HILL TOPS
I
Their baby was born the following August.
The day of its arrival, Nathan paced the cool, impersonal corridors of
the maternity hospital like an animal crazed, obsessed with the
necessity of getting relief by tearing something.
He had often smiled over the acclaimed nervousness and general distress
of certain young fathers, awaiting the arrival of their first-born. He
was not smiling now. Suppose the child should cost Madelaine her life?
What youngster could ever compensate for the Woman Beautiful who from
the first had made matrimony almost an idealist’s dream? If he lost
Madelaine, he could understand how fathers could hate their offspring.
But there was to be no occasion for any such unnatural attitude. At
twenty minutes past three o’clock, a nurse came down the elevator and
accosted him with a cheery, knowing smile.
“Congratulations first, Mr. Forge,” she cried. “You have an eight-pound
son. Everything’s perfectly normal and your wife’s doing lovely.”
A son!
A hot knife went straight through Nathan’s heart and into his soul.
“Come back about six o’clock,” the nurse advised him, though Nathan
scarcely heard. “You’ll find your wife in Room Eighty-eight.”
A few minutes later Nathan left the hospital. He sped blindly for a
florist’s to buy flowers, flowers—millions of flowers. He was boyishly
obsessed to buy flowers.
Madelaine was dozing when Nathan entered her room at six o’clock. She
turned her head toward him, lifting eyes that were still hollow and
slightly glazed with suffering. But when she recognized him, a coy smile
showed about her delicate mouth.
“Well, Mr. Man?” she demanded. “And now what have you to say?
_We—have—a—son!_”
Nathan, down beside the bed, buried his face in her soft mother-throat.
“If there was only something big I could do to show how much I love you,
dear,” he cried thickly, “—oh, God, if I only knew what to do——”
“Do? I thought we settled that—the night on the steam-ship—coming back
from Japan? A similar ‘do’ will be quite sufficient for the present
also.”
She held up her lips. He did.
It was not until the following morning, however, that Nat saw his son.
The nurse entered with a heavy roll of flannel and laid the baby in his
arms. Gently Nat pulled aside the blanketing and a tiny hand came up. It
was groping in its new-born blindness,—groping, groping, groping.
But it did not grope fruitlessly. That exquisite, shell-like little palm
found a great talon claw,—the life-twisted hand of its father. And it
gripped that calloused Thing tightly. It could always grip that
calloused Thing tightly.
Nathan’s only comment came in a whisper. To his boy he spoke a promise:
“There shall be no Fog for you, little son. As you grow along—your
dad—will understand!”
II
Hill Tops!
It was a night in November. Darkness had fallen early. A fire had been
lighted in the open grate and the big southern living room was pungently
warm. Shades had been drawn, shutting out the dreary autumn afterglow.
Aside from the ruddy gleam of the crackling fire, the only illumination
in the apartment came from the pedestal lamp beside a piano. The lamp
had an old-rose shade. All the hues and angles of the room were softened
and blended by its richness.
Nathan came down the wide front stairs, tying the cords of his
dressing-gown as he descended. He turned into the living room. A few
feet inside the door, he paused.
The room was perfect. White, mahogany, and old rose was the color
scheme. The ceiling was shaded and the furniture was heavy. Yet so
deftly had the latter been arranged and so perfect the spacing, that the
room had an air of fine distance and perspective; relaxation and rest
was the result and it soothed like an opiate.
The man’s artist-eye could neither miss nor pass lightly over the
proportion and fastidiousness that gave the room its character,—the
sense of perfect order without the least sacrifice of comfort. A few oil
paintings filled appropriate spaces upon the warm brown walls. Smaller
corners held etchings and exotic prints that Madelaine had brought from
Japan. The dull polish of the piano, writing desk, music cabinet, table,
reflected the glint of the firelight. An exquisite sculptural study
showed at just the right point in the corner across the heavy divan
drawn up before the grate. And as Nathan inventoried these things, a
deep sense of peace grew upon him. It entered into his being with the
atmosphere he breathed. An old phrase he had used somewhere before
whispered softly again in his subconscious mind, something about “—art
drawing-rooms, softly shaded at midnight.” This was home,—his home! One
born to such things might never appreciate them as Nathan could
appreciate them now.
He moved across. From the carved black cherry box on the end of the
reading table he found a Havana. His evening paper was there also. He
picked up the paper and went round the divan. He sank down before the
fire, but after lighting the cigar with all the ceremony of a priest
kindling a sacred altar flame, he did not read.
The wind rose and drew the flames higher into the deep, broad flue.
Somewhere out on the Avenue rose the gear-clack and purr of a ’bus. It
was a wild, melancholy night outside. It would rain or snow before
morning. But wind nor weather had no part or parcel with that home,
inside. The room might have been in a castle in Spain for all the drear
outside weather had to do with its comfort. The man felt with an
overwhelming emotion that he had reached a safe harbor,—the hinterland
of peace.
Madelaine had been overseeing bedtime rites in the nursery. Nathan’s
cigar had scarcely an inch of finely powdered ash before he heard his
wife’s step on the stair. As though he had never been in the room
before, as though it were all a dream, he turned his head as she came
across.
She had put off her dinner frock and was clothed now in silken
lingerie—soft, trailing, beautiful things that accentuated her height
and perfect figure. Like a cameo against ebony she fitted into that
room; had she not been its creator? She paused and adjusted her hair.
Beautiful hands they were, that gleamed white and deft in the
half-light,—slender, characterful hands for taste and resolute purpose.
“Junior was a perfect dear about going to bed,” she remarked as she gave
her tresses a final pat and turned toward her husband. “I’ll flatter
your conceit enough, Mr. Man, to say that he grows more like his dad
every day.”
Her voice was vibrant and mellow, like the room and the house. Queer how
thoughts enter a man’s mind. Nathan could not help contrasting
Madelaine’s ordering of her home and child with Milly’s. Milly—given
even the same setting—would have had books, papers, interrupted sewing,
baby’s clothing—oh, damn Milly. A vast sense of fulfillment welled up in
Nathan’s throat. It veiled his vision for a moment. What if he had
missed Madelaine that morning on the Hill Top?
Madelaine saw her husband was pensive. She drew a low cushion across
before Nathan could get it for her. She sank down at his feet, and with
a faint expression of amusement, her dark eyes fastened on the flames.
She remained that way for a time, then leaned her head over against the
man’s knee. Nathan’s hand stole down and smoothed her hair.
“Happy, dear?” she asked, as she had asked a thousand nights.
“I’m very happy, Madelaine,” he said huskily, like a boy.
“It pleases me to have you say that,” was the woman’s comment.
“At the door, a few moments ago, I had to stand for a time and ‘drink
in’ my ‘art drawing-room softly shaded at midnight.’ This sort of thing
was what I’d dreamed of, so long, it—well, it hurt. Even now it hurts.
But it’s a sweet hurt. That’s the ‘hick’ in me, I suppose. I can’t get
over it.”
Madelaine smiled, a bit sadly. Reaching up, she drew the hand despoiling
her hair down beside her cheek and patted it. (Milly would have reminded
him curtly that he was “mussing her” or asked him if he thought she
could do her hair a dozen times a day just for him to yank out of
place—oh, damn Milly!)
“Nathan, dear,” the wife whispered, calm eyes looking deep in the
flames, “pride in one’s home—appreciation of the efforts of loved ones
to please, is never provincial; neither should a lifelong hunger for
beautiful things hurt. I say that, Nathan, and yet you make me confess
that you’ve not been alone in that hunger; you haven’t been the only one
who has come into a heritage of such things, to know that sweet hurt.
And remember too, dear, without earthly shadows we see no high lights.
It’s the wealth of life to measure our happiness at last by the price
attainment has cost us.”
III
“My Girl the Fairies Brought!” whispered Nathan, after a time. “I never
want to think of her as coming from anywhere else. There still are
fairies.”
Madelaine arose at the end of a half-hour, despite her husband’s
protest.
“I’m only going above stairs to get an envelope, dear. It holds two
pieces of brown mapping with a strip of newspaper pasted upon them. I
want you to take them to an art store when you go down to the office in
the morning. Have the slip of news-print remapped and put in a copper
frame. It must hang over my writing desk—permanently.”
“Newsprint? Copper frame? What’s the idea?”
“I want my Rosary out in sight, where I can look upon it constantly.”
She rumpled his hair. Then she leaned over the back of the divan. Her
delicate lips were very close. He did.
IV
As I draw this intimate biography to a close, they are sleeping in my
house, two doors down this upper hallway from my study. Nathan came to
Paris this week-end to visit his home office about business in England
next month. He made a motor-trip of it and brought Madelaine, Nathan
Junior and Junior’s nurse.
Mary Ann gave a dinner for them to-night. Many of our friends among the
Preston-Hill set, as our summer colony is known, were invited, notable
among them Mrs. Percival Mosely. The Moselys have lately bought a summer
place here in Paris at the instigation of the Thornes.
Mary Ann’s dinner was very much of a success. It was aided toward that
end by Madelaine,—mightily so.
A score of times to-night I caught myself staring rudely at Nathan’s
wife. With smashing beauty of face, figure and gown, and a personal
charm beyond all clumsy male adjectives, she kept that table on _qui
vive_ with her _bon mots_ and delicious repartee—eyes shining, cheeks
flushed, ruby lips sparkling—and my cellar is not stocked with anything
but pumpkins and last season’s peach preserve, either. And the pride and
happiness on her husband’s face was entirely pardonable and
heart-mellowing.
I would conclude with Mrs. Mosely’s remark to Mary Ann at the door.
Naturally Mrs. Mosely is a comparative stranger to Paris.
“I’ve had a truly wonderful evening,” she cried, in her smooth onyx
voice, “and I’m especially grateful for being placed beside that young
Mr. Forge at dinner. I met him once in New York but really had no
opportunity to make his acquaintance closely. Why, he told me more about
Russia and Russian art than I’ve learned in eleven summers abroad. And
as for poetry—he spoke of that new book that’s causing such a sensation
in New York: ‘Life Lyrics of a Tanner’, as though he might have written
it himself. I should have liked to have known his parents. Truly, they
must have been most remarkable people. Why, I haven’t met such a
well-informed, intelligent, perfectly poised and smoothly polished young
fellow in the last dozen years. I think he’s perfectly charming!”
The “Life Lyrics of a Tanner!” It’s a great book. An autographed copy
lies here upon my desk, weighing down my high pile of manuscript. Pity
it was published anonymously!
For the tanner isn’t old Caleb Gridley. I’ll tell the world he isn’t.
And that’s not army slang, either.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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THE GREATER GLORY
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● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that:
had extra character spacing by “plus” signs (+stretched+).