THE AWAKENING
The white giant, sun-stricken, drooping languidly, crumbled and
dissolved before their eyes. The air softened. The streams rushed full,
the southern hillsides showed bare and gaunt.
In the lake cabin they felt aged by their imprisonment. It had been so
long, so remote from the world rush. Like prisoners long confined, they
were loath to leave a dungeon where life had been well ordered if not
exhilarating. Benumbed in the first days of the change, they returned
indoors to the soothing evenness of their six months' hibernation. They
found those first changes unbelievable. Winter would surely go on
forever; too mighty a jailer it was to be vanquished by a mere breath of
honey and flowers. They stayed in to warn one another against false
appearances.
But there came a day when, in the blaze of noontime, Ben Crider moved
his chair out by the door and sang softly to the strains of his guitar.
His eyes blinked in the sunlight as he sang, yet they did not fail to
detect the signs of spring so plentiful about the clearing in bud and
leaf and tiny grass shoot, even though patches of snow still lay in the
shaded spots.
The woman who cooked came also to the door as Ben sang. He had spoken of
her the winter through as "the woman," dimly perceiving her as a spirit
that mumbled endless complainings as she toiled, for she was one who
had been disillusioned by much cooking. She cooked acceptably, and Ben
had burgeoned in the uncanny luxury of food prepared by another hand
than his own, but he had given her little attention beyond discovering
her opinion that cooking was a barren performance, since people
perversely ate and thereby destroyed, and the thing must be done again
endlessly. He had vaguely observed that this woman was not beautiful,
and now, as she faced him with a sudden joviality in the spring
sunshine, he saw that she could never have been beautiful. She beamed
amicably on the balladist, and he, turning casual eyes on her, was
stricken to dismayed silence; the tuneful praise of young love fainted
on his lips as he stared, aghast, and his startled hand hushed the
vibrant strings. A moment he looked, recovering from the shock. Then, in
swift recoil, he grasped his chair and went resolutely out under the big
hemlock, there to resume his song and his absent contemplation of
Nature's awakening--his back to the cabin door. In this sensitive mood
he wished not to incur again a vision that blighted song.
It was no longer disputable that spring was real; no baseless tradition,
but an unfolding reality. Ben had divined it, and the other prisoners
were not long in proving it.
One of them surveyed it in panic wonder, turning in upon herself to face
the ordeal of enforced living. They wandered in the open, three of them,
now, finding it good to feel the bare, elastic earth under their feet
again, and prove the noiseless but sensational life of growing things
all about them. They plucked buds to see their secret hearts, and
exposed the roots of peeping herbs that had begun their strivings
before the snow went.
When the sunny places had been dried and warmed, and were pulsing in
their myriad hidden hearts, so that winter began to fade in their minds
as some dream of night, they would penetrate the sunless depths of a
narrow canyon where the snow yet lay deep and the stream was a mere
choking of ice in a gorge.
It was in the flush of this exultation over winter's downfall that they
planned camp life in a vale at the edge of the lake, where the spruces
thinned to leave wide-vaulted arches, and spread the floor with yielding
brown rugs of the pine needle. They began it as a play, and finished
with a permanent camp into which they moved from the cabin. There were
tents and beds, a table, a sheet-iron stove, chests for their stores,
and hammocks in which to be fanned by the south wind.
Bartell promised his sister vast benefits from this life.
"This will put the finishing touches to you, Sis. A month here and
you'll be loping over the range, high, wide, and handsome. It'll take an
elk-high fence to hold you after you've slept awhile out here."
She felt the truth of what he said, and was appalled by it. Almost daily
she dismayed herself by recalling some unpremeditated feat of strength
or endurance. Life had crept back to her like a whipped dog, and
bitterly she felt the sting of its satire. She was loath to leave the
cabin in which she had so long nursed death. She had impregnated the
very walls with an atmosphere of dissolution. But she understood now
that that prison house could no longer suffice her. Stubborn life had
prevailed over all its powers of suggestion. There she had clung
stubbornly to the old solution, cherishing a hope of some sudden
relapse, despite the new life that taunted her with its animal buoyance.
But once in the open, her brain was washed of that. Her mind was as
clear as the fathomless blue above them at noon; and the stars at night
were not more coldly luminous than the reasoning she bent upon herself,
nor sharper than a certain deduction she made.
Ewing brought his drawing to the camp and spent the mornings in work. He
had finished his series for the _Knickerbocker_ during the winter, and
these drawings, with the illustrations for the story previously made,
had brought him enough to discharge the Teevan debt. He had reported
this transaction significantly to Mrs. Laithe, and was now busy on
pictures for another story for the _Knickerbocker_.
"Only a little longer," he said, with a meaning she could not fathom,
and he returned to his work with a singular absorption. Not even Ben
could distract him when he sauntered up for his daily criticism. Ben was
respectful to the drawings after he saw the checks they brought, but his
summing up of the purchaser's acumen never varied.
"Well, well--fools and their money! The idee of payin' out cash for a
thing that looks as much like Red Phinney as that there does!"
When work was done for the day Ewing would turn to Mrs. Laithe with a
smile of release, and they would stray along some dim trail or off into
pathless, shaded silences of the wood, lingering in grassy mountain
meadows, or skirting the base of bleak crags where streaks of snow in
shadow still clung to the gray walls. She was conscious then of a tumult
throbbing wonderfully beneath the surface of their companionship--a
tumult of life aching for release. In little chance moments of silence
this rumbled ominously, leaving her fearful, but curiously resigned,
moved to blind flight, yet chained and submissive as were the hills
themselves.
One afternoon they sought their canyon of delayed winter after many days'
neglect of it. They wondered if spring might not have reached even that
secret recess at last. They left the trail that skirted the edge and
descended a rocky way that Ewing found, emerging at last through a
fringe of the stunted cedars into the gloom of the depths.
At first glance this last stronghold of winter seemed to have remained
impregnable. Snow lay deep along the bottom, enormous stalactites of ice
depended from overhanging ledges, and the stream itself appeared to be
still only a riven glacier. But, listening intently, they heard a steady
liquid murmur, the very music of spring come at last to sing the gorge
awake. As they stood, listening, there was a shivering crash; one of the
huge icicles had dropped, shattering on a lower ledge and raining its
fragments into the soft snowbed below.
"It's the very last of winter," said Ewing mournfully. "That snow is
eaten through and through. See how those bits of ice drove into it. And
hear that running water. It will be off with a rush now. It's the very
last of it--all I shall have to look back to--that winter of ours
together." His tone was full of a meaning she dared not question. They
climbed in silence to the summer above and traversed, still silently,
the stretch of green woods that grew beyond the canyon wall. Only at the
first mountain meadow, a dazzle of emerald under the slanting sun, did
they halt to gaze at each other. His eyes were wonderfully alight with
sadness and rejoicing as she faced him, radiant in a moment of
forgetfulness, flagrant in her beauty's renewal.
"You're wonderful again," he said, almost whisperingly, "you're all in
flower now!" She quickened under his look, feeling the glow on her
cheeks. But that faded at his next words.
"I finished the last of those drawings to-day. Now I must go."
"Ah--go?" It was a little cry, half of question, half of understanding.
"Yes--I can go now. I couldn't go before, but I have the money now."
She sickened as they walked on in silence, fearing to question him, and
when they reached the camp she ran to throw herself on the bed in her
tent, covering her eyes with her hands, pressing the lids down, but
making no sound.
As they sat about their camp fire that evening Ewing was struck by a
certain view he caught of her. She sat in shadow on a stool at the foot
of a towering hemlock, and once when he rose to stir the waning fire a
flame shot up from a half-burned log, with a volley of sparks that fell
back in a golden rain. He glanced over to be sure that she escaped
these, and saw her sharply revealed in the sudden light, unconscious of
it, unaroused by the crackling explosion. She was staring fixedly into
the darkness, her body relaxed, her hands half clasped, her head, the
profile toward him, leaning wearily against the tree. Before this
background she seemed frail again, her face pallid under the dark of
her hair and against the rough, ruddy brown of the tree bole, her whole
body contrasting in its fragile lines with the tree's strength--human
weakness showing starkly against the vigor of the woods.
To dull the sudden wanting of his heart for her he walked off alone over
the path that bordered the lake, to reduce the amazing actuality of
things, if he could, to proportions seemly with normal life. But the
lake was a mirror of enchantment, the booming of an owl was a magic
portent, the shadowed wall of granite was a turreted castle of
mysteries, vague in the starlight, and the very stars themselves huddled
down on him excitingly. He was in a world of the unreal, and must do an
unreal thing. He stumbled blindly back to camp. He was surprised to find
Mrs. Laithe as he had left her, still drooping against the rough-barked
tree, weak, submissive, overborne. He touched her arm gently to recall
her from some troubled distance. She looked at him with eyes unseeing at
first.
"Isn't it bedtime?" he suggested.
She smiled and stood up to shrug away the spell of her dreaming. She
spoke with such clear strength of tone that he was at once reassured of
her vigor.
"Yes, it's sleeping time--in a moment. I haven't said much to you, but
there's really little to say. You feel that you must go?"
"How could I stay here--after that?"
She repressed a sudden spasm of wild, weeping laughter that threatened
to overcome her.
"And you'll not come back?" She waited breathless.
"There isn't much chance of it."
"You dear, dear fool!" was on her lips, but she held back the words and
said very quietly:
"Go out, then, and live as you must. Only don't let life cow you. Don't
ever fear that living is intricate or hard or tragic--a thing to be gone
about warily. The wary people make the same mistakes as the careless
ones, and feel them ten times more. Don't be afraid to dream--afraid to
believe. I'm glad I've dreamed every dream of mine--false or true. Never
be afraid to want." She turned half away as if to go, but halted, and he
thought she had grown suddenly weak.
"You're going----"
"To-morrow, I'd thought--the sooner the better."
"Ah, but that's so soon. Can't we have one more day here? One more day
to think of it?"
"I've thought of it all winter, days and nights as well; but I'd like
another day--" He watched her longingly as she went beyond the
firelight.
"Not a day to think about it," he called softly--"a day to forget."
They made it a day of forgetting, as he had said. In the morning they
planned to ride, and their spirits were such as they rode off that Ben
was moved to regard them knowingly, as one who had taken a fling at life
in his time.
The day long they rode or rambled, talking of all but obvious
things--making it, indeed, a day of forgetting and a day to remember.
Deep in the woman's heart stirred an instinct of primal coquetry, an
impulse to wield her charm upon him, to make the woman prevail over the
man, beating all reason down, blindly, madly. And she yielded to this,
watching its effect on him, divining the power of her freshened beauty
each time she compelled his eyes. Instinctively she would have had him
say, "I give up. I can't go. Let me stay--stay by you!" The natural
woman in her fought for that. But reason reigned above the conflict. She
knew he would not surrender and knew she would not have him surrender.
Still she could not resist that impulse to enchain him, and exulted each
time she made him tremble at their nearness.
Not until night had come did the imminence of his going seem to lie upon
them. But then it lay with a weight. Together they left the camp and
felt a way over the darkened trail to the cabin. Ewing had spoken of
packing he must do, of matters in which she might help him.
But when they were in the studio, and he had started a great blaze in
the fireplace he sat before it with her, silent. She spoke at length of
the packing.
"There's none to do," he answered. "I'm taking scarcely anything--only
what I can carry back of the saddle."
Her blood leaped with a quick hope.
"Then you're not going for long--you _will_ come back--" But he only
shook his head.
"I can't expect to come back." He looked at her with a sudden lighting
of his eyes. "Come near to me this once." He moved a stool in front of
him. "Sit here, this once."
She sat on the low stool at his feet and felt herself drawn slowly
forward until her arms rested on his knees. She laid her head on them,
shaken to the heart. Then she felt him bending over her, hovering,
sheltering her, and at last, with a long sigh, come to rest, his face
buried in her hair. They remained so, immovable, without further speech.
The absurdity of the thing between them had never seemed so egregious
to her. The words rang in her mind, burning behind her closed
eyes--"It's all a mistake, that. How could you believe it, even you,
unused to the world though you are?" But she knew the questions this
would bring from him, the doubt that would stay with him; knew she could
never satisfy him with less than the truth. For a moment she heard
herself telling him this truth, gently, delicately, tenderly. But he
spoke, even while she was thinking this.
"I wanted to be here to-night with you, and with her." He raised his
head at last, to look at the portrait of his mother. "She understands,
I'm sure. And she would have me go--she would have me do as I am doing."
She knew finally, then, that she could never tell him. She ceased all
vain considering of that. He was going away from her because of the lie
he believed. The truth might come to him some day, but it must never
come from her. The certainty brought her a kind of rest. She could fall
back on laughter and tears for the thing.
A long time they sat there, speaking little, her head still cradled on
his knees. But when the fire died they knew it must be late and rose to
go. Ewing looked long at the portrait, then turned to her.
"I'm doing what I would do for her," he said, "and I'm glad I had you
both with me this last time. You'll always keep that for me, won't you?"
He raised a hand toward the portrait.
"If you wish it," she said.
When they came in sight of the camp fire they stopped and turned to each
other. He caught her by the shoulders.
"Good night and good-by!" he whispered.
She tried to speak, but could not for the trembling of her lips. She
turned to go, and took a few faltering steps, then flew back, and with a
wild gesture, drew him down and pressed his head against her heart.
Ben came sleepily from the cabin next morning as Ewing was about to
mount his horse. He had felt at ease about this journey, because of the
slender equipment with which Ewing was setting out. An early return was
to be inferred.
Ewing held out his hand, and Ben, observing that it was scarce daylight,
and that the act could in no way be considered a public scandal, grasped
it cordially.
"So long, Kid--and good luck, whatever you're goin' to do!"
"There's a man down in New York needs killing, Ben."
"Now, look a here, Kid, you better look out"--but the practical aspects
of the affair at once seized his mind, and he broke off with, "Got your
gun?"
"No--a gun's too good for him."
Ben considered this, and became again solicitous.
"Well, look a here, now, you be darned careful. If it's needed, why, do
it. But you jest want to remember that New York ain't Hinsdale County.
You want to be mighty careful you don't git into some trouble over it."