When Miss Whitcom learned, as she did directly, that Mr. O'Donnell
was at the Elmbrook Inn, down at Crystalia, she emphatically changed
colour. However much she might like to deny it, a fact was a fact. And
in addition to that, her talk, for at least ten seconds, was utterly
incoherent. She simply mixed the words all up, and nothing she said
made any sense at all. Of course she quickly regained her equilibrium
and made a playful remark about "having had all that letterwriting
trouble for nothing." But it must very plainly and unequivocally be
set down that throughout those first ten seconds her colour was high,
her coherence at zero.
The ensuing hour at Beachcrest passed quietly, despite the fact that
every one seemed moving at a high rate of tension.
Mrs. Needham spent a considerable portion of the time in conference
with Eliza. The advent of the grocer's boy occasioned the usual
excitement. It must be understood that these arrivals mean ever so much
more in the wilderness than they do in town. In town, supposing there
is a certain item missing, you merely step to the phone and give your
tradesman polite hell. But on Point Betsey there were no such resources
possible. They did not even have electric lights, and it was merely
possible, when things went wrong, to explode to the boy (which never
did any good), or to explode in a grander yet still quite as futile
way to the world at large. Fortunately, this morning (the morning of
this most momentous day!) the supplies arrived in relatively excellent
condition.
The Rev. Needham, pacing up and down alone in the living room, paused
nervously now and then to heed the muffled sounds issuing from sundry
quarters of the cottage: the squeaky opening or closing of doors,
which might somehow have a meaning in his life; the shuffle of steps
(maybe portentous) across the sanded boards.... And most especially he
pricked his ears--those small, alert ears of his, that were perpetually
prepared for the worst--when the things came from the store. It would
be horrible, with guests in the house, to have a short supply; although
of course here again, as in the case of the pancakes, he was concerning
himself outside his own department. But even if these responsibilities
of the kitchen didn't really rest on his shoulders, nevertheless the
Rev. Needham listened as each item was pronounced, upon its emergence
from the huge market basket.
Coffee, cheese, eggs--eggs, ah! we must look at them. One broken? Well,
we should be thankful for eleven sound ones. Housekeeping, especially
housekeeping in a cottage, develops a wonderful and luminous patience.
This patience--like mercy, an attribute of God Himself--may even
sometimes lead one to the tracing of quite Biblical applications. There
were twelve disciples in the beginning, yet one of them, in the stress
of events....
Bread, celery, carrots, frosted cookies. _Where was the roast?_ The
Rev. Needham's heart stood still. He halted, petrified with horrid
fear. The roast, the roast! Thank God they found it, down at the bottom
of the basket. Oh, thank _God_! The pacing was resumed.
Up and down, up and down. One would have perceived here, so far as
externals went, merely a quiet, middle-aged clergyman strolling in
his home. Yet in the cottage living room this clergyman and this
angry Dutch clock together synthesized contemporary events. "Trouble,
trouble, trouble, trouble!" ticked the clock sharply. And each step
in the Rev. Needham's pacing seemed a question. As the years crept by,
broadening vision seemed not very materially to be quieting the good
man's fidgets and perturbations. It seemed merely to give them longer
tether; for his unsettled state was organic. It would never be really
otherwise. Religion, science, feeling, thought, reason--all alike, in
their several directions, seemed impotent to anchor him. The sea was
too deep. He might, of course, _call_ himself anchored; but alas, the
cruel little demons of doubt and quandary were bound, sooner or later,
to insinuate themselves back into his heart. His walk was groping,
indecisive. Each step was a question: "Whither? Why? How long? What is
best? What is best? _What is best?_"
Miss Whitcom stood meditatively before the somewhat wavy mirror in
her little room. She was pondering past, present, future. Also, she
was acknowledging that grey hairs had perceptibly multiplied since
O'Donnell last saw her. Would he notice them? And if he did? Well? She
contemplated herself and her life in the wavy mirror.
Beyond his own three-quarters partition, Barry happened at the same
moment to be standing before a mirror also--as men do sometimes, who
would be sure to deny the charge were it publicly preferred against
them. Yes, he was getting along. Not in any sense _old_, of course. To
some a man of thirty-three seems still a young man. He tried to look at
it that way. Still thirty-three was thirty-three. And Louise.... She
was young, so young--and fresh, and sweet, and adorable.... His quiet
eyes misted a moment as he thought of her. And for her sake he could
wish himself one of those fabulous princes we read of in childhood. Ah,
yes--a kind of prince--just for her sake! He regarded himself in the
glass solemnly and critically. There were undeniable lines of salient
maturity in his face; and princes, that was sure, never had any lines
at all. So young, so sweet, so charming! He sighed and went about
unpacking his things. That he should win her--that he should win this
dear girl for his wife ...!
"I have done nothing to deserve such happiness as this," he said
softly. "In all my life, nothing, nothing!"
And then he took a ring out of a little box and gazed at it. And when
he had gazed at it a long time, he put it back in the box and put the
box in his pocket.
Louise, in the seclusion of her room, no longer wept, though she still
lay on the bed. Tears had relieved the strain, and her heart was not
so burdened. Slowly reviving, she lay in a sort of half pleasant
lethargy--not thinking, exactly, nor even actually feeling, for the
moment. Tears are like suave drugs: under their mystic persuasion
life may assume the lovely softness of a mirage. But the softness is
fleeting. It rests and it is gone. It is like false dawn. Or it is like
a dream of light when the night is blackest.
4
Marjory and Anna met outside the cottage in a little rustic bower
where there was a hammock, and where the Rev. Needham had constructed,
with his own hands, a clumsy and rather unstable rustic bench. It had
taken him nearly all one summer to build this bench. The clergyman had
perspired a great deal, and gone about with a dogged look. They were
all mightily relieved when the task was at last completed. It seemed to
simplify life.
Mrs. Needham sat on the rustic bench now, fanning herself with her
white apron. Her face was flushed, her manner a little wild. She
and Eliza had reached the agonizing conclusion that the raisins,
indispensable to the Indian meal pudding, hadn't come, only to discover
the little package lying out on the path where it had slipped from the
grocer boy's basket. The pudding was saved, but what a shock to one's
whole system!
"Well, Anna," said her sister, dropping fearlessly into the hammock.
None but newcomers possessed that sublime faith in hammock ropes!
"I declare!" returned Anna. "Whew!"--her apron moving rapidly--"So
warm!"
"Well, have you been charging up hillsides, or racing Alfred on the
beach?"
Mrs. Needham looked a little startled at the irreverent allusion. "Oh,
no, only planning with Eliza, and--"
"You find Eliza a treasure, don't you?"
"Yes, she's very capable."
"I suppose a maid's capability must take on a special lustre in the
wilderness. Don't you sometimes fancy you see a faint halo over Eliza's
head? You people in this luxurious country have become so dependent,
I don't know what you _would_ do if there should ever be a general
strike!"
"No, I don't know either," admitted Mrs. Needham. "Eliza talks of
going back. It's so quiet up here--girls don't like it. We've raised
her twice. I really don't know what's going to be the end of the help
question. And wages ...!" She raised her eyes to the heavens.
A short silence followed. Marjory swung gently back and forth in the
hammock. She might have been pronounced an eloquent embodiment of
perfect calm; and yet her heart was curiously bumping about.
"Anna," she asked slowly, "do you remember Barrett O'Donnell?"
Her sister looked at her queerly a moment. "Some friend, Marjory?" For
Marjory had had, in her time, so many friends!
"You'll remember him, I know, when you see him," she nodded. And then
she continued: "He's here."
"Here?"
"Well," her sister laughed, "not quite on the Point, but at Crystalia."
"Really?"
"Dear old Barrett! I wonder...."
"Marjory," the other asked, with an odd effect of conscious shrewdness,
"is he--is Mr. O'Donnell _the_ man?"
"For goodness sake, _what_ man, Anna?"
"Why, I always felt," her sister replied quaintly, "that there was one
man, all through the years--'way from the time we stopped telling each
other secrets...."
Marjory laughed loudly. But she seemed touched also. "It's a long time,
isn't it, since we stopped telling secrets?"
And Anna sighed, for perhaps her retrospect, if less exciting, was even
longer than her sister's.
The two sat, after that, a little while without speaking. Then Anna's
large round face assumed a truly brilliant expression.
"Marjory!" she cried.
"Well?"
"You say he's here?"
"Um, though it seems impossible to credit such a thing. Perhaps it's
all a myth. He's at the Elmbrook Inn. Is there," she whimsically
faltered, "--is there honestly such a place?"
"Marjie, I mean to have him up!"
"Anna--you mean here?"
"For _luncheon_!"
In their excitement the two ladies were really all but shouting at each
other. They realized it and smiled; sank to quieter attitudes both of
bearing and speech.
"You think he'd come, don't you Marjie?"
"Come? Ra_ther_! Did you ever hear of a travelling man turning down a
chance at home cooking?"
"Then I'm going to send right over and invite him. It will be real fun!
I suppose," she embroidered, with as great an effect of roguery as she
could enlist, "I suppose he's followed you up!"
"Obviously!" her sister replied, not apparently flustered in the least.
"Think of it!"
"Yes, it is rather dreadful, isn't it--especially at our ages!"
"I think it's kind of splendid, Marjie."
"Er--Alfred never was much of what you'd call the 'following' kind, was
he Anna?"
"Well, I can't seem to remember. It seems to me once...."
"Oh, they'll nearly always follow _once_. It's keeping right on that
seems hard. Of course," she added, "marriage puts a stop to all that
sort of thing, doesn't it?"
"Yes, I suppose, in a sense...."
"Anna, there's just one way to keep 'em going: _don't marry_! Well,
you see for yourself how it is."
"Yes, but it seems kind of dreadful to put it that way, don't it?"
"Dreadful? Oh, yes. Yes, of course it's dreadful. Still, it's rather
nice."
"M-m-m," murmured Anna.
The philosophy of man's pursuit proved baffling. Here were two sisters
who knew its bitters and its sweets. Yet it is doubtful if for either
the bitter was all bitter and the sweet all sweet....
Hilda and Leslie came back from the tennis tournament. They were hot
and in high spirits.
"Who won?" asked Mrs. Needham cheerily.
"We did, mama!"
"Three cheers!" cried Miss Whitcom, sitting up enthusiastically in the
hammock.
"You never saw such excitement!" cried Hilda. "Most of the games were
deuce for both sides before anybody got it!"
"Very close," was Leslie's simpler version.
Louise crept to her window and peered down into the bower. Hilda and
Leslie were holding one racquet between them. It was his racquet and
she was twining her fingers playfully in and out among the strings. A
feeling of suffocation closed suddenly upon Louise's throat.
And just then Barry walked into the bower. He had been exploring the
delightful wild endroit, and hoping that Louise might suddenly appear,
with some lovely tangle of wood and vine for background. For he hailed
from a country where trees are scarce, and one's backgrounds from
childhood are sand, desert sand. His life had grown suddenly so rich....
Barry was welcomed. Mrs. Needham made room for him beside her on the
rustic bench. She looked at him a little shyly, but with the ecstatic
admiration, also, of one who would say: "This is the man we're giving
our daughter to!"
But where _was_ Louise? Her mother had scarcely seen her since the
return from Frankfort. How strangely she was behaving.
"I believe she's lying down," said Barry, his tone warm with shielding
tenderness and apology. "She got up so early to meet the boat. It was
wonderful of her!"
The two young champions were giving Aunt Marjie a fuller account of
the tennis combat. They still held the racquet between them. Both were
flushed, keen-eyed, ridiculously happy. How soon he had recovered!
Louise, up at her window, remembered Leslie's mood at an earlier hour.
At dawn she might have had him. Now it was too late. "Oh, the injustice
of it!" she cried, her hands crushing her breast. But as she looked
down into his glowing face, she realized a swift sense of humiliation.
"He didn't care after all," she told herself.
Hilda and Leslie evinced great willingness to convey the luncheon
invitation to Barrett O'Donnell. Leslie, of course, volunteered to
go, and Hilda, of course, said she simply _would_ go too. So off they
raced, still holding the tennis racquet between them.
Louise watched them go. In her hand was the book she had bought in
Frankfort. Suddenly, under stress of very violent emotion, she pressed
it against her cheek.
Barry watched them out of sight. He was thinking of Louise. She had not
yet kissed him. In his pocket was a little box, and inside the little
box was a ring.
Marjory also watched them go. She sighed even as she smiled: "Another
young thing, just starting out--boy-crazy. So futile." But she smiled
more radiantly in spite of herself, and the other valuation _would_
slip in: "So sweet!"
5
The portières between the dining room and the living room at Beachcrest
are carefully drawn. The whole company is assembled, waiting. It is
one o'clock, the vitriolic Dutch timepiece on the mantel having just
snapped out the hungry truth.
The clock, with its quenchless petulance and spite, is lord of the
mantel. And what an entourage of vessels! Close up against it huddles
a bottle of peroxide. Then, although disposed in some semblance of
neatness and order, one discovers a fish stringer, an old pipe, several
empty cigar boxes, heaps of old letters, a book opened and turned down,
a number of rumpled handkerchiefs, some camera films, a bottle of red
ink. There are two odd candlesticks, without any candles, a metal dish
containing a vast miscellany of pins, collar buttons, rubber bands, and
who knows what? Lo, on the other side of the clock loiter a curious
pebble, a laundry list, a box of candy, some loose change and a little
paper money, a pocket flash which no longer works, matches in a broken
crockery receiver, perfumes, sandpaper, a writing tablet and some
yellowing envelopes. And one glimpses, emerging from chaos, the frayed
handle of a whisk broom which has seen immeasurably better days. Some
woven grass baskets, too. Anything else? Yes, yonder is a box of tacks,
and beside it a little pile of the Rev. Needham's socks, nicely darned.
Also, strewn here and there, are various rail and steamship timetables,
most of which bear the dates of seasons long gone by. An immortal
miscellany! Oh, and one must not miss that curious creature squatting
in a dim corner and peering ever alertly around with his little beady
eyes: yes, a sad and much dilapidated Teddy Bear.
One o'clock!
There is a tendency on the part of every pair of eyes--even those of
the Rev. Needham, or perhaps especially those--to direct from time to
time a wholly unconscious glance of hope mingled with mild anxiety
toward the tantalizing green portières, beyond which Eliza moves about
with maddening deliberateness.
One o'clock, snapping like a dry forest twig under the tread of some
wild creature. Then an angry _tick_-tock, _tick_-tock. On and on and
on, forever.
Out in the kitchen Eliza was prodding the kettle of soup. She was
dreamily thinking of the porter at the hotel in Beulah. Would he get
over this evening? Oh, love is so wonderful! Eliza was quite gauche and
unlettered; yet love, for her, was a thing which could rouse brilliant
orgies of the imagination. Love, even for her, was something which
transcended all the ineffable promised glories of Heaven itself. Yes,
it was better than the streets of pearl and the gates of amethyst--or
was it the gates of pearl and the streets of gold?
When the soup was ready she served it, then thrust asunder the
portières. "Lunch is served, ma'am," she announced, with a degree of
majesty which would simply have terrorized the Beulah porter.
They responded promptly--not exactly crowding ahead of each other, but
stepping along with irreproachable briskness. Appetites beside the sea
are like munition factories in wartime.
There was a cheerful rattle of chairs and much scraping of feet under
the table. Then a solemn silence, while the minister prayed. The Rev.
Needham, of course, sat at the head of the table. Mrs. Needham sat
opposite him at the foot. To the minister's right was Miss Whitcom,
who found herself delightfully sandwiched in between a knight of
the church and a knight of the grip. Needless to say, the latter
was Mr. O'Donnell, looking his very nicest and smelling of soap
like the Brushwood Boy. Next came Hilda, who flashed quite dazzling
smiles across at her sister, smiles more subdued and shy at Mr.
Barry. There was a flurry of conversation at first, while the paper
napkins were being opened up and disposed where they would afford the
most protection--not a great deal, it is to be feared, at best. And
then--well, then there was almost no talk at all until after the soup.
As they say in theatre programs: "The curtain will be lowered one
minute to denote a lapse of time."
Miss Whitcom and Mr. O'Donnell had employed quite as little formality
in their meeting as the latter had prophesied during the trip up to
Beulah. She hadn't, as a matter of fact, referred to the wall paper in
the throne room of the Queen's palace. Instead she had remarked: "You
know, it's curious. I was just dropping you a note. Yes. I wanted, for
one thing, to express my regret over the unlikelihood of our seeing
each other this trip, since you see I'm going right back. Jolly you
should have happened along like this--and a postage stamp saved into
the bargain!" While he, swallowing his disappointment over the prospect
of her immediate return to Tahulamaji, had replied in like spirit: "How
fortunate--about the stamp, I mean. It _has_ been a long while, hasn't
it?"
And now they were sitting side by side at the table, rather
monopolizing the conversation--having a beautiful time, yet never quite
descending from that characteristic, mutually assumed tone of banter.
"I suppose you're still travelling, Mr. O'Donnell?"
"Still travelling, Miss Whitcom."
"Same firm?"
"Same firm."
It had been the same firm almost as far back as memory went. It always
would be the same firm. There was little of change and perhaps nothing
at all of adventure in this destiny. But there was a rather substantial
balance in the bank, which, after all, is a kind of adventure, too.
"Babbit & Babbit," she mused.
"Members of the O. A. of C."
"True. I'm afraid I'd forgotten the letters at the end."