They did not return immediately to New York. Halfway, an
unaccountable timidity seized him--the shrinking of a schoolboy
before entering a public assemblage--and with a sudden impulse they
turned back for a week of Indian summer in the bungalow by the
lake where they had gone first. He himself did not in the least
comprehend the motives which had made him suddenly delay the test
of the return to the old life. Sometimes he thought it was a lack
of confidence, a fear of having lived in illusions, that would
dissipate before the rude shock of reality. At other times it
seemed to him a clinging to the world of solitude in which he had
found his happiness, in distrust of what compensation lay ahead.
So deep was this indecision of the soul that their days were spent
in aimless pleasure. His easel remained unpacked. No desire for
work came to him. Now and then, he felt an irresistible longing
to plunge back into the world of men, and again, a revolt against
himself--a restless shrinking-back, a longing to return deeper
into the unquestioning loyalty of the great world of forests and
still ranges. At such times, he would gaze for long spaces at
Inga, filling his eyes with the healing vision of her youth and
charm--wondering.
“Why do you stay?” she asked him, one evening, when they had sat
silently, looking across at Catamount, blue and luminous under the
scattering sunset clouds which swam like radiant goldfish above its
sharp outline.
“I wonder.” After a moment he said, a certain gentleness in his
voice which seemed attuned to the gentleness in the skies, “I think
it’s because it’s the ending of a phase. I want the other--the big
things--and yet I want to hold on to this, to what this has been to
us, a little longer and still a little longer. Do you understand?”
She nodded, and her fingers turned gently in his fingers.
“This is personal,” he said slowly, “the other will be different.
It will be a sort of renunciation of many things. This is the
romance, the great romance of my life, and, well, I want it to go
on a little longer.”
Her head went slowly down to his shoulder; he drew his arm about
her.
“It is unbelievable, providential--and it is all you,” he said
reverentially. “You are as strange to me, Inga, as the first day. I
do not know you--no, not at all. Yet, in what you have made me feel
and in what you have made me suffer too, you have done everything.”
A certain charm of the twilight, of the quiet spot, and of the
youthful ecstasy he had known momentarily swept aside the man that
had been built up victoriously and logically. For the instant he
was in love with love without reason or reserve with the memory of
other moments felt in the passionate moods of the fading day and
the poignant floods of moonlight.
“Shall we never go back, Inga?” he said breathlessly. “Shall we
stay here all winter, just you and I?”
In his arms he felt her tremble and then fill with a great sigh.
“Oh, I’m so glad you said that!” she cried abruptly, and for a
moment something shook in her voice.
“Shall we stay?” he said eagerly, confused by thronging sensations,
even as the earth and the sky grew confused in the fall of the
night.
She laughed, lightly and happily from the heart, and though she
was not deceived by the intoxication of the moment, she yielded
with every sense.
The next morning she was an inconscient child, without a brooding
thought, romping about the bungalow, doing a dozen crazy things,
singing and laughing until her mood caught him in its playfulness.
For the day they were as foolishly happy as a pair of growing
puppies, playing a dozen tricks on each other, laughing for the
pure joy of being together, pursuing or pursued.
“Upon my soul, Inga, I believe you are actually flirting with me!”
he cried, from across the table.
She eluded his sudden grasp and went scurrying out of doors and up
into the sheltering branches of a broken pine. He stood at the foot
laughing, one hand on her ankle which he had caught just as she
was hurrying out of reach. Thus arrested, she turned and settled
herself on the swaying branch.
“Actually flirting with me,” he said sternly.
She shook her head indignantly, her eyes sparkling.
“What is the meaning of this, I’d like to know?” he continued,
scowling.
“Would you, Mr. Dan?” she said, with her head on one side, her lips
tantalizingly set.
“I certainly do! Why are you so happy, all at once?”
“Because,” she cried, “because I want to crowd a whole lifetime
into a day! Look out!”
Before he could reply, she had sprung down into his arms, almost
upsetting him with the shock of her descent. She lay her face close
to his, panting and flushed.
“Because I want to be happy for a whole lifetime!” she said and
flung her arms about him. The next moment, she had slipped from him
and taken refuge along the shore, leaping lightly from rock to rock.
A little later, as he waited her return, she came back quite sober
and demure.
“When you make up your mind to go,” she said, looking at him
intently, “do it quite suddenly, and don’t--don’t tell me until
just before--just a few hours before.”
His mood, too, had turned to seriousness. He drew her to a seat
beside him.
“It’s queer how your mind changes,” he said earnestly. “I thought,
once, I wanted to shake the dust of the city forever--run off, be a
hermit up in the top of a mountain, on an island. I hated men and
their ways, their jealousies, and their estimates--and, now, I feel
as though I’d like to go back, astound them just for once, and then
come back here forever.” He stopped, looked at her, and saw the
smile on her lips. “What’s that mean--you don’t believe me?”
“I believe all but the last.”
“Well, that’s the way I feel now,” he admitted. “I suppose I should
stay away. It’s only vanity.”
“No; you want to feel your strength,” she said slowly. “What you
get from others will give you confidence.”
“Yes; I suppose I’m like the rest,” he said frankly. “There is
something cruel about it. I want to go back and feel how I’ve
gone ahead of the others--even my friends, my best friends. It’s
something savage, almost as though you flung them down bodily and
climbed over them. And they’ll feel that, too, no matter how much
they praise what I’ve done--at the bottom in their secret hearts
it’ll hurt. Wonder why it must be so!”
“I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully; “if you feel that way, it’s
because you need just that feeling, I suppose.”
He hesitated, rather surprised at her understanding before he went
on.
“I know it’s trivial, guess the big ones are beyond that--if
they are; and yet--” He brought his hands together in an eager
clasp over his knee, and his face lit up. “And yet it would be
something to go back and feel how you’ve astonished them all, to
make good, to have everyone talking about you again--the feeling
of the footlights. If you’ve once known that, it’s hard to get
away from it.” He smiled at himself. “What an ass I am! Do you
think I’m hopelessly ridiculous?” She was standing, her back to a
tree. As he looked up guiltily, she was smiling down at him, with a
proprietary, maternal pride. “Inga,” he said grinning, “sometimes
you remind me of a mother cat, purring away contentedly and
watching her favorite kitten tumbling about the rug.”
She burst out laughing.
“Perhaps!”
He took her hand and said abruptly:
“And you--do you want to go back?”
“I want what you need, Mr. Dan,” she said, looking at him steadily.
“Will you be proud of me, Inga, when we have an exhibition all our
own?”
“I’m proud now----”
“But won’t you be prouder when the crowds come and you feel what
you’ve done?”
She shook her head.
“No; not more than I am now.”
“I don’t see why you say that,” he said, perplexed and frowning.
“I shan’t like to share you with crowds,” she said abruptly, and
then, as though she were afraid to have shown too much feeling, she
said hastily, “Mr. Dan, don’t think of exhibiting too soon.”
“Why, Inga?”
She studied him carefully, as though calculating in him all his
capacity of suffering and all his need of praise.
“You’re too sensitive--you’ll be changed too easily by what people
tell you.”
“You mean, criticism will hurt me?”
“No, no; their praise.”
“Flattery.”
“Yes.”
“So you think I’ll give in to flattery, do you?” he said, with the
exaggerated gruffness he used when he pretended to be angry.
She nodded without yielding an inch.
“Yes; it means so much to you--oh, I’m serious. There are so many
things, new ideas in you. Work them out yourself; don’t let any one
else know what you’re thinking--not even me--until you get where
you want.”
“What a wise head!” he said, smiling.
“I’m right; I know I’m right.”
“Yes, you are,” he said solemnly. “I don’t know how you guess my
failings, but you guess them remarkably well. All right; I’ll
appoint you my guardian, and I’ll promise to obey.”
“Then don’t show your sketches to any one--oh, Tootles and King,
if you want, but not to the others--the ones you want to--to throw
down and climb over.”
“Why, I believe you’re just as savage as I am!” he said, laughing
at her conclusion.
“I am; I am!” she cried, in high excitement, and the point lay
settled. She was back in her mood of riotous gaiety.
For the rest of the day he watched her, puzzled and fascinated,
drawn to her by all his senses, finding her a hundred times more
tantalizing, perplexing, and desirable than ever before, astounded
at the whirl of spirits into which she drove without a pause. The
next day, while he was still waiting what mood would dominate her,
she announced abruptly that the time had come to depart. Then he
understood.
* * * * *
It was far into November when they returned to the Arcade, and the
city was the city of the approaching winter, vibrant, stirring, and
electric. He felt a new eagerness of the imagination, a confidence
buoyed up on waves of energy that seemed to urge him joyfully back
into the arena of conflict.
When they had taken a taxi and were caught in the full crush of
thronged avenues, he drew forward on his seat, leaning eagerly
toward the window. The city was there, waiting for him, with its
variegated flashes of life, its movements of skyscrapers and
clouds, its streaming multitudes and, in the shifting current,
faces, fragments of human light and shade. These scattered details,
which once had been meaningless and confusion on confusion, had
a new significance, brought together and made comprehensible by
deep, underlying impulses, moving and massed according to the
same immutable laws, that flung giant rocks, inscrutable and calm
amid the shifting seasons that overran them only to die away. In
this opposition of fashioned cliffs and drifting tides of men
he felt a kinship with the sea-swept reaches he had known, a
unity in significance which surprised him, where he had expected
disillusionment, and, drinking in greedily thus the richness of the
thronged world which called to him, he realized, with a sudden joy,
that his true work lay ahead of him.
Inga, by his side, sat like a statue of contemplation. In her, a
profound transformation was taking place. From the moment when,
far-off, she had divined the approach of the metropolis, by its
far-flung, hideous stragglers, until the moment when they had burst
into the sudden upleap of serried life, crowded windows, flight
on flight in mute straining toward the freedom of the upper air,
something had closed about her, a rigidity of the soul, and from
her eyes something childlike and inconscient had fled away. She
continued to stare ahead calmly and without flinching, but the look
on her clear forehead was brooding and prophetic.
They had hardly drawn up at the Arcade amid a gathering of small
urchins, when a great limousine came superbly up and a familiar
voice cried in great excitement:
“Inga! Inga!”
The next moment, the Myrtle Popper, which had been, came flying
rapturously toward them, in the figure of a stylishly dressed woman
in half mourning. From the limousine, more slowly, King O’Leary
descended, somewhat embarrassed at being thus surprised.
“Mr. Dangerfield, how well you look! Inga, how pretty you’ve
grown!” cried Myrtle, embracing her. “My, what a surprise; we
thought you never was coming! The boys’ll be tickled to death. You
must all dine with me to-night--sure you must! It’d just break my
heart if you didn’t. We’ll have some party!”
O’Leary shook hands, a little red under the sharp, amused look Inga
gave them and, after a promise to allow themselves to be fêted
by Myrtle, they went in to Sassafras, whose white eyes rolled so
rapidly in astonishment that they threatened to fly loose. The
elevator was as dusky as ever, jolting and balking on its resentful
way up. The corridors were vast--ill lighted and creaking under
their tread, but at the door where the studio of the Three Arts had
been, they stopped aghast before a strange sign which announced,
MCTWEEDER AND FLAHERTY
CANADIAN-AMERICAN BUSTER PIE CO.
BUSINESS OFFICE.
Myrtle, laughing, explained that the ruse was for defensive
purposes only around the first of the month, and at the noise
they made, Tootles and Flick came bounding out. In another five
minutes they were the center of an excited gathering--Miss Quirley
all aquiver; Belle Shaler; Millie Brewster, a little drawn and
nervous; “the baron,” who seemed strangely feeble and old, even
to Schneibel, who came plunging in, crying volubly to see the
masterpieces of the summer--at once--while a patient waited below
in the torture-chair. One look at Dangerfield told them the story
of the summer. O’Leary shook hands with Inga, blurting out:
“Well, you’ve done it--say, my hat’s off to you!”
And a little later, “the baron,” profiting by a moment’s isolation,
leaned over and patted her arm, saying with his courtly smile:
“You wonderful child--when you are in heaven will you ask the _bon
Dieu_ to squeeze me through--a little?”