THE LIAR
The lamps had not yet been lighted in the big, comfortable living-room
and late sunlight striped wall and ceiling with rose where Karen sat
sewing, and Darrel, curled up in a vast armchair, frowned over a book.
And well he might, for it was a treatise on German art.
His patience arriving at the vanishing point he started to hurl the book
from him, then remembering that it was not his to hurl, slapped it shut.
Which caused Karen to lift her deep violet eyes inquiringly.
"Teutonic Kultur! I've got its number," he said. Which observation
conveyed no meaning to Karen.
"German art," he explained. "It used to be merely ample, adipose, and
indigestible. Now the moderns have made it sinister and unclean. The
ham-fist has become the mailed fist; the fat and trickling source of
Teutonic inspiration has become polluted. There is no decadence more
hideous than the brain cancer of a Hercules."
Karen followed him with intelligent interest. She said with hesitation:
"The moderns, I think, are wandering outside immutable boundaries.
Frontiers are eternal. If any mind believes the inclosed territory
exhausted, there is nothing further to be found outside in the waste
places--only chaos. And the mind must shift to another and totally
different pasture--which also has its boundaries eternal and fixed."
"Right!" exclaimed Darrel. "No sculptor can find for sculpture any new
mode of expression beyond the limits of the materials which have always
existed; no painter can wander outside the range of black and white, or
beyond the surface allotted him; the composer can express himself in
music only within the limits of the audible scale; the writer is a
prisoner to grammatical expression, walled always within the margins of
the printed page. Outside, as you say, lies chaos, possibly madness. The
moderns are roaming there. And some of them are announcing the discovery
of German Kultur where they have barked their mental shins in outer
darkness."
Karen smiled. "It is that way in music I think. The dissonance of mental
disturbance warns sanity in almost every bar of modern music. It is that
which is so appalling to me, Mr. Darrel--that in some modernism is
visible and audible more and more the menace of mental and moral
disintegration. And the wholesome shrink from it."
Darrel said: "Three insane 'thinkers' have led Germany to the brink
where she now stands swaying. God help her, in the end, to
convalescence--" he stared at the fading sunbeams on the wall, and
staring, quoted:
"'_Over broken oaths and
Through a sea of blood._'"
He looked up. "I'm sorry: I forget you are German."
"I forget that I am supposed to be, too.... But you have not offended
me. I know war is senseless. I know that war will not always be the
method used to settle disputes. There will be great changes beginning
very soon in the world, I think."
"I believe so, too. It will begin by a recognition of the rights of
smaller nations to self-government. It will be an area of respect for
the weak. Government by consent is not enough; it must become government
by request. And the scriptures shall remain no more sacred than the
tiniest 'scrap of paper' in the archives of the numerically smallest
independent community on earth.
"The era of physical vastness, of spheres of influence, of scope is
dying. The supreme wickedness of the world is Force. That must end for
nations and for men. Only one conflict remains inevitable and eternal;
the battle of minds, which can have no end."
For an American and an operator in real estate, Darrel's philosophy was
harmlessly respectable if not very new. But he thought it both new and
original, which pleased him intensely.
As for Karen, she had been thinking of Guild for the last few minutes.
Her sewing lay in her lap, her dark, curly head rested in the depths of
her arm-chair. Sunlight had almost faded on the wall.
Through the window she could see the trees. The golden-green depths of
the beech-wood were growing dusky. Against the terrace masses of salvia
and geraniums glowed like coals on fire. The brown-eyed girl had been
away with him a long while.
Mrs. Courland came in, looking more youthful and pretty than ever, and
seated herself with her knitting. The very last ray from the sinking sun
fell on her ruddy hair.
"Think you are right, Harry," she said quietly to Darrel. "I think we
will sail when you do. The men on the place are becoming very much
excited over this Uhlan raid on the cattle. I could hear them from my
bedroom window out by the winter fold, and they were talking loudly as
well as recklessly."
"There's no telling what these forest people may do," admitted Darrel.
"I am immensely relieved to know that you and Valentine are to sail when
I do. As for Kervyn Guild--" he made a hopeless gesture--"his mind is
made up and that always settles it with him."
"He won't return with you?"
"No. He's joining the Belgians."
"Really!"
"Yes. You see his people were Belgian some generations back. It's a
matter of honour with him and argument is wasted. But it hits me pretty
hard."
"I can understand. He is a most delightful man."
"He is as straight and square as he is delightful. His mother is
charming; his younger brother is everything you'd expect him to be after
knowing Kervyn. Theirs is a very united family, but, do you know I am as
certain as I am of anything that his mother absolutely approves of what
he is about to do. She is that sort. It may kill her, but she'll die
smiling."
Mrs. Courland's serious, sweet eyes rested on him, solemn with sympathy
for the mother she had never met.
"The horrid thing about it all," continued Darrel, "is that Kervyn is
one man in a million;--and in a more terrible sense that is all he can
be in this frightful and endless slaughter which they no longer even
pretend to call one battle or many.
"He's a drop in an ocean, only another cipher in the trenches where
hell's hail rains day and night, day and night, beating out lives
without distinction, without the intelligence of choice--just raining,
raining, and beating out life!... I can scarcely endure the thought of
Kervyn ending that way--such a man--my friend----"
His voice seemed hoarse and he got up abruptly and walked to the window.
Ashes of roses lingered in the west; the forest was calm; not a leaf
stirred in the lilac-tinted dusk.
Karen, who had been listening, stirred in the depths of her chair and
clasped her fingers over her sewing.
Mrs. Courland said quietly:
"It is pleasant for any woman to have known such a man as Mr. Guild."
"Yes," said Karen.
"If the charm of his personality so impresses us who have known him only
a very little while, I am thinking what those who are near and dear to
him must feel."
"I, too," said Karen, faintly.
"Yet she loves him best who would not have it otherwise it seems."
"Yes; he must go," said Karen. "Some could not have it--otherwise."
A man came to light the lamps. And a little while after they were
lighted Mrs. Courland quietly looked up from her knitting. One swift,
clear glance she gave; saw in the young girl's eyes what she had already
divined must be there. Then bent again above her ivory needles. After a
while she sighed, very lightly.
"They're late," remarked Darrel from the window.
"They are probably strolling up the drive; Valentine knows enough not to
get lost," said her mother.
After a few moments Karen said: "Would my playing disturb you?"
"No, dear. Please!"
So Karen rose and walked to the piano. Presently Darrel turned and
seated himself to listen to the deathless sanity of Beethoven flowing
from the keys under a young girl's slender fingers.
She was still seated there when Valentine came in, and turned her head
from the keyboard, stilling the soft chords.
"We had such a good time," said Valentine. "We caught half a dozen
trout, and then I took him to the Pulpit where we sat down and remained
very quiet; and just at sunset three boar came out to feed on the oak
mast; and he said that one of them was worth shooting!"
"You evidently _have_ had a good time," said Darrel, smiling. "What
happened to Guild. Did the boar tree _him_?"
"I think he'd be more likely to tree the boar," remarked the girl. And
to her mother she said: "He went on toward the winter fold to talk to
Michaud who has just returned from Trois Fontaines. There were a lot of
men there, ours and a number of strangers. So I left him to talk to
Michaud. What have you all been doing this afternoon?" turning to Karen,
and from her, involuntarily to Darrel.
"Miss Girard and I have conversed philosophically and satisfactorily
concerning everything on earth," he said. "I wish my conversations with
you were half as satisfactory."
Valentine laughed, but there was a slight flush on her cheeks, and again
she glanced at Karen, whose lovely profile only was visible where she
bent in silence above the keyboard.
"Your mother," remarked Darrel, "has decided to sail with me. Would you
condescend to join us, Valentine?"
"Mother, are you really going back when Harry sails?"
"Yes. I don't quite like the attitude of the men here. And Harry thinks
there is very likely to be trouble between them and the Germans across
the border."
The girl looked thoughtfully at her mother, then at Darrel, rather
anxiously.
"Mother," she said, "I think it is a good idea to get Harry out of the
country. He is very bad-tempered, and if the Germans come here and are
impudent to us he'll certainly get himself shot!"
"I! I haven't the courage of a caterpillar!" protested Darrel.
"You're the worst fibber in the Ardennes! You _did_ kill that grey boar
this morning! What do you mean by telling us that you went up a tree!
Maxl, the garde-de-chasse at the Silverwiltz gate, heard your shot and
came up. And you told him to dress the boar and send a cart for it.
Which he did!--you senseless prevaricator!"
"Oh, my!" said Darrel meekly.
"And you're wearing a bandage below your knee where the boar bit you
when you gave him the coup-de-grâce! Maxl washed and bound it for you!
What a liar you are, Harry! Does it hurt?"
"To be a liar?"
"No! where you were tusked?"
"Maxl was stringing you, fair maid," he said lightly.
"He wasn't! You walk lame!"
"Laziness and gout account for that débutante slouch of mine. But of
course if you care to hold my hand----"
The girl looked at him, vexed, yet laughing:
"I don't _want_ people who do not know you to think you really are the
dub you pretend to be! Do you wish Miss Girard to believe it?"
"Truth is mighty and must----"
"I know more about you than you think I do, Harry. Mr. Guild portrayed
for me a few instances of your 'mouse'-like courage. And I don't wish
you to lose your temper and be shot if the Uhlans ride into Lesse and
insult us all! Therefore I approve of our sailing for home. And the
sooner the better!"
"You frighten me," he said; "I think I'll ask Jean to pack my things
now." And he got up, limping, and started for the door.
"Mother," she said, "that boar's tusks may poison him. Won't you make
him let us bandage it properly?"
"I think you had better, Harry," said Mrs. Courland, rising.
"Oh, no; it's all right----"
"Harry!" That was all Valentine said. But he stopped short.
"Take his other arm, mother," said the girl with decision.
She looked over her shoulder at Karen; the two young girls exchanged a
smile; then Valentine marched off with her colossal liar.