THE FLAVOUR OF GRAPES
When Helen came down to breakfast she was wan and years older in
appearance than Henriette, who was blooming and cheerful.
"Working again! Confess--I saw the light in your room," said
Henriette. "You try too hard."
"There's no doubt of it," agreed Helen. "I can't help it. It's the
fault of mistaking taste for talent in moments of impulse, and some
kind of a knot in my brain."
"Poor dear!" said Mrs. Sanford in instinctive sympathy before she could
catch herself. Then she drew back in her chair, prepared for the
tempest.
But this time Helen did not appear even irritated; she had become more
than ever inexplicable to her aunt.
"Poor dear!" she repeated absently. "If one talks about one's self one
must expect to be talked about."
The vicar turned to Phil's experiences in the Southwest. Was it really
wild? And how did one live? As Phil pictured his life in swift, broad
strokes, Helen was listening intently and some of the fire returned to
her eyes.
"There is one thing I have not told," he said gravely, as they went out
on the lawn. "I think that it ought to be told even in the presence of
the ancestor, though he may disown me."
"More American humour," thought Mrs. Sanford, convinced that she now
knew the signals and prepared to laugh even if she did not understand
the joke.
"My first task was cleaning out cattle cars!"
But Mrs. Sanford did not laugh. She was aghast. Even the vicar was
visibly shocked. Helen spoke first.
"I hope you did it well," she said.
"No fear!" he rejoined.
"We wondered why you did not go to work for Peter," said the vicar.
They, too, knew of Peter Smithers. Even in England Philip could not
escape the shadow of the rich man who might leave him a fortune, which
Mrs. Sanford had already imagined as restoring the estate in Hampshire.
Perhaps Phil guessed as much, for he related with relish the essence of
his last interview with Peter. The vicar and his wife looked
depressed; they longed to tell him that he had been unwise.
Helen was laughing as she had last night into the mirror, at the
picture which she conjured of Peter stamping down the path at Longfield
in anger.
"Splendid!" she exclaimed, almost hilariously; and then was still, as
their eyes met.
"You'll make your own fortune, which is better," said Henriette.
"A hundred a week is all there is in sight at present," Phil replied.
"We have little time before the train goes if----" the vicar urged.
It was the ancestors again. The warrior of the portrait had the cool
and damp distinction of having his bones under a stone in the church
floor which had been trod by generations of worshippers. Later cousins
were in the churchyard, their chiselled names grown faint. The vicar's
kindly face glowed as he indulged in his favourite topic of genealogy.
Helen imagined the ancestors in the garbs and prejudices of their time
come to life and passing in review before the transplanted and
surviving branch.
"I suppose," she suggested, in the way she had of speaking aloud to
herself, as if the thought were not worth considering by other people
but pleased her, "I suppose that Peter Smithers would say that these
are all dead ones and it's the live ones that count."
Of course she should not make such remarks. Still, she would and
people would stare at her in wonder, even as the vicar and his wife
were staring at that moment. Phil looking hard at a tombstone had a
quiver to his lips which he would have denied bore any relation to a
smile.
"I was only thinking how much nicer it must be to be alive and touring
Europe for the first time with the money you had earned, instead of
being an ancestor," she explained. "I like Peter for giving his money
to the clubhouse. Ancestors did nothing for him."
"You don't seem to care for ancestors?" Phil suggested.
"Oh, yes, lots--generically," she answered. "They built cathedrals and
churches like this and had a horrid good old human time in the doing of
it. As for one's own ancestors, it depends upon how much they have
done for you."
"You are quite surpassing yourself at iconoclasm to-day," said her
sister gently and sympathetically.
Helen nodded as if she knew it, and could not help herself.
"Everything depends upon the flavour of the grapes," she replied. The
sisters were searching each other's eyes in a new and surprising way to
both. The grapes were sweet to Henriette; they were sour to Helen.
"It is the hard work last night," said Henriette, slipping her arm
around her sister. "Those charcoals may come right yet."
Helen was silent, unresisting, unresponsive, her face like ill-moulded
clay, and Henriette a personification of apology to Phil.
"According to story-books, Peter may yet fall on his knees and beg you
to take his fortune," she added to Phil. "So much for Peter Smithers.
He doesn't worry you, does he? It's delightful having seventeenth
cousins like you."
"And like you!" he replied to the challenge. "And you will not let me
miss the train."
They had time to walk and his bag had already gone. Helen was subdued,
remaining with her uncle behind Phil and Henriette.
"Remember at Mervaux, the sixth of August!" Henriette called from the
platform.
"I await your mother's invitation," Phil replied.
His last view of her was the uplifted arm as she waved her
handkerchief. Of course he had said that he would return to
Truckleford now that he had found the way and the vicar even talked of
accepting the invitation to Longfield, which is the way of such
partings. But America is far away.
Philip was alone in the compartment, very much alone as pictures
recollected from the down journey passed before his mind. The glance
across the aisle at the first meeting; Henriette's face reflected in
the mirror beside his; her figure preceding him along the path as they
ascended the hill above the village; little confidences on the walk to
the station. These are well-known symptoms. Acting as his own
diagnostician, this modern youth only four weeks from the cactus
country thought:
"I wonder if I have been hit! And Helen? I don't quite make her out.
She's not uninteresting, though. I wonder how long it will take
Henriette to do a portrait! I hope she is one of those painstaking
artists who has intervals of rest and conversation. But maybe Madame
Ribot won't write to me," scepticism which he dismissed as unpleasant.
It stood to reason that the mother of such a girl as Henriette would do
anything that she wanted. "I should, myself," he decided.
To him as an American the assassination of the heir to a European
throne and his consort, which he read in the newspapers that evening,
had the thrill of horror of a railroad or a steamship disaster. It
could have none of the seriousness that it had to every European, who
had that "balance of power," as they called it, in the back of the head
of his individual existence. He read; he sympathised in a generic
twinge of pity, and was little further concerned. In the afternoon of
the next day he should be in Holland and in the evening, had he not
chosen to spend a few days with Rembrandt and wooden shoes, he could
have been in Berlin, a journey in distance equivalent to that from
Buffalo to New York or Chicago to Omaha.
What contrast in language and people! Miss Wooden Shoes was as boyhood
pictures made her: and leisurely England, too; but where was the
phlegmatic old German with his china-bowl pipe? He realised the energy
of the new Germany, galvanised by some higher will of leadership, with
the resentment of its _verboten_ system which is inevitable to all
Americans who have not been educated in Germany and themselves fallen
into step, and particularly to a Sanford of New England.
He met Americans wherever he went, in hotels, on trains, and in picture
galleries, catered to for the dollars they dropped by the way into open
palms, privately criticised for the very liberality which made them
welcome, not to mention also for their brusqueness, their air of
success and sometimes their spread-eagleism. But they did not care as
long as they had the freedom of the playground. European politics or
world politics did not concern them, come from the fatness of their new
world beyond the seas. The last tourist summer of its kind!
Philip studied the newspapers with the help of college German which is
good enough on grammar but floundering in passing the time of day. His
keen mind began to catch the sense of how an assassination affected
that balance of power; he felt the pressure in the air before a cloud
burst; the suspense of the sparks running along the fuse from Sarajevo
to the powder magazines--but all objectively, with no presage of how
subjective it was to become to him.
Then one day all the youth of that nation moved as with one thought and
purpose, as the football eleven goes onto the gridiron--which was the
simple comparison that he made. For forty years they had been drilling
for this struggle and all the years and days and hours of the forty
years broke in cumulative force for the blow. How it made him think;
that a people could act together in this fashion; that a million and
two million men could go each to his place as the fireman to his on an
alarm! It seemed as if they should sweep all the world before them,
like the breaking of a dam down a river bed.
Youth was not bothering how to get home. It was on the scene and that
was enough. But about Mervaux and seventeenth cousins? Should he see
either? While in Berlin he had received so insistent a letter of
invitation from Madame Ribot that he had decided to spend less time in
Paris and more in Mervaux than originally planned, if it were agreeable.
Somehow he got on board a train in Switzerland, and sitting up all
night in a stifling second-class compartment he reached Paris. His
fellow-passengers were thinking of how to obtain money on letters of
credit and how to find berths on a transatlantic steamer. His own
passage had already been engaged on a French ship from Havre.
In Paris was a man who was more important to Phil than kings and
generals. The manager of the corporation which had promoted him and
paid the wage that gave him the holiday had just arrived from Vichy by
automobile. Mr. Ledyard was in a state of mind! The credit of the
world thrown out of gear; no answers to his cablegrams; stock markets
closed, while the passage he had engaged from Boulogne on a German
steamer was of about as much use to him for crossing the Atlantic as a
team of Esquimaux dogs. When Phil entered the room Ledyard had been
ringing in vain for a servant, who was already with the colours. He
was glad of some one to talk to, this man of power whom Phil had met
only twice: once on being employed and again on his return from the
Southwest to promotion.
"Business will go to the devil!" said Ledyard. "Everybody is going to
draw in and wait to see whether or not the world is coming to an end.
I'd like to drive the Kaiser's war bonnet down over his head and
strangle him. I confess that I never felt so helpless in my life. I
can't even get a second-class passage. Steamship company paid no
attention to my wires. First come, first served."
"I have a passage on a French liner for the sixteenth," said Phil, "two
in the cabin, if it will be any use to you, sir."
"Will it be any use? Taken, if it's six in the cabin," said Mr.
Ledyard. "And you return when you can get a comfortable passage; your
salary goes on." He considered the favour worth Phil's salary for
years. "I shouldn't stay in Paris if I were you," he went on. "You
might be caught in a siege. These people can't hold the Germans.
Manufacturing power and efficiency will be the big factors in this war,
and the Germans are ready. You have seen that, haven't you?"
"Yes. Amazing--it's a lesson."
"My English friends won't see Germany; they live too close to her. But
an American ought to, even if he resents her. It's between the Germans
and the British navy. The French can't stand up to it. I only wish
they could."
Phil could not agree. It was a different atmosphere which he had found
in Paris from that in Berlin, but no less impressive. Here was the
wall to hold the battering-ram which he had seen in movement for the
shock on the other side of the frontier. The emotional French were
going silently to their places no less promptly than the Germans;
democracy against Kaiserdom, the closed shops with "_Sous le drapeau_"
chalked on the shutters, the quietness of prayer and resolution which
possessed all France as one human being had taken possession of him.
All the world at war, and he was walking down the Champs-Elysees, the
greatest street in the world, its pavement white in the moonlight and
silent except for an occasional footfall. Somewhere over the hills in
the direction of Rheims was Mervaux. If the Ribots were still there
and wanted him, he would pay them at least a call.