THE WAY OF A MAID WITH A MAN
Between the queer mixture of emotions which beset him and the discomfort
of his bruised face and over-strained body Thompson turned and twisted,
and sleep withheld its restful oblivion until far in the night. As a
consequence he slept late. Dawn had grown old before he wakened.
When he opened his cabin door he was confronted by the dourest aspect of
the north that he had yet seen. The sky was banked full of slate-gray
clouds scudding low before a northeast wind that droned its melancholy
song in the swaying spruce tops, a song older than the sorrows of men,
the essence of all things forlorn in its minor cadences. A gray, clammy
day, tinged with the chill breath of coming snow. Thompson missed the
sun that had cheered and warmed those hushed solitudes. Just to look at
that dull sky and to hear the wind that was fast stripping the last sere
leaves from willow and maple and birch, and to feel that indefinable
touch of harshness, the first frigid fingerings of the frost-gods in the
air, gave him a swift touch of depression. He shivered a little. Turning
to his wood box he hastened to build a fire in the stove.
He stoked that rusty firebox until by the time he had cooked and eaten
breakfast it was glowing red. When he sat with his feet cocked up on the
stove front and gave himself up to the sober business of thought, it
seemed to him that he was passing a portentous milestone. To his
unsophisticated mind the simple fact that Sophie Carr had permitted him
to kiss her, that for a moment her head with its fluffy aureole of
yellow hair had rested willingly upon his shoulder, created a bond
between them, an understanding, a tentative promise, a cleaving together
that could have but one conclusion. He found himself reflecting upon
that--to him--most natural conclusion with a peculiar mixture of
gladness and doubt. For even in his exaltation he could not visualize
Sophie Carr as an ideal minister's helpmate. He simply could not. He
could hear too plainly the scorn of her tone as she spoke of
"parasitical parsons", of "unthinking acceptance of priestly myths", of
the Church, his Church, as "an organization essentially materialistic in
its aims and activities", and many more such phrases which were new and
startling to Thompson, even if they had been current among radical
thinkers long enough to become incorporated in a great deal that has
been written upon philosophy and theology.
Sophie didn't believe in his God, nor his work; he stopped short of
asking if he himself any longer had full and implicit belief in these
things, or if he had simply accepted them without question as he had
accepted so many other things in his brief career. But she believed in
_him_ and cared for him. He took that for granted too. And love covers
a multitude of sins. He had often had occasion to discourse upon various
sorts of love--fatherly love and brotherly love and maternal affection
and so on. But this flare of passionate tenderness focussing upon one
slender bit of a girl was something he could not quite fathom. He would
have contradicted with swift anger any suggestion that perhaps it was
merely wise old Nature's ancient method efficiently at work for an
appointed end. He had been so thoroughly grounded in the convention of
decrying physical impulses, of putting everything upon a pure and
spiritual plane, that in this first emotional crisis of his life he
could no more help dodging first principles than a spaniel pup can help
swimming when he is first tossed into deep water.
Still--he was not a fool. He knew that his concern was not for Sophie
Carr's immortal soul, nor for the beauty and sweetness of her spirit,
when he was near her, when he touched her hand, nor even in that supreme
moment when he crushed her close to his unquiet heart and pressed that
hot kiss on her lips. It was the sheer flesh and blood womanliness of
her that made his heart beat faster, the sweet curve of her lips, the
willowy grace of her body, the odd little gestures of her hands, the
melody of her voice and the gray pools of her eyes, eyes full of queer
gleams and curious twinkles--all these things were indescribably
beautiful to him. He loved her--just the girl herself. He wanted her,
craved her presence; not the pleasant memory of her, but the forthright
physical nearness of her he desired with an intensity that was like a
fever.
Just the excitement of feeling--as according to his lights he had a
right to feel--that they stood pledged, made it hard for him to get down
to fundamentals and consider rationally the question of marriage, of
their future, of how his appointed work could be made to dovetail with
the union of two such diverse personalities as himself and Sophie Carr.
A hodge podge of this sort was turning over in his mind as he sat there,
now and then absently feeling the dusky puffiness under one eye and the
tender spot on the bridge of his nose where Tommy Ashe's hard knuckles
had peeled away the skin. He still had a most un-Christian satisfaction
in the belief that he had given as good as he had got. He was not
ashamed of having fought. He would fight again, any time, anywhere, for
Sophie Carr. He did not ask himself whether the combative instinct once
aroused might not function for lesser cause.
He came out of this reverie at the faint rustle of footsteps beyond his
door--which was open because of the hot fire he had built.
He did not suspect that the source of those footsteps might be Sophie
Carr until she stood unmistakably framed in the doorway. He rose to his
feet with a glad cry of welcome, albeit haltingly articulated. He was
suddenly reluctant to face her with the marks of conflict upon his face.
"May I come in?" she asked coolly--and suited her action to the request
before he made reply.
She sat down on a box just within the door and looked soberly at him,
scanning his face. Her hands lay quietly in her lap and she did not
seem to see Thompson's involuntarily extended arms. There was about her
none of the glowing witchery of yesterday. She lifted to him a face
thoughtful, even a little sad. And Thompson's hands fell, his heart
keeping them company. It was as if the somberness of those wind-swept
woods had crept into his cabin. It stilled the rush of words that
quivered on his lips. Sophie, indeed, found utterance first.
"I'm sorry that you and Tommy fought," she said constrainedly. "I didn't
know until this morning. It was cowardly of me to run away. But it was
foolish to fight. It didn't occur to me that you two would. I suppose
you wonder what brought me here. I was worried for fear you had been
hurt. I saw Tommy, but he wouldn't talk."
"I daresay I'm not a pretty object to look at," Thompson admitted. "But
I'm really not much the worse."
"No. I can see that," she said. "Tommy is very quick and very strong--I
was a little afraid."
The contrition, the hint of pity in her voice stirred up the queer
personal pride he had lately acquired.
"I don't suppose Ashe has any monopoly of strength and quickness," he
remarked. "That--but there, I don't want to talk about that."
He came over close beside her and looked down with all his troubled
heart in his clear blue eyes--so that the girl turned her gaze away and
her fingers wove nervously together.
"My dear," the unaccustomed phrase broke abruptly, with a fierce
tenderness, from his lips. "I love you--which I think you know without
my saying so. I want you. Will you marry me? I--"
Sophie warded off the impetuous outstretching of his arms and sprang to
her feet, facing him with all the delicate color gone out of her cheeks,
a sudden heave to her breast. She shook her head. "No," she said. "I
won't penalize myself to that extent--nor you. I won't bind myself by
any such promise. I won't even admit that I might."
He caught her by the shoulders and shook her roughly.
"Yesterday," he said hoarsely, "you let me kiss you--your lips burned
me--you rested your head against me as if it belonged there. What sort
of a woman are you? Sophie! Sophie!"
"I know," she returned. "But yesterday was yesterday. This is another
day. Yesterday--oh, you wouldn't understand if I told you. Yesterday I
was bursting with happiness, like a bird in the spring. I like you, big
man with the freckled face. You came down here and stood beside me and
smiled at me. And--and that's all--a minute's madness. We can't marry on
_that_. I can't. I _won't_."
His fingers tightened on the rounded arms. He shook her again with a
restrained savagery. If he hurt her she did not flinch, nor did her gray
eyes, cloudy now and wistful, waver before the passionate fire in his.
"Sophie," he went on, "you don't know what this means to me. Don't you
care a little?"
"Yes," she answered slowly. "Perhaps more than a little. I'm made that
way, I suppose. It isn't hard for me to love. But one doesn't--"
"Then why," he demanded, "why refuse to give me a hope? Why, if you care
in the least, is there no chance for me? It isn't just a sudden fancy.
I've been feeling it grow and struggling to repress it, ever since I
first saw you. You say you care--yet you won't even think of marrying
me. I can't understand that at all. Why?"
"Do you want to know? Can't you see good grounds why we two, of all
people, should _not_ marry?" she asked evenly. "Can you see anything to
make it desirable except a--a welling up of natural passion? Don't hold
my arms so tight. You hurt."
He released his unthinking grip and stepped back a pace, his expression
one of hurt bewilderment at the paradox of Sophie's admission and
refusal.
"We're at opposite poles in everything," she went on. "I don't believe
in the things you believe in. I don't see life with your vision at all.
I never shall. We'd be in a continual clash. I like you but I couldn't
possibly live with you--you couldn't live with me. I rebel at the future
I can see for us. Apart from yourself, the things you'd want to share
with me I despise. If I had to live in an atmosphere of sermons and
shams, of ministerial sanctimoniousness and material striving for a
bigger church and a bigger salary, I'd suffocate--I'd hate myself--and
in the end I'd hate you too."
A little note of scorn crept into her voice, and she stopped. When she
spoke again her tone had changed, deepened into uncertainty, freighted
with wistfulness.
"I'm not good--not in your sense of the word," she said. "I don't even
want to be. It would take all the joy out of living. I want to sing and
dance and be vibrantly alive. I want to see far countries and big
cities, to go about among people whose outlook isn't bounded by a forest
and a lake shore, nor by the things you set store by. And I'll be a
discontented pendulum until I do.
"Why," she burst out passionately, "I'd be the biggest little fool on
earth to marry you just because--just because I like you, because you
kissed me and for a minute made me feel that life could be bounded by
you and kisses. You're only the second possible man I've ever seen. You
and Tommy Ashe. And before you came I could easily have persuaded myself
that I loved Tommy."
"Now you think perhaps you love me, but that you might perhaps care in
the same way for the next attractive man who comes along? Is that it?"
Thompson asked with a touch of bitterness.
"I might _think_ so--how can one tell?" she sighed. "But I'm very sure
my impulses will never plunge me into anything headlong, as you would
have me plunge. Don't you see," she made an impatient gesture, "we're
just like a couple of fledgling birds trying our wings. And you want to
proceed on the assumption that we're equal to anything, sure of
everything. I _know_ I'm not. You--"
She made again that quick, expressive gesture with her hands. Something
about it made Thompson suddenly feel hopeless and forlorn, the airy
castles reared overnight out of the stuff of dreams a tumbled heap
about him. He sat down on one of the rude chairs, and turned his face to
look out the window, a lump slowly gathering in his throat.
"All right," he said. "Good-by."
If his tone was harsh and curt he could not help that. It was all he
could say and the only possible fashion of saying it. He wanted to cry
aloud his pain, the yearning ache that filled him, and he could not,
would not--no more than he would have whined under pure physical hurt.
But when he heard the faint rustle of her cotton dress and her step
outside he put his face on his hands and took his breath with a
shuddering sigh.
At that, he was mistaken. Sophie had not gone. There was the quick,
light pad of her feet on the floor, her soft warm hands closed suddenly
about his neck, and he looked up into eyes bright and wet. Her face
dropped to a level with his own.
"I'm so sorry, big man," she whispered, in a small, choked voice. "It
hurts me too."
He felt the warm moist touch of her lips on his cheek, the faint
exhalation of her breath, and while his arms reached swiftly,
instinctively to grasp and hold her close, she was gone. And this time
she did not come back.