conquered, the tawny creature was suddenly across the open with a rush
and on the stooping shoulders. That was the beginning of the
companionship that lasted until fall. The next season brought the animal
as unexpectedly, and they took up the old relation where it had left off
the previous summer. They trudged together through miles of forest,
sometimes the cat on the man's shoulder, but often making side
excursions on his own account and coming back with the proud burden of
bird or tiny beast. Together they watched the days decline in red and
gold glory from the ledge where the stream drops over the next height,
or when it rained, companioned each other by the hearth in the hut.
There was between them that satisfying and intimate communion of
inarticulate speech only possible between man and beast.
There came a day when the man sat hour after hour over his writing,
letting the hills call in vain. The cat slept himself out, and when paws
in the ink and tracks over the paper proved of no avail, he jumped down
and marched himself haughtily off through the door and across the
clearing to the forest, tail in air. Late that afternoon the man was
arrested midway of a thought rounding into phrase by the sudden
darkness. There was a fierce rush of wind, as if some giant had sighed
and roused himself. The door of the hut slammed shut and the blast from
the window scattered the papers about the floor. As he went to pull down
the sash the cat sprang in, shaking from his feet the drops of rain
already slanting in a white sheet across the little valley. At the same
moment there was a "halloo" outside, and a woman burst open the door,
turning quickly to shut out behind her the onrush of the shower and the
biting cold of the wind. She stood shaking the drops from her hair, and
then she looked into the astonished face of the man and laughed.
She was as slim and straight as a young poplar, clad in white
shirt-waist and khaki Turkish trousers with gaiters laced to the knee.
Her hair was blown about in a red-gold snarl, and her eyes looked out as
unabashed as a boy's. The two stared at each other for a time in
silence, and finally it was the woman who spoke first.
"This isn't exactly what I call a warm welcome--not just what the cat
led me to expect! It was really the cat who brought me--I met him over
on Slide Mountain--he fled and I pursued, and now here we are!"
She made a hasty survey of the hut, and then of its owner, putting her
head on one side as she looked about her with a quick, bird-like
movement, he still staring in stupefaction.
"Of course you detest having me here, but you won't put me out in the
rain, again, will you?"
At once he was his courteous self. With the same motion he dumped the
astonished cat from the cushioned chair by the writing table, and drew
it forward to the fire. Then he threw on a fresh stick of pine that
flared up in a bright blaze, and with deferring gentleness took the
sweater that hung from her shoulders and hung it to dry over a section
of tree-trunk that served as a chimney seat.
"You are as welcome to my hut as any princess to her palace," he smiled
on her, "indeed, it is yours while you choose to stay in it!"
"Don't you think," she made reply, as he drew another chair up opposite
to her, "that under the circumstances we might dispense with fine
speeches? It is hardly, I suppose, what one would call a usual
situation, is it?"
He looked at her as she stretched her small feet comfortably to the
blaze, her face quite unconcerned.
"No," he acquiesced, "it certainly is not usual--or I should hate
it--the 'usual' is what I fly from!"
She threw back her head, clasping her hands behind it as she laughed.
She seemed to luxuriate as frankly in the heat and the dryness as the
cat between them.
"And I"--she turned the comprehension of her eyes upon him--"I cross the
ocean every year in the same flight!"
The storm drove leaves and flying branches against the window, while
they sat, for what seemed a long time, in contented silence. He found
himself as openly absorbing her charm as if she had been a tree or a
mountain sunset, while she was making further tours of inspection with
her eyes about the room.
"It is entirely adorable," she smiled at him, "but it piques my
curiosity!'
"Ask all the questions you wish--no secrets here."
"Then what, if you please, is the object I see swung aloft there in the
dome?"
"My canvas hammock which I lower at night to climb into and go to bed,
and pull up in the daytime to clear the decks."
"And the big earthen pot in the fireplace--it has gruesome suggestions
of the 'Forty Thieves!'"
"Only a sort of perpetual hot-water tank. The fire never quite goes out
on this domestic hearth, and proves a very acceptable companion at this
high altitude. There is always the kettle on the crane, as you see it
there, but limitless hot water is the fine art of housekeeping--but,
perhaps you don't know the joy there is to be found in the fine art of
housekeeping?"
"No, I do not," her eyes took on a whimsical expression, "but I'd like
to learn--anything in the way of a new joy! In the way of small joys I
am already quite a connoisseur, indeed I might call myself a collector
in that line--of _bibelot_ editions, you understand, for thus far I seem
to have been unable to acquire any of the larger specimens! Would you be
willing to take me on as a pupil in housekeeping?"
"It would add to my employment a crowning joy--not a _bibelot_!"
"Pinchbeck fine speeches again," she shrugged. "Do you stop here all the
long summer quite alone?"
"All the 'short summer,'" he corrected, "save for the society of the
cat, who dropped down last year from nowhere. He must have approved of
the accommodations, for he has chosen me, you see, a second time for a
summer resort."
"Yes--I think he was trying to protest about you being his exclusive
find, when I invited myself to follow him down the mountain--leading and
eluding are so much alike, one is often mistaken, is it not so?"
She was sitting forward now, chin in hands, elbows on her knees, gazing
into the flames where a red banner waved above the back log. When she
turned to him again the westering sun had broken through the clouds and
was sending a flare of rosy light in at the window. Studying her face
more fully, he saw that she was years--fully ten years--older than he
had supposed. The boyish grace that sat so lightly was after all the
audacious ease of a woman of the world, sure of herself.
"I, too, am living the hermit life for the summer. I am the happy
possessor of a throat that demands an annual mountain-cure. Switzerland
with its perpetual spectacular note gets on my nerves, so last year we
found this region--I and my two faithful old servitors. Do you know the
abandoned tannery in the West Branch Clove? That has been fitted up for
our use, and there we live the simple life as I am able to attain
it--but you have so far outdone me that you have filled my soul with
discontent!"
"Alas," said the man, "you have served me the very same trick! I could
almost wish--"
"That I had not come!"
"Say, rather, that you would come again!"
She stood up and reached for her sweater, waiting for him to open the
door. The round of the little valley was a glittering green bowl filled
with pink cloud scuds. They stepped out into a jubilant world washed
clean and freshly smiling. She put out her hand in good-bye.
"I almost think I shall come again! If you were a person with whom one
could be solitary--who knows!"
When she appeared the next time she found him by the noise of his
chopping. They climbed to the top of the moss-covered boulder that hangs
poised over the ledge where the stream leaps into the abyss. Below them
the hills rolled in an infinite recession of leaf-clad peaks to the sky
line, where they melted to a blur of bluish-green mist.
"Oh, these mountains of America!" she cried, "their greenness is a thing
of dreams to us who know only bare icy and alps!"
"Far lovelier," he said, "to look down upon than to look up to, I think.
To be a part of the height comes pretty near to being happy, for the
moment."
She turned from the view to study her companion. The lines in the
corners of his kind, tired eyes, the lean, strong figure, hair graying
about the temples. He grew a little impatient under it before she spoke.
"Do you know," she said slowly, "I am going to like you! To like you
immensely--and to trust you!"
"Thank you, I shall try to be worthy"--even his derision was gentle--"I
seem to remember having been trusted before by members of your sex--even
liked a little, though not perhaps 'immensely'! At any rate this
certainly promises to be an experience quite by itself!"
"Quite by itself," she echoed.
"Wouldn't it be as well for you to know my name, say, as a beginning?"
"No," she nodded, "that's just what I don't want! I only want to know
you. Names are extraneous things--tags, labels--let us waive them. If I
tell you how I feel about this meeting of ours will you try to
understand me?"
The answer was less in words than in the assent of his honest gray eyes.
"I have been surfeited all my life," she went on, "with love--I want no
more of it! The one thing I do want, more than anything else, is a man
friend. I have thought a great deal about such a friendship--the give
and take on equal terms, the sexless companionship of mind--what it
could be like!"
He brushed the twigs from the lichens between them and made no answer.
"Fate--call the power what you will"--she met the disclaimer that
puckered the corners of his mouth--"fate brought us together. It was the
response to my longing for such a friendship!"
"It was the Yellow Cat!"
"The Yellow Cat plus fate! While I sat there by your fire I recognized
you for that friend!"
Far below over the tree tops cloud shadows and sunlight were playing
some wonderful game of follow-my-leader; a hawk hung poised on tilting
wings; and on the veil of mist that was the spirit of the brook where it
cast itself from the ledge curved the arch of a rainbow. The man pointed
to the augury.
"You might try me," he said, and they shook hands on the compact,
laughing half shamefacedly at their own solemnity.
"As woman to woman," he offered.
"Let it be rather as man to man," she shrugged.
"As you like--as women we should have to begin by explaining ourselves."
"Precisely, and men companion each other on impersonal grounds."
"Then it is a man's friendship?"
"Better still," she mused, "we'll pattern it after the ideals of the
disembodied! We'll make this summer, you and I together, a gem from the
heart of life--I will have it so!"
So it came about that like two children they played together, worked,
walked, or read and talked by the open fire when cold storms came. Every
morning she came over the wood-road that led by winding ways from her
valley, and at sunset she went back over the trail alone. He might go as
far as the outlook half way over the mountain where the path begins to
go down, but no farther; as for any fear, she seemed to know nothing of
its workings, and the revolver she wore in a case that hung from her
belt was a mere convention.
One morning she came with eyes dancing--it was to be an especial day--a
fete--and the gods had smiled on her planning and given them perfect
weather. Never such sunshine, such crystal air, such high-hung clouds!
Breakfast over, they hurried about the miniature housework, and packed
the kit for a long day's tramp. Then they started forth, the cat
following, tail aloft. Beyond a dim peak, where the clove opens
southward, by the side of a tiny lake they lunched and took their
noonday rest. She watched the smoke curl up from his pipe where he lay
at peace with the scheme of things.
"Do you know, Man, dear," she said, "I am glad I don't in the least
guess who you are! I have no doubt you write the most delightful stories
in the world--but never put me in one, please!"
He took the pipe out of his mouth and looked at her long before he
replied.
"Woman, dear," he said, "I have put you in a place--your own place--and
it is not in my novels!"
She scrambled to her feet laughing.
"It's very well to make stories, but it is really more diverting to live
them! Come, I must lead you now with your eyes shut tight to my
surprise!"
So hand in hand they went along a smooth green wood-road until she
stopped him.
"Look," she cried, "now look!"
Straight away till the road narrowed to a point of light against the sky
where the mountain dipped down, banks of mountain laurel rose on either
side in giant hedges of rose and white, while high above them waved the
elms and beeches of the forest.
"It is the gardening of the gods!"
"It is my own treasure-trove! I found it last year and I have been
waiting to bring you to it on my fete--what you call birthday! And now
wish me some beautiful thing--it may come true! There is a superstition
in my country--but I shall not tell you--unless the wish comes true!"
He broke off a spray of the waxen buds and crowned her solemnly where
she stood.
"I have already wished for you--the most beautiful thing in the world!"
She shook her head, sorrowful. "Man, dear, the only thing in all the
world I still want is the impossible!"
"Only the impossible is worth while--and I have wished!"
She shook her head again, laughing a little ruefully. "It could not
arrive--my impossible--and yet you almost tempt me to hope!"
"Anything--everything may arrive! You once thought that such a
friendship as this of ours could not, and lo, we have achieved it!"
"I wonder"--her eyes seemed fixed on some far prospect, a world beyond
the flowery way--"I wonder if we have! And I wonder why you have never
made a guess about my world when you have at least let me get a peep now
and then into yours?"
"I don't care a rap about your 'world,'" he smiled into her eyes, "while
I have you!"
"No curiosity about my--my profession?"
"Not a bit--though it was clear enough from the first that it was the
stage!"
She made an odd little outcry at his powers of divination.
"Then I must look it--before the footlights from my birth! Since you are
so clever, Mr. Man, will you also be merciful when you come to weigh me
in those scales you try to hide beneath the garment of your kindness?
Think, when you judge me, what it is for a woman never to be
herself--always to have to play a part!"
He reached and took her hand suddenly, drawing her to him with a
movement that was almost rough.
"This is no play acting--this is real! No footlights--no audience--only
you and me in all this world!"
But she drew away, insistently aloof. She would have none of his
caresses.
"This, too," she said, as she moved apart and stood waiting for him to
follow, "is a part of the play--I do not deceive myself! When I go back
to my world--my trade, I shall remember this little time that you and I
have snatched from the grudging grasp of life as an act--a scene only!
It's a perfect pastoral, Man, dear, but unreal--absurdly unreal--and we
know it ourselves while we play the game!"
Down through the flower-bordered vista the cat went stalking his prey,
his sinuous body a tawny streak winding along the green path. These
trivial humans, with their subtle attractions and compunctions, were as
though they never had been when the chase was on--the real business and
purpose of life!
For the rest of the time they were together they avoided the personal.
Each felt the threat in the air and tacitly averted it. For that one
perfect day there should be no past, no future, nothing but the golden
present.
Swinging in his breeze-rocked hammock between door and window the man
lay awake through the long watches of the night, thinking, thinking,
while his heart sang. Toward dawn he fell into a deep sleep from which
he was only awakened by the cat springing up to lick his face in
reminder of breakfast.
It was when he came back from his plunge in the pool that he first
noticed a paper pinned to his door-post. Within its folds his doom was
penned!
"Even you, dear Man, could not wish me the impossible! That superstition
of my country is that to come true it must be the first wish of your
fete day--and by one who loves you! Alas, my old servant had already
wished--that he might get me started for home to-day! Clever
Friedrich--for he had also packed! When you read this I shall be far on
my way. You could never find me though you searched the earth--but you
will never try! It is well as it is, for you see--it was not friendship
after all!"
* * * * *
And yet there was a sequel. During the following year there dropped to
the man in his hard-pressed literary life, one of those errant plums
from the political tree that now and then find their way to the right
basket. He was named for an excellent diplomatic post. His friends
congratulated him and talked a good deal about "material" and
opportunities for "unique local color;" his wife chattered unceasingly
about gowns and social details, while he armed himself, with the
listless reticence that was become habit, to face new responsibilities
and rather flavorless experiences. He had so withdrawn himself of late
to the inner creative life that he moved in a kind of phantasmagoria of
outer unrealities. It was the nearest to a comfortable adjustment for
the mis-mating of such a marriage as his, but it was not the best of
preparations for the discharge of public duties, and he walked toward
his new future with reluctant feet, abstractedly. In some such mood as
this, his mind bent on a problem of arrangement of fiction puppets,
seeing "men as trees walking," he found himself one day making his bows
at a court function. Along the line of royal highnesses and grand
duchesses with his wife he moved, himself a string-pulled puppet,
until--but who, in heaven's name is this?
For one mad moment, as he looked into her eyes, he thought the tightened
cord he sometimes felt tugging at his tired brain had snapped, and the
images of sight and memory gone hopelessly confused. She stood near the
end of the line with the princesses of secondary rank, and the jewels in
her hair were not more scintillant than her eyes as he bent over her
hand. She went a little pale, but she greeted him bravely, and when they
found themselves unobserved for a moment she spoke to him in her soft,
careful English:
"You recognized me, you remember, for a play actor, and now you are come
from the world's end to see me perform on my tiny stage! Alas, dear
critic, since my last excursion, I am no longer letter perfect in my
part!"
They met but once again. It was in the crush of guests in the great hall
where her old Prince, in the splendor of his decoration-covered coat,
was waiting to hand her to her carriage. There was a brief time in which
to snatch the doubtful sweetness of a few hurried words. She was leaving
in the early morning for the petty Balkan province where her husband
held a miniature sway, over a handful of half-savage subjects. Hardly
more than a renewal of greeting and a farewell, and she was gone!
As the old Prince wrapped her more carefully in her furs, and the
carriage rolled away in the darkness, he spoke to her, somewhat puzzled:
"I should be sorry to think the American Ambassador has been taking too
much wine--as you well know, my knowledge of the barbarous English
tongue is but limited, and yet--I thought, as I joined you, he was
talking some farrago of nonsense about a _Yellow Cat_!"
* * * * *
That year the Yellow Cat came home lean and gaunt, a chastened, humble
creature, as one who has failed in a long quest, and is glad to stretch
his weary length before the hearth and reap the neglected benefits of
the domestic life.
"It is really very odd" said the minister, quite as if he were saying
something he had never thought of saying before, "where that cat goes in
the summer!"
"Isn't it?" responded the minister's wife--just as she always did. "It
fires the imagination! He walks off some fine morning and completely
shuts the door on our life here--as if he gave us notice not to pry into
his movements. But this time"--she was leaning to stroke the tawny sides
with a pitying touch--"this time you may be sure something very sad and
disappointing happened to him--something in that other life went quite
wrong! How I wish we could understand what it was!"
V
A COCK AND POLICEMAN
A Tale of Rural England
By RALPH KAYE ASSHETON
IT HAPPENED up in Lancashire, and the truth can be vouched for by at
least half a hundred spectators. It fell in this wise: Bob O' Tims owned
a game-cock which was the envy of the whole street for lustre of
coloring and soundness of wind. Its owner was almost unduly proud of his
possession, and would watch it admiringly as it stalked majestically
about among its family of hens.
"There's a cock for you!" he would say, with a little wave of his pipe.
"There's not many cocks like that one. The king himself has got nothing
like it down at Windsor Castle."
Now, Jimmy Taylor had always been a rival of Bob O' Tims's. Jimmy's
grandfather had fought at the Battle of Waterloo. This gave him great
prestige, and it was almost universally believed, in Chellowdene, that
the preeminence of the British Empire was mainly due to the battle-zeal
of Jimmy's ancestry. But whenever Jimmy talked about his grandfather,
Bob skilfully turned the conversation to his game-cock. This made Jimmy
testy, and one day he told Bob, in contemptuous tones, that "he'd be
even wi' him yet, in the matter o' game-cocks, as well as everything
else."
That was one Monday evening, and the following Wednesday Bob O' Tims's
cock disappeared. When Bob discovered his loss, his face went quite pale
with anger. Without a word, he flung on his cap and set off for Jimmy
Taylor's cottage.
When he reached it, he went still whiter. For Jimmy was sitting at the
door, and up and down the yard in front of him strutted a magnificent
game-cock.
Bob O' Tims stretched out his forefinger, pointed at the cock, and with
a stubborn look forming about his mouth and jaw, observed:
"Yon's mine."
"It isn't," responded Jimmy. "It's mine."
"I tell thee, yon's mine. Yo've prigged it."
"It's mine! I bought it at th' fair."
"Thee never bought yon cock at any fair. It's mine, I tell thee."
Words grew high between the disputants, as the cock, in all its bronze
and golden splendor, marched up and down the yard, until the argument
between the two men terminated in a quarrel so violent that half-a-dozen
neighbors came in to see what was the matter. It ended in Bob O' Tims
insisting that he would take the matter into court. He was as good as
his word, and the next time that the bench met, Bob O' Tims summoned
Jimmy Taylor on a charge of having stolen his game-cock.
The magistrates listened to the witnesses on either side. Half-a-dozen
people were ready to swear that the cock belonged to Bob. But Jimmy
brought up a couple of witnesses to testify that they had seen him buy a
similar animal at Turton Fair. The cock was then brought into court. It
clucked and choked indignantly, and the partisans of Bob and Jimmy swore
against each other as hard as ever they could. The bench appeared
perplexed; and it was owing to their inability to come to any decision
that the magistrate's clerk made his famous suggestion.
"The case appears to me impossible to prove as it stands, your
worships," he said to the bench. "I would suggest, if I may be allowed,
that you direct an officer of the court to take the cock to some spot at
an equal distance between the houses of the plaintiff and of the
defendant. If he is there placed upon the ground, and left to his own
devices, he is pretty sure to make his way straight home."
The magistrates accepted the suggestion of the clerk, and gave judgment
accordingly. A policeman was ordered to carry out their instructions.
Now, this officer was young and raw, and had only recently been enrolled
in the constabulary. He was a fat, rosy man, with an air of
self-importance. He set out from the court with the cock under his arm.
An excited crowd streamed after the policeman, who stalked on with no
little pomposity. When he reached the common, which lay between the
houses of the rival claimants, he stood still for a minute or two,
grasping the cock and looking judiciously from one side of the broken
land to the other.
The crowd eagerly commenced to give information.
"You're a bit nearer Bob O' Tims's than you are to Jimmy's!" cried one.
"Nay! Nay!" interposed another spectator, who was a partisan of Bob O'
Tims. "There's a corner to turn afore you get to Bob's. It's not fair,
not to make allowance for that."
"Stand back!" cried the policeman majestically--"Stand back, every man
of you. The critter will be too much put about to go anywhere if you
don't keep still tongues in your heads."
The officer still stood, with his legs wide apart, turning his head
slowly from side to side. Once he made a pace in the direction of Jimmy
Taylor's; then, changing his mind, he took a couple of steps toward Bob
O' Tims's. Finally, he decided that he had fixed upon the exact locality
commanded by the law, and with a magisterial air, he again waved back
the crowd and deposited the cock upon the ground in front of him.