THE SONG OF THE WOLF
The next morning, yielding to McVey's urgencies, he consented to take
part in the fall round-up just at hand, working in the interests of the
C Bar outfit.
In the ensuing days of strenuous toil he worked harder than he had ever
done before in all his range experience, spurred with the idea that he
owed Carter some reparation for leaving his service so unceremoniously,
and his staunch yeomanry appealed particularly to Anselm Brevoort, who
had run out to see a rodeo and have a month's hunt with Carter. As the
best hunter among the C Bar men it naturally devolved upon Douglass,
after the range work was done, to act as guide to Brevoort and the
ladies, who developed a great interest in the sport.
It was upon one of these trips that Brevoort casually mentioned his
temptation to buy a ranch as an investment, asking Douglass's advice in
the matter. The latter expressing some diffidence in the premises,
Brevoort brought the point in issue to a definite focus by asking him if
he thought the price asked for the Vaughan holdings, twenty thousand
dollars, was excessive. Douglass thought it was excessively cheap, to
the contrary, and said so emphatically.
"I would gladly give thirty for it if I had the money. There are more
than twenty thousand dollars' worth of cattle in the VN brand without
counting the ranch lands, which are worth nearly as much more. I think
the Vaughans are loco to sell at the price!"
They had just finished luncheon and were lounging about a little spring
enjoying their post-prandial pipes. Mrs. Brevoort was dallying with a
dainty papelito and Grace was fussing with her pocket camera. Constance,
gracefully exhaling a perfumed wraith, looked significantly to her
husband, who gave an imperceptible nod and after a few thoughtful puffs
came to the marrow of his subject.
"That's Carter's opinion, too, and McVey thinks it a great bargain,
also. And as Mrs. Brevoort has taken a great fancy to the place for some
reason, I think I will take it; that is, if I can secure some competent
man to manage it for me. It would be a position of entire trust as I
know nothing of the business and would necessarily be unable to give it
scarcely any attention, my time being fully occupied otherwise. Are you
open to such an engagement, Mr. Douglass?"
Grace Carter, her attention apparently riveted upon some intricate
adjustment of her camera, scarcely breathed; Constance Brevoort,
flicking the ash from her cigarette, never moved an eyelash. In the
silence which followed the question, the champing of the horses on the
grain in their nose-bags sounded to the women like a threshing machine.
"I am much flattered!" said Douglass, slowly. "But I am afraid that I
will not be able to accept your offer. I have some mining interests to
look after and--"
"But I understood you to say that you would gladly give thirty thousand
dollars for it if you were in funds. That presupposes that you could
find the time if necessary," said Breevort, with humorous insistence.
"Look here, Douglass, I am not in the habit of loading myself up with
dubious investments, and I wouldn't give ten dollars for the whole
layout unless I can secure you as manager. In your hands I feel as
though I would get fair returns on my outlay. I am frank to say I have
'looked you up' as we say in town, and I want you to give it further
consideration before turning my offer down. As to your mining interests,
perhaps I could be of some assistance to you in that direction. Think it
over; I won't take no for an answer right off the reel."
As he was unsaddling the horses on their return that night, Miss Carter,
coming with some sugar lumps for her pet roan, stopped long enough to
shyly venture the hope that he would be able to become one of the
neighbors.
"The sale of their ranch will allow Nellie Vaughan to achieve the dream
of her life, an extended trip abroad, and one realizes so few of one s
dreams in this life, you know! Besides, you are part of the environment
to me. You really 'belong'! I do hope you will accept Mr. Brevoort's
proposal--for Nellie's sake!"
Very deliberately he hung the saddle on the rack. Then he came close to
her, looking very masterful and Strong in the white moonlight.
"Nellie is to be congratulated on the thoughtfulness of her loving
friends! But why should I, who am not one of them, take her into
consideration at all? Promiscuous philanthropy is not my forte. The
inducement is small. Have you nothing better to offer?"
"For our sakes, then;" she said ambiguously. "We will feel easier if you
remain on this range, feel more secure in our lives and property." He
flushed at the immensity of the compliment but ruthlessly forced her
hand.
"That's rather high, but still not enough. Bid again!"
"For _my_ sake!" It was nearly a whisper, but he heard. His eyes were
triumphantly bright as, deftly eluding his curving arm, she sped swiftly
away in the benign darkness. But it was a different glow from any which
had ever irradiated them before: This was that of a soft, sweet
tenderness that vaguely soothed even while strongly disconcerting him.
He was very quiet under the spell of it as he went into supper, and
noticeably distrait during the game of chess which he subsequently
played with Mrs. Brevoort in the big living room later on.
Beating him with ridiculous ease she declined another game, saying,
laughingly: "You are not in form to-night, Mr. Douglass, and I like
victories more difficult of achievement. Time was when I was content
with mere winning, no matter how easy the attainment of that end. But
this life out here has spoiled me for inanities forever. I have still
the insatiable desire for conquest, but now I want to go up against odds
and win, to bring into camp only opponents worthy of my steel."
"But that," he said, with conventional politeness, "is unthinkable.
There can be none entirely worthy of you!" She made a little _moue_ at
the wearisome compliment.
"Why do all men say the same things! I'm quite sure I've heard something
like that a hundred times before. In fact, I've come three thousand
miles to get away from it. Say something original, please, even if it be
something wicked!"
He looked at her queerly but she met his gaze with eyes as audacious as
her words. Over at the piano Grace was playing with much tender feeling
one of Chopin's delicious nocturnes; before the open fireplace, Carter,
Brevoort and McVey were discussing the possibilities of a well-managed
ranch. The big room with its happy combination of modern and primitive
amenities was the epitome of cheerfulness and comfort.
"Original? No man can say anything that is that. The possibilities were
exhausted centuries ago. Even. Sin is stereotyped. There have always
been women like you and men like me! What on earth could a man in my
position say to a woman in yours that would be acceptably wicked?"
She smiled inscrutably; there was no abstraction in his manner now. "And
yet you are so bold in other things!" she said, tauntingly. "To the
brave all things are possible."
From far out in the darkness came the weird, long-drawn, mournful howl
of some gaunt timber wolf foraging with his mate. It was very faint and
the others, deeply engrossed in music and money matters, were
unconscious of it. At its eerie repetition she laid her hand lightly on
his arm.
"Listen! That is something new to me at all events. What can it be?"
"Only 'the voice of one crying in the wilderness,'" he whimsically
quoted. "A gray wolf calling to his mate." He laid his hand
restrainingly on hers and leaned so close that his hot breath swept her
cheek.
"I wonder how brave, or wicked, you could really be, you wonderful
creature!" he murmured, insidiously. Her color heightened but she made
no reply. The pulse was very distinct in the veins of the soft little
warm hand lying tremulously beneath his. "Listen! There it is again, the
call of the Wild, the voice out of the Primitive inviting strong souls
back into the boundless realm of the great First Cause. Are you brave
enough to accept it, to go out and be the most gloriously fierce wolf of
them all?"
"Why," she exclaimed, with a labored vivacity that deceived neither of
them, "that is certainly original!"
"With--say with me for a running mate!" His voice was scarcely audible.
"And that is decidedly wicked!" She gently withdrew her hand. But there
was small reproof in the seductive smile playing about her red lips.
With the arrogance of the youthfully virile and strong he glanced
contemptuously at the slight figure before the fireplace, old and worn
and gray, debilitated with the fierce excesses of the chase after money;
then he looked at the radiant beauty of the voluptuous young woman
beside him and laughed grimly at the painful disparity between man and
wife.
"And they say marriages are made in heaven!" To his credit be it said
that he had intended the sneer to be mental only, but somehow or other,
perhaps telepathically, the woman bent her head and a wave of crimson
suffused her face.
"Wolves know no conventions," he went on with tense vehemence. "Out
there in the wild soul calls to soul, body leaps to body in the fitness
of true affinity. It is all Life, and therefore all Love; for Life is
Love incarnated. The senile moralists of Humanity, that least fit race
of all earthly animals, preach the equality of the sexes. As applied to
human beings that is a lie. It is only out there among the wolves that
She is the equal of He in all things, his mental, physical, psychical
and sexual peer. That is why the type is kept pure and eternal. The wolf
of twenty centuries hence will be fully the equal of the wolf of to-day.
And why? Because of the virtue of perfect natural selection--the fittest
to the fittest, without the let and hindrance of sickly sentimentality,
the unnatural joining by Man-god made crimes of the unfit to the fit.
Wolves breed wolves, with full powers of the highest enjoyment of Life
and Love. Humanity begets weaklings, cowards, driveling idiots whose
highest evolution is that shapeless thing called Hope, whose greatest
virtue is submission to the anomalies of civilization. Even you, who
could be the peer of any wolf that ever ran untrammeled--"
He stopped abruptly, ashamed of his vehemence, and somewhat abashed by
the indulgent if slightly satirical smile of his amused listener.
"Even if I could run, and howl, and go hungry; every man's hand, and
what is infinitely worse, every woman's tongue against me! And what
could the Wolf give me in exchange for this?" waving her hand around the
room comprehensively and incidentally fondling her jewels.
"He could give you something in exchange for _that_," he said, with a
sinister glance towards the fireplace and again she dropped her eyes.
He drew the chess board towards him and began mechanically arranging the
pieces. Then he swept them impatiently into a heap and made as if to
arise. She leaned forward suddenly and again laid her hand on his arm.
"The wolf subject is an interesting one to me. It is really a pity that
I will not be accorded an opportunity of studying them in their native
haunts. If it were not for your, to us, unfortunate obligations
elsewhere, I should devote quite a portion of my time to the pursuit of
more definite information about them."
His hot hand almost burned hers. "Why shouldn't you investigate the
matter if you want to? Your husband is going to buy the VN ranch!" In
silence more eloquent than words she gave him her hand.
After a few desultory minutes with the group about the fireplace, he
strolled over to the piano. Grace welcomed him shyly, her touch on the
keys a little uncertain as in compliance with her request he sang to her
accompaniment the Toreador song from Carmen. The request was an
inspiration on her part, she never having heard him sing before, and she
had preferred it only to cover her soft confusion as she suddenly felt
rather than saw his presence behind her. If his instant compliance had
surprised her, his execution of it was a revelation to everyone in the
room. He sang it easily and freely, a little raucously from lack of
practice, it is true, but with the power and richness of voice that made
even Constance Brevoort, hypercritical as she was in things musical, sit
breathless to its conclusion.
The silence which followed was first broken by Red. "Gee, Ken," he said
quaintly, "who'd ever thought yuh could beller so melojious as that!
Why, yuh're a reg'lah preemoh-johnny!" In the hilarity which this evoked
Grace said, reproachfully:
"And to think I never knew!"
He was almost boyishly elated at the implied compliment, and, at the
insistence of his audience sang several other operatic selections very
creditably. Then he turned in modest explanation to Carter's demand.
"We all sang a little at college, you know, and my mother was an
accomplished musician. It is four years since I last sang. You are
overkind to me."
"Do you not play as well?" impulsively asked Mrs. Brevoort. He shook his
head negatively.
"Only a few accompaniment chords that I smash out indifferently! and I
am dubious of my ability to do that after all these years of roping and
ditch digging."
Anselm Brevoort, watching him speculatively through a fragrant cloud of
cigar smoke, suddenly sprang a bomb. "Have you ever composed, Mr.
Douglass, written any songs, for instance? I have heard that you range
men have an aptitude in that direction."
Douglass surveyed him levelly for a moment, his face hardening with
quick suspicion. "I have done most things foolish, after the manner of
my kind, Mr. Brevoort," he said, curtly; "but I hardly think you would
find even a passing interest in anything I have accomplished in that
direction." Whereupon that astute financier subsided promptly, evincing
no further curiosity as to the poetic attainments of this uncomfortably
straight-speaking young personage. He was a very shrewd man and had long
since learned to respect the moods and idiosyncrasies of others.
But Constance, his wife, detecting the sharp irritation in Douglass's
voice, was seized with a malicious desire to know its cause; like her
husband she was thinking: "That caught him on the raw, somehow. I wonder
why?"
"You should allow your friends to be the judge of that, Mr. Douglass,"
she said, pleasantly. "I am quite certain myself that we should find
much more than a passing interest if we could induce you to favor us.
The songs inspired by this environment must naturally be full of color
and strength. I should very much enjoy hearing one."
"Upon your heads be it, then!" He seated himself at the piano. "This,"
he said, turning to Mrs. Brevoort, meaningly, "I call 'The Song of the
Wolf.'"
Through the silence of the room crept a queer, faint murmur like the
breath of an aeolian harp or the sighing of the wind through far-off
pines. There was no attempt at harmonious arrangement and concordance;
it was rather a vague, erratic and intangible dissonance, a weird jumble
of soft discords that alternately pleased and pained. Gradually it
increased in volume, as the wind rises to the approach of a storm,
culminating finally in a thunderous crash of double bass. Then out of
the contrastive silence of the succeeding lull came unmistakably the
mournful howl of a wolf, wonderfully rendered by a few soft tremulous
touches of those strong yet sensitive fingers.
Another rolling crash, a diminishing rumble, and then the rich, deep
voice of the singer:
"Child of the Wind and Sun, I glide
Like a tongue of flame o'er the mountain's side.
Wherever falleth my blighting tread
Lie the whitening bones of the silent Dead.
For trail of wrath
Is my red-wet path
From the Sea's low rim to the glaciers high,
_Ai y-u-u--yu--yu-u-u-u!_
I live the better that others die.
_Ai yu-u-u-u-u-u!_
"Oh! sweet is the scent in the evening gale,
Of the dun deer wending adown the trail
Where I lie, grim ambushed, with bated breath,
A gray lance couched in the hand of Death!
At that maddening tang
White-bared each fang,
Dripping anon with ambrosia red;
_Ai y-u-u--yu--yu-u-u-u!_
Haste, sweetheart, to the feast outspread!
_Ai yu-u-u-u-u-u!_
"But sweeter even than Life's rich wine,
As, hot from the kill--ah-h! draught divine!--
It trickles adown my ravished throat,
Is my gaunt mate's deep-toned, chesty note.
As o'er hill and plain
She calls amain
Till the welkin quivers with ecstasy:
_Ai y-u-u--yu--yu-u-u-u!_
'Oh come, Beloved, to Love and me!'
_Ai yu-u-u-u-u-u!_
"Manlings spawned in the cities' slime.
Weaklings, withered before your prime.
What ken ye of the joys there be
Of Life and of Love and of Liberty!
Better hill and dell
As free Ishmael
Than the shackles of pomp and pageantry:
_Ai yu-u-u--yu--yu-u-u-u!_
Come out, oh! faint hearts, and howl with me!
_Ai yu-u-u-u-u-u!_"
In the storm of applause that rewarded his unique performance he rose
and went over to the fireplace.
"If you are still disposed to the purchase of the Vaughan holdings I
will accept your offer," he said to Brevoort. "But I must be free to
come and go at will. I am one of the wolves, you know!"
Brevoort nodded a brisk acquiescence. "That is perfectly satisfactory to
me. We will arrange the details."
McVey was genuinely pleased and said so; Carter rather grudgingly
extended his congratulations; he would rather Douglass were the manager
of his own estate. His grievance was still fresh and rankling.
Constance Brevoort, toying with the ivory chessmen, smiled
commiseratingly at the soft irradiation of Grace's face.