasped a club and bent over the turf; the club
described a short arc, the ball flashed whitely through the air, and
the group trotted eagerly forward, mingling explanation, chagrin and
prediction with heated and simple sums in arithmetic.
Then he saw Eliza... she was on the tennis court, playing with a
vigorous girl with a bare and stalwart forearm. He divined that the
latter was winning, and conceived a sweeping distaste for her flushed,
perspiring countenance and thickset ankles. “How beautiful you look!”
Eliza called, as he propped himself against the wire netting that,
overrun with honeysuckle, enclosed the courts. He watched her fleeting
form, heard her breathless exclamations, with warm stirs of delight.
When her opponent played the ball beyond her reach his dislike for that
efficiency became an obsession. The flying shadows lengthened on the
rolled, yellow surface of the court; the group on the porch emptied
their teacups and moved away; and the final set of games won by the
“beefsteak.”
Eliza slipped into a formless chocolate-colored coat: racket in hand she
smiled at him. “I'm rather done,” she admitted. She hesitated, then: “I
wonder--are you doing anything?--if you would drive me home?” He assured
her upon that point with a celerity that wrought a momentary confusion
upon them. “The Meadowbrook and roan at the sheds,” she directed. In the
basketlike cart they swung easily over the road toward Hydrangea House.
Checked relentlessly into a walk the roan stepped in a dainty fume.
Eliza's countenance was as tenderly hued as the pearly haze that overlay
the far hills; faint, mauve shadows deepened the blueness of her eyes;
her mouth, slightly parted, held the fragile pink of coral; a tinge of
weariness upon her bore an infinite appeal--her relaxed, drooping body
filled him with a gusty longing to put his arms about her shoulders
and hold her secure against all fatigue, against the assaults of time
itself.
He had never before driven such an impatient and hasty animal; at the
slightest slackening of the reins the horse broke into a sharp trot;
and, beyond doubt, he could walk faster than any other brute alive.
Already they were at the entrance to the driveway; the house appeared
to hurry forward to intercept them. Eliza pressed a button, and a man
crossed the grass to the roan's head. They descended, and she lingered
on the steps with a murmur of gratitude. “Mrs. Dreen telephoned Ranke
to meet the eight-forty,” a servant in the doorway replied to Eliza's
query; “she's having dinner in town with Mr. Dreen.”
Eliza turned with a gesture of appeal. “Save me from a solitary
pudding,” she petitioned Anthony; “you can go back with Ranke.... On the
porch, such fun--father detests candles.” The voicing of his acceptance
he felt to be an absurd formality. “Then if you can amuse yourself,”
she announced, “I'll vanish for a little... cigars in the library and
victrola in the hall.”
He crossed the sod to the porch on the other face of the house, and
sat watching the day fade from the valley below. A violet blur of smoke
overhung the chimney of the Ellerton Waterworks, printed thinly on the
sky. A sense of detachment from that familiar scene enveloped him--the
base ball field, the defunct garage, places and details, customary,
normal, retreated into the distance, it seemed into the past, gathering
upon the horizon of his thoughts as the roofs of Ellerton huddled beyond
the hills, vanishing into shadows that inexorably deepened, blotted out
the old aspects, stilled the accustomed voices, sounds.
A servant appeared, and placed a table upon the tiles, spreading a
blanched cloth, gleaming crystal and silver. A low bowl of shadowy wood
violets was ranged in the centre, and hooded candles lighted, spilling
over the table, the flowers, a pale, auriferous pool of light in the
purpling dusk. When Eliza followed, in filmy white, she seemed half
materialized from the haunting vision of poignant beauty at the back of
his brain. She was like moonlight, still and yet disturbing, veiled in
illusion, in strange, ethereal influences that set athrill within him
emotions immaterial, potent, snowy longing, for which he had no name.
The last plate removed, Anthony stirred his coffee in a state of dreamy
happiness. The candlelight spread a wan gold veil over Eliza's delicate
countenance, it slid over the pearls about her slim throat, and fell
upon her fragile wrists. “It's been wonderful,” he pronounced solemnly.
“I've been terribly rude,” she told him, “I have hardly spoken. I have
been busy studying you.”
“There's not much to study,” he disclaimed; “Mrs. Bosbyshell thinks
I'm marked for failure.” In reply to her demand he gave a brief and
diffident account of that eccentric old woman. “But,” Eliza discerned
among the meagre details, “she trusts you, she lets you into her house.
And you are perfect to her, of course.
“Any one could trust you, I think. Yet you are not a particle tiresome;
most trustworthy people are so--so unexciting. But monotony is far
as possible from your vicinity. What did you do, for instance, this
morning?” He described to her the advent of the circus, the labor in
the obscurity. “I was surprised to see the old thing up,” he ended: “it
seemed so hopeless at first.”
“How wonderfully poetic!” she cried.
Until that moment poetry had occupied in his thoughts a place analogous
to tea.--In his brief passage through the last school he had been
forcibly fed with Gray's Elegy, discovering it unmitigated and sickening
rot. When now, in view of her obvious pleasure, he would have to
reconsider his judgment.
“That blind effort,” she continued, leaning forward, flushed with the
warmth of her image, “all those men struggling, building in the dark,
unable to see what they were accomplishing, or what part the others
had. And then--oh! don't you see!--the great, snowy tent in the morning
sun--a figure of the success, the reward, of all labor, all living.”
“How about the ones that loafed--didn't pull, or were drunk?”
“For all,” she insisted, “sober and drunk and shrinking. Can you think
that any supreme judgment would be cheaply material, or in need of
any of our penny abilities? do you suppose the supreme beauty has no
standard higher than those practical minds that hold out heaven as a
sort of reward for washed faces? Anthony,” it was the first time she had
called him that, and it rang in his brain in a long peal of rapture, “if
there isn't a heaven for every one, there isn't any at all. You, singing
an idle song, must be as valuable as the greatest apostle to any supreme
love, or else it isn't supreme, it isn't love.”
“You are so wonderfully good,” he muttered, “that you think every one
else is good too.”
“But I'm hardly a bit good,” she assured him, “and I wouldn't be good
if I could--in the Christian kind of way.” She gazed about with an
affectation of secretiveness, then leaned across her coffee cup. “It
would bore me horribly,” she confided, “that 'other cheek' thing;
I'm not a grain humble; and I spend a criminal amount of money on
my clothes. I have even put a patch upon my cheek to be a gin and
stumbling-block to a young man.”
She had!
He surveyed with absurd pleasure that minute black crescent on the pale
rose of her countenance. If she had been good before she was adorable
now: her confession had drawn her out of the transplendid cloud where
he had elevated her down to his side; she was infinitely more desirable,
more warmly and delightfully human.
“I have been asking about you,” she told him later, with a slight frown;
“the accounts are, well--various. I don't mind your--your friends of the
stables, Anthony; they are, what Ellerton will never learn, the careless
choice of a born aristocrat; I don't care a Tecla pearl whether you are
'a steady young man' or not. And one doesn't hear a whisper of meanness
about you anywhere. But I have an exaggerated affection for things that
are beautiful, I suppose it's a weakness, really, and ugly people or
surroundings, harsh voices even, terrify me. The thought of cruelty
makes me cold. And, since you will come into my thoughts, and smile your
funny little smile at me out of walls and other impossible places, I
should like to picture you, not in pool rooms, but on the hills that you
know so well. I should like to think of your mind echoing with the rush
of those streams, the hunting of those owls, you told me about, and not
sounding with coarse and silly and brutal words and ideas.”
“It echoes with you,” he replied, “and you are more beautiful than hills
and streams.”
For a moment she held his gaze full in the blue depths of her vision;
then, with a troubled smile, evaded it. “I'm a patched jade,” she
announced.
Ranke, the servant informed them, was ready to meet the train.
“You're going... Elbe's affair on the Wingohocking?”
“Absolutely.” She stood illusive against the saffron blur of the
candles, the sweeping hem of night.
“I'll remember,” he blundered; “whatever you would wish... you have
changed everything. The dinner was--I don't remember what it was,” he
confessed; “but I remember an olive.”
He left the automobile at the edge of Ellerton, and proceeded on foot,
passing the dully-shinning bulk of the circus tent. He heard the brassy
dissonance of the band within, the monotonous thud of horses' hoofs
on the tanbark; a raucous voice rose at the entrance to the side-show
dwelling unctuously on the monstrosities to be viewed within for the
price of a dime, of a dime, a dime. He recalled the spent lioness in her
painted cage, the haggard and sick hyena, the abject trot of the wolves
to nowhere.--A sudden exhalation of hatred swept over him for the
hideous inhumanity of circuses and men. Eliza had lifted him from the
meaningless babble of trivial and hard voices into a high and immaculate
region of shining space and quietude. He didn't want to come down again,
he protested, to _this_.